Impeachment not our business, council says

Majority declines to support resolution asking Congress to act
By Robert Speer
roberts@newsreview.com
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After listening to some 20 of his fellow Chicoans explain why they wanted Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Councilman Larry Wahl, a former Navy fighter pilot who served in Vietnam, had a blunt reply.

“We’re at war, folks, with a bunch of Islamofascist extremists who want us dead or back in the ninth century,” he declaimed, adding emphatically that he supported the president and vice president in the war on terrorism.

But Wahl wasn’t the only veteran in council chambers Tuesday night (Aug. 19). Michael Pike, a former Green Beret captain who served in Vietnam and Laos, also spoke, and he gave a first-hand account of why he believed impeachment was appropriate.

As part of his Special Forces training, to prepare him in the event he was captured, he was waterboarded—twice. “I can tell you it was the most terrible thing I’ve ever gone through,” Pike said. He was willing to climb a 10-foot barbed-wire fence that shredded his hands rather than go through it again. He said he’d also been subjected to electroshock, and waterboarding was worse.

The U.S. government’s use of torture such as waterboarding was one of the reasons a group calling itself the Chico Impeach Team approached the council, presented it with petitions containing more than 1,000 signatures, and asked it to support a resolution calling on Congress to initiate impeachment. Several California cities—including Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Arcata and, naturally, Berkeley—have passed similar resolutions.

The Bush administration, with its warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus, deceitful war-mongering, preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation (Iraq), secret “black sites” and use of torture, has shredded the Constitution and broken both American and international law, speakers charged.

In an initial PowerPoint presentation, Bill Donnelly, representing the Chico Impeach Team, argued that impeachment is a local issue because councilmembers take an oath of office to defend the Constitution. The Bush administration has put the Constitution in danger, and the council had a duty to act, he insisted.

Full Article: Impeachment not our business