Washington, D.C. - Rep. John Conyers, Jr., the ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, held a hearing on June 16, 2005, on the “Downing Street Memo.” The leaked British document is “a smoking gun,” in that it shows that, as early as July, 2002, President George Bush, Jr., and others in his administration, had decided to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power, via a preemptive military invasion of that country. In order to justify that action, Bush and his cohorts are suspected of putting in motion a plot, to “fix the policy...around the intelligence and the facts... dealing with the conjunction of terrorism and WMD...” In other words, they stand accused of “cooking the intelligence” to suit their own warmongering agenda!

Rep. Conyers, from Michigan, wanted to hold his hearing on Capitol Hill, in one of the large House office building rooms, but Republicans on his committee balked. Instead, he was forced to move his forum to a smaller room, “HC-9,” located in the Capitol itself. Nevertheless, 50 members of Congress showed up to lend their support to his efforts and almost every major news organization was present. The hearing lasted from 2:30 PM to 4:30 PM. I understand it included stellar testimony from a number of witnesses. I could only get into the hearing for a few minutes because of the size of the crowd, however I did make it to a rally afterwards at Lafayette Park, which was planned by progressive groups around the hearing. Fortunately, C-Span is planning to rebroadcast the Downing St. Memo hearing at a later date. Many who spoke at the congressional hearing earlier in the day, also showed up to talk at the Lafayette Park rally in front of the White House that followed.

One of the witnesses at that hearing and the rally was Cindy Sheehan, a Gold Star Mother. Sheehan said, “I think maybe, (after the hearing today), that I’m going to get some justice for Casey (her son, who was killed in Iraq), and for the 1,713 other brave Americans and the tens of thousands, uncounted and countless Iraqi people who have been killed by lies and by the betrayals of our country.” She continued, “President George W. Bush doesn’t deserve our allegiance. He doesn’t deserve to go back to Crawford, Texas. He deserves to go to prison for what he did.”

The Downing St. Memo, a/k/a “Downing St. Minutes,” has gained such notoriety since its release that a number of newspapers in the U.S. have felt compelled to publish its contents in full. (1) More once-secret British documents relevant to the insidious deception campaign of the Bush-Cheney Gang have also recently been released. (2) Meanwhile, polls show that support for the Iraqi War is declining in the country, and that at least one GOP congressman, Rep. Walter Jones of N.C., has come out against the war.

Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange was also a speaker at the rally. She said, “The smoking gun is the Downing St. Memo! We will not let the Downing St. Memo get away from us. We want this to be the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq. And, the beginning and the end of the Bush administration!”

On May 5, 2005, the sponsor of this hearing, Rep. Conyers, and 88 other congressional members, demanded in a letter to Bush, that he answer five questions that related to the leaked British document. To date, Bush has stonewalled that request. Meanwhile, a grass roots drive, via the Internet, had secured over 560,000 signatures of concerned citizens in support of Conyers’ letter. That Petition, with the signatures, was personally delivered, at 6: 15 PM last night, to the guards at a White House gate, on Pennsylvania Ave., by Rep. Conyers, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Diane E. Watson (D-CA), Rep. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and other congressional members.

Rep. Waters also spoke to the rally at Lafayette Park, whose crowd of enthusiasts numbered in the hundreds. She said, “Today is a new beginning. We are now focusing on the ‘big lie.’ The Congress has come alive. We are going to take on this president in a real way. We are going to take it to the streets.” Waters then emphasized that President Bush was “a liar.” She said, “There were never any WMD.” She also blasted V.P. Dick Cheney and Secretary of State, Condi Rice. Waters let the crowd know that fifty members of the House have already signed on to the new “Out of Iraq Caucus.” She finished by saying, “We’re going to bring our troops home!”

From the beginning, Rep. Conyers, almost alone in the Congress, has been a sharp critic of Bush’s rush to war with Iraq. On March 15, 2003, Conyers was one of the keynote speakers at a massive anti-war rally on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. At that time, only days before Bush was to launch his criminal enterprise against Iraq, Conyers said it was the U.S., not Iraq, that needed “a regime change.” He labeled the Bush-Cheney Gang as one that has shown great disdain for the “Constitution and the democratic process.”

Meanwhile, in a related matter, on the legal front, a Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin, has been indicted in an espionage case involving Israel. Ex-employees of AIPAC, a powerful lobbying group for Israel, are suspected of being involved in the case. The investigation is continuing. There is speculation that this probe could lead to Neocon operatives within the U.S. government, who were also “cooking the evidence,” with respect to Iraq! (3)

Rep. Conyers said at the rally, “This is great, historic day in America. We have finally broken through the stonewalling that has been going on in the Congress. Now, we were told one thing in America (about Iraq), but in London they were planning a war all the time...We need more hearings, more questions and more marches and more protests. This is only a beginning, which is going to turn this sad and terrible war around,” he predicted.

Finally, if it could be proven that Bush deliberately lied to the Congress on March 18, 2003, about the reasons he gave it for going to war with Iraq, it would be an impeachable offense under the U.S. Constitution. To date, 1,713 American military personnel have died in that unjust and illegal conflict and over $177 billion has been wasted. In addition, under the precedents established at Nuremberg, Bush, and other members of his administration, who may have had conspiratorial roles in that supposed campaign of deception-like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and others, too-could, if the cases against them are properly established, be indicted and tried for War Crimes, under International Law.

© William Hughes 2005

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘No’ to the War Party” (Iuniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at: liamhughes@comcast.net.

Notes:

1. Baltimore Sun, June 15, 2005.

2. afterdowningstreet.org.

3. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6316.

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr., center, and other Democrats held a mock Judiciary Committee hearing as a protest against the war in Iraq.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.

"At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little subpoena power." That brought the house down.

As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing Street Memo" is important.

A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.

The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."

No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos "establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get out" of Iraq.

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his "candid answer."

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."

Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"

The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House."

Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our work."

Wellstone assasinated, Max Cleland outed by electronic vote fraud and thus the criminality is rewarded by control of the senate.

The house of whores of course, is a paid lobby except for the few who are able to resist the graft.

This government is no longer the peoples'. It belongs to the pimps.

Of both sides.