USA: Vermont towns for impeachment of Bush and against Iraq war

By David Walsh:

Vermont towns vote for Bush-Cheney impeachment

9 March 2007

On March 6 at least 38 Vermont communities at their annual town meetings passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Several towns voted not to take up or opposed the measure and it was blocked from being introduced by bureaucratic maneuvers in a number of others.

In Middlebury, Vermont’s Republican governor, Jim Douglas, who presided over the town meeting, attempted to prevent measures calling for the impeachment of Bush and withdrawal of US troops from Iraq from being voted upon, but the sentiment of the meeting was such that he was obliged to permit the action.

Both resolutions passed by voice vote. Douglas was the chairman of Bush’s 2000 election committee and 2004 reelection committee in Vermont.

Impeachment resolutions were also passed in Jericho, home to Gaye Symington, Democratic speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives, who opposes the campaign, as does Vermont’s congressman, Democrat Peter Welch, whose town, Hartland, also voted for the measure.

In Putney, the resolution passed unanimously. Several Vermont towns had passed the resolutions in 2006.

Also on Vermont town meeting day, a tradition that dates back to the pre-revolutionary era, some 20 communities approved a resolution calling for withdrawing US troops from Iraq and treating them well once they return home.

The resolution declared, “The best way to support them [the troops] is to bring each and every one of them home now and take good care of them when they get home.”

The Bush impeachment measure passed in Middlebury accuses the president and vice president of violating their oath of office to “‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The resolution asserts that Bush and Cheney “manipulated intelligence and misled the country to justify an immoral, unjust, and unnecessary preemptive war in Iraq”; that they directed the government to engage in domestic spying without warrants; that they have “conspired to commit the torture of prisoners, in violation of the Federal Torture Act and the Geneva Convention”; that they have ordered the indefinite detention of prisoners “without legal counsel, without charges and without the opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention—all in violation of US law and the Bill of Rights.”

US soldiers against Iraq war: here.

Anti Cheney protests in Utah, USA: here.

Another cost of the Iraq war: nearly 60,000 US divorces.

Iraqi women worse off under US occupation: here.

Iraqi oil law and the British government: here.