By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Two of the articles deal with the fact that Bush was never elected, and in fact stole the election of 2004 in Ohio. They should serve as a cautionary notice to the Obama campaign that this year’s election could also be stolen.
Kucinich’s courage in introducing these articles is underscored by the fact that the Congress should have removed Bush from office years ago. From lying to the world to perpetrate the war in Iraq, to violating the Constitution on scores of basic civil rights and liberties issues, to fostering a regime based on unprecedented corruption and robbery, George W. Bush would be known as the worst president in the history of the United States if in fact he had been elected president.
But these articles of impeachment contain charges that come directly from the independent reportage on the stolen 2004 election that appeared first at www.freepress.org and in other non-corporate and internet-based media throughout the United States. Ironically, though these facts have finally penetrated to a proposed Congressional indictment of the nation’s chief executive, they have yet to be reported in the "mainstream" corporate-owned media.
Kucinich’s Article 28 charges Bush with "tampering with free and fair elections," along with "corruption of the administration of justice." Article 29 charges him and his staff and political cronies and underlings with "conspiracy to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1965" (co-author Bob Fitrakis, attorney-at-law, helped draft these Articles 28 and 29 based in part on information that was first posted at www.freepress.org).
Many of the specific charges leveled in the bill of impeachment can be traced directly to conflict of interest charged raised in Ohio by grassroots election protection activists before, during and after the 2004 voting. Bush deserves impeachment, Kucinich writes, for "willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to ensure that uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election would be disproportionately concentrated in urban African-American districts."
The impeachment document also notes that "in Ohio’s Lucas County, which includes Toledo, 3,122 or 41.13% of the provisional ballots went uncounted under the direction of George W. Bush’s agent, the Secretary of State of Ohio, John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Committee to Re-Elect Bush/Cheney in Ohio….In Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, 8,559 or 32.82% of the provisional ballots went uncounted….In Ohio’s Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, 3,529 or 24.23% of the provisional ballots went uncounted."
In our numerous conversations with Rep. Kucinich since the Ohio-centered theft of the 2004 election, he has made it clear that he fully understands the depth of planning and coordination that went into the hijacking of the presidency. Based on sophisticated coordination between Blackwell and White House consiglieri Karl Rove, the GOP launched a high-tech blitzkrieg on the electoral process. Their tactics ranged from removing more than 300,000 registered Ohio citizens from the voter rolls, to short-changing inner city precincts of needed voting machines, to rigging electronic vote counts, to calling a phony Homeland Security alert to several score other tactics, many of which continue to surface.
The tragedy of this impeachment is that it did not occur in 2004, when the independent media filled with the first revelations of what really happened in Ohio. Two new election protection documentaries, David Earnhardt’s UNCOUNTED and a new release coming from Emmy-award winner Dorothy Fadiman, make the experience even more indelible.
The Bush catastrophe is now winding down, having exceeded all expectations in its destruction of the fabric of American law, economy and ecology. But if Barack Obama allows history to repeat itself yet again in 2008, this nation will plunge even deeper into the depths. The only way to avoid that is to proceed with this impeachment in all its potential force. At very least, this Congress must thoroughly expose and act on what was done to our sacred democratic process in 2004. As we have since learned, the world cannot afford to have this happen again.
-Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Elections & Is Rigging , available via www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They also co-wrote, with Steve Rosenfeld, What Happened in Ohio, from The New Press. (Republished with permission)
