Marjorie Cohn: One Step Closer to a Cheney Impeachment

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.


One Step Closer to a Cheney Impeachment

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted January 23, 2008.

More than a third of the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic members want to see Cheney ousted.


Nine out of 23 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee favor starting impeachment hearings against Vice President Dick Cheney. Six of the nine are co-sponsors of H.R. 799, which contains three articles of impeachment.

Articles I and II of H.R. 799 accuse Cheney of purposely manipulating intelligence to deceive Congress and the American people about a fabricated threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, respectively. Article III charges Cheney with openly threatening aggression against Iran absent any real threat to the United States. All three articles say Cheney's actions have damaged our national security interests.

Three of the nine Judiciary Committee Democrats who advocate launching impeachment hearings against Cheney, Reps. Robert Wexler, D-Fla.; Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.; and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., co-authored an op-ed that appeared on Dec. 27 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

They wrote, "The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that, if proven, may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution. The allegations against Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens."

There is also credible evidence that policies set in Cheney's office authorized the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody, in violation of three treaties the United States has ratified, as well as the U.S. Torture Statute and War Crimes Act. The policies on the treatment of prisoners emanating from Cheney's office triggered the abuse and torture, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.

"It was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field," Wilkerson, a former colonel, said on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. In November, the House of Representatives sent the impeachment resolution to the House Judiciary Committee for further proceedings. However many Democrats oppose impeachment, citing the year and a half of testimony about Bill Clinton's personal relations. They think impeachment will detract from Congress's other pressing business.

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