Kucinich: Articles of Impeachment 12.

[L. Coyote]

Run time: 09:44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFZbUcwNUK8   Posted on YouTube: June 11, 2008 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: June 12, 2008 By DU Member: L. Coyote Views on DU: 350

 

[L. Coyote]

1. INITIATING A WAR AGAINST IRAQ FOR CONTROL OF THAT NATION'S NATURAL RESOURCES

Article XII
INITIATING A WAR AGAINST IRAQ FOR CONTROL OF THAT NATION'S NATURAL RESOURCES
In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional
oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability,
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional
duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed",
has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President,
invaded and occupied a foreign nation for the purpose, among other purposes, of seizing control of that
nation's oil.
The White House and its representatives in Iraq have, since the occupation of Baghdad began,
attempted to gain control of Iraqi oil. This effort has included pressuring the new Iraqi government to
pass a hydrocarbon law. Within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the US Agency for
International Development (USAid) awarded a $240 million contract to Bearing Point, a private U.S.
company. A Bearing Point employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, was hired to advise the
Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up the new hydrocarbon law. The draft law places executives of
foreign oil companies on a council with the task of approving their own contracts with Iraq; it denies
the Iraqi National Oil Company exclusive rights for the exploration, development, production,
transportation, and marketing of Iraqi oil, and allows foreign companies to control Iraqi oil fields
containing 80 percent of Iraqi oil for up to 35 years through contracts that can remain secret for up to 2
months. The draft law itself contains secret appendices.
President Bush provided unrelated reasons for the invasion of Iraq to the public and Congress, but
those reasons have been established to have been categorically fraudulent, as evidenced by the herein
mentioned Articles of Impeachment I, II, III, IV, VI, and VII.
Parallel to the development of plans for war against Iraq, the U.S. State Department's Future of Iraq
project, begun as early as April 2002, involved meetings in Washington and London of 17 working
groups, each composed of 10 to 20 Iraqi exiles and international experts selected by the State
Department. The Oil and Energy working group met four times between December 2002 and April
2003. Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, later the Iraqi Oil Minister, was a member of the group, which
concluded that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the
war," and that, "the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment of
oil and gas resources." The same group recommended production-sharing agreements with foreign oil
companies, the same approach found in the draft hydrocarbon law, and control over Iraq's oil resources
remains a prime objective of the Bush Administration.
Prior to his election as Vice President, Dick Cheney, then-CEO of Halliburton, in a speech at the
Institute of Petroleum in 1999 demonstrated a keen awareness of the sensitive economic and
geopolitical role of Midde East oil resources saying: "By 2010, we will need on the order of an
additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and national
oil companies are obviously controlling about 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a
government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East,
with two-thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though
companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.''
The Vice President led the work of a secret energy task force, as described in Article XXXII below, a
task force that focused on, among other things, the acquisition of Iraqi oil through developing a
controlling private corporate interest in said oil.
In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his
trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the
prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting
removal from office.

[L. Coyote]

2. CREATING A SECRET TASK FORCE TO DEVELOP ENERGY AND MILITARY POLICIES

ARTICLE XIII
CREATING A SECRET TASK FORCE TO DEVELOP ENERGY AND MILITARY POLICIES WITH RESPECT TO IRAQ AND OTHER COUNTRIES
In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional
oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability,
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional
duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has both personally and acting through his agents
and subordinates, together with the Vice President, created a secret task force to guide our nation's
energy policy and military policy, and undermined Congress' ability to legislate by thwarting attempts
to investigate the nature of that policy.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report on the Cheney Energy Task Force, in August
2003, described the creation of this task force as follows:
"In a January 29, 2001, memorandum, the President established NEPDG Development Group] — comprised of the Vice President, nine cabinet-level officials, and four other
senior administration officials — to gather information, deliberate, and make recommendations to the
President by the end of fiscal year 2001. The President called on the Vice President to chair the group,
direct its work and, as necessary, establish subordinate working groups to assist NEPDG."
The four "other senior administration officials were the Director of the Office of Management and
Budget, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, the Assistant to the
President for Economic Policy, and the Deputy Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs.
The GAO report found that:
"In developing the National Energy Policy report, the NEPDG Principals, Support Group, and
participating agency officials and staff met with, solicited input from, or received information and
advice from nonfederal energy stakeholders, principally petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and
electricity industry representatives and lobbyists. The extent to which submissions from any of these
stakeholders were solicited, influenced policy deliberations, or were incorporated into the final report
cannot be determined based on the limited information made available to GAO. NEPDG met and
conducted its work in two distinct phases: the first phase culminated in a March 19, 2001, briefing to
the President on challenges relating to energy supply and the resulting economic impact; the second
phase ended with the May 16, 2001, presentation of the final report to the President. The Office of the
Vice President's (OVP) unwillingness to provide the NEPDG records or other related information
precluded GAO from fully achieving its objectives and substantially limited GAO's ability to
comprehensively analyze the NEPDG process. associated with that process.
"None of the key federal entities involved in the NEPDG effort provided GAO with a complete
accounting of the costs that they incurred during the development of the National Energy Policy report.
The two federal entities responsible for funding the NEPDG effort—OVP and the Department of
Energy (DOE)—did not provide the comprehensive cost information that GAO requested. OVP
provided GAO with 77 pages of information, two-thirds of which contained no cost information while
the remaining one-third contained some miscellaneous information of little to no usefulness. OVP
stated that it would not provide any additional information. DOE, the Department of the Interior, and
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provided GAO with estimates of certain costs and salaries
associated with the NEPDG effort, but these estimates, all calculated in different ways, were not
comprehensive."
In 2003, the Commerce Department disclosed a partial collection of materials from the NEPDG,
including documents, maps, and charts, dated March 2001, of Iraq's, Saudi Arabia's and the United
Arab Emirates' oil fields, pipelines, refineries, tanker terminals, and development projects.
On November 16, 2005, the Washington Post reported on a White House document showing that oil
company executives had met with the NEPDG, something that some of those same executives had just
that week denied in Congressional testimony. The Bush Administration had not corrected the
inaccurate testimony.
On July 18, 2007, the Washington Post reported the full list of names of those who had met with the
NEPDG.
In 1998 Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, "Iraq possesses
huge reserves of oil and gas, reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." According to the GAO
report, Chevron provided detailed advice to the NEPDG.
In March, 2001, the NEPDG recommended that the United States Government support initiatives by
Middle Eastern countries "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment." Following
the invasion of Iraq, the United States has pressured the new Iraqi parliament to pass a hydrocarbon law
that would do exactly that. The draft law, if passed, would take the majority of Iraq's oil out of the
exclusive hands of the Iraqi Government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or
more. The Bush administration hired Bearing Point, a U.S. company, to help write the law in 2004. It
was submitted to the Iraqi Council of Representatives in May 2007.
In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his
trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the
prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting
removal from office.

[pleah]

3. K&R!

:applause:

[jgraz]

4. K&R

[L. Coyote]

5. Kick. Putting these ducks in row.