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Amy Goodman

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Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark Calls For Impeachment of President Bush

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Clark, who launched the website votetoimpeach.org, accused President Bush of high crimes for misleading the nation over the war and for helping to overthrow Jean Bertrand-Aristide, the democratically-elected president of Haiti. [includes rush transcript]

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Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with the voices of dissent. This is the former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark.

RAMSEY CLARK: The Nuremberg judgment calls the war of aggression the supreme international crime. It’s the first crime against peace. There can be no war crime until there’s war. It leads to all of the crimes against humanity. It is a supreme international crime. And George Bush’s “Shock and Awe,” a synonym for terrorism — isn’t it? “Shock and Awe” — was a war of aggression. No rational person can believe that Iraq was any threat under any circumstances, even if it was developing weapons of mass destruction, to the United States of America. And we know it.

And the whole assault was built on deliberate lies, not misinformation, not poor intelligence. They knew damn well what they were doing. They wanted to do it, and they did it. And every moment of this invasion, which takes the lives of Iraqi people every day, is an illegal occupation. And we as Americans have the highest responsibility because we live here. This is our country. We love it. We want to take it back. We want to end militarism in this country and end aggression and end the occupation in Iraq now!

We are spending more on arms than every other country in the world. We have got to slash that 90%. There will be no peace until we do. We destroy Iraq again because we say falsely they are developing weapons of mass destruction. We got more than the rest of the world combined. We are developing three new generations of nuclear weapons in the face of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and all of the other laws of the world. And they will be used because they are tactical weapons. You can take out ten discrete blocks in Fallujah this time. You don’t have to send marines in to get killed. That’s what Bush is about.

What more arrogant statement had we heard from any president of the United States at any time than President Bush’s statement about Haiti? “Aristide has to go.” The President of the United States elected by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court, with a minority of the popular vote, says that the most popular and beloved president in the hemisphere, with the largest electoral majority, serving as the president of the Republic of Haiti, the only republic in the history of the world that liberated itself as slaves from French colonialism, and he dares to say, “Aristide has to go”? I say, Bush has to go! Aristide has to come back! Aristide would be a better president of the United States by far. He’s a gentle, loving man. He never hurt a soul. He loves the people. He lives in poverty.

Fallujah — Fallujah is the Guernica of our time. The city has been destroyed, thousands killed in the eyes of the world. Abu Ghraib, it shows the heart of American respect for human dignity, doesn’t it? You torture them. Then you say, 'Oh, it's a few strays.” And then you continue to do the same thing. There’s no greater symbol on earth for contempt for the idea of human rights and human dignity than Guantanamo.

I’ve got to go, so let me say this: There is one clear answer to this problem immediately. You don’t have to wait three years and four months. You don’t even have to wait to the next congressional elections. It’s impeachment!

AMY GOODMAN: Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, speaking at the massive anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.

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