While Donald Trump spoke of “sovereignty” at the United Nations on Tuesday, the U.S. government continues to bomb various countries and kill innocents. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced she is launching a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump.
CommonDreams reports: “‘Total Massacre’ as U.S. Drone Strike Kills 30 Farmers in Afghanistan.”
JOHN AMIDON, jajaja1234 at aol.com, ED KINANE, edkinane340 at gmail.
Amidon, Kinane and Tiffany are members of Upstate Drone Action in New York, which has organized protests at Hancock base. Kinane said today: “On Tuesday, six of us were arrested in the morning. We’ve had protests here for years, since we found out the 174 Attack Wing was based just near us, killing people in Afghanistan with MQ-9 Reaper drones. We had a banner: ‘Drones Fly, Children Die, Our Hearts Are Breaking.’ We were finally released late last night. We did our latest protest after learning of the drone massacre in Afghanistan that killed and wounded farmers there. The U.S. government is using drones to commit war crimes.” The others arrested are Julienne Oldfield, Rae Kramer and Les Billips. See Kinane’s articles at Truthout, including “Weaponized Drones and the Phony ‘War on Terror.'”
The Washington Post reported Tuesday: “U.S. invokes state secrets privilege to block American journalist’s challenge to alleged spot on drone ‘kill list‘”: “For the first time ever, a United States federal court ruled that the government may kill one of its citizens without providing him the information necessary to prove that he is being wrongly targeted and does not deserve to die.”
FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Boyle’s books include Destroying World Order. He said today: “It’s certainly possible that Trump engaged in wrongdoing in his statements to the Ukrainian leader, but this is insignificant compared to totally criminal wrongdoing like bombings, assassinations, murders and war crimes conducted by Trump as well as prior presidents. A fidelity to the rule of law would act on the ample evidence to impeach Trump for such criminality. So, we’re seeing political power and calculation here by both Trump and Pelosi more than anything else.”
Boyle was legal adviser to Rep. Henry B. González when he released classified material on the House floor in 1992 in an attempt to impeach George H. W. Bush following the start of the the Gulf War and wrote the first draft of the Gonzalez Impeachment Resolution. Bush would later write in his memoirs that if the Gulf War “drags out, not only will I take the blame, but I will probably have impeachment proceedings filed against me.”
In 1990, after Yemen voted against a United Nations Security Council Resolution for war against Iraq, a U.S. representative told the Yemeni Ambassador: “That is the most expensive vote you ever cast.” The U.S. then immediately suspended tens of millions of dollars of aid to that desperately poor country.
Boyle was recently on an accuracy.org news release on the War Powers Resolution, which was largely written by Rep. Paul Findley, who died last month at 98. Also, see: “Attacking Syria ‘Impeachable.'”
