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Walkin’ the Dog

HB City Council Ignores ‘War Criminals’
Local activists want Bush impeachment on agenda

By John Earl
OC Voice Editor

When a group of Huntington Beach activists asked their city council representatives to consider placing an impeachment resolution targeting President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the agenda for a future city council meeting, they hoped that at least one councilmember would help them out.

So far, their goal is far from realized.

The resolution is based, in part, on the belief that George Bush “deliberately and repeatedly” deceived the American public into believing that Iraq was a threat to the United States, “in order to initiate an illegal, immoral, and unnecessary war against Iraq to the devastation of that country, and causing incalculable damage to this country, and to the stability of the world,” according to a web site referred to by the group.

According to the U.S. Constitution, impeachment is an indictment for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” and requires a simple majority vote. A subsequent trial in the U.S. Senate would require a 2/3 vote for conviction and removal from office.

The impeachment proponents spoke before the city council on Aug. 7 and Aug. 20, when about 20 of them picketed on the sidewalk in front of city hall prior to the meeting. Last July 23 they held a demonstration at the pier which attracted over 60 participants.

The group, which now calls itself Huntington Beach Impeach (HBI), had no trouble coming up with evidence of Bush and Cheney’s alleged crimes and the consequences of those crimes for the city council—evidence that has persuaded up to 45 percent of the American public that Bush should be impeached and 54 percent that Cheney should be, according to a recent poll by the American Research Group (a CNN poll showed 38 percent for impeachment of the president).

The cost of war

At the Aug. 20 city council meeting, several HBI representatives spoke of the Iraq war’s toll, indirectly and directly, upon the residents of Huntington Beach.

“Huntington Beach is not an island,” HB resident Lynda Hernandez told the council, “and the human and economic costs are staggering.”

So far, total U.S. cost for the Iraq war is about $500 billion. But taking statistics from www.costofwar.com, Hernandez said that 50 percent of the U.S. tax base was being spent on the “military industrial complex,” taking funds away from local needs such as education, health care and affordable housing. Orange County’s war cost so far is $6 billion, enough to have provided 284,000 students with 4 year college scholarships or pay for 103,000 teachers, she claimed.

HB resident Vern Nelson brought the impeachment/war issue directly home by showing an enlarged photo of Marine Corporal William C. James, who grew up in Huntington Beach and was inspired by 9-11 to join the Marines to fight terrorism. “Of course, we all know by now that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11,” Nelson said, “That was just a tactic to frighten us Americans into supporting Bush and Cheny’s war.”

James was killed in the 2004 assault on Fulaga, which Nelson described as “one of the war’s many debacles,” a reference that infuriated Councilmember Don Hansen to the point of tears and elicited his promise not to support the agenda proposal and a severe tongue lashing besides. 

Recalling that the city had “adopted” the 3-1 Marine Battalion stationed in Iraq (See “Left and Right,” OC Voice, Nov. 2006), Hansen said that he had met many of those men who had received the Purple Heart award for risking their lives at Fuluga. Choking up, Hansen lashed out. “I think it’s shameful for you to call their heroism a debacle. It’s shameful,” he scolded.

Rather than questioning the heroism of the marines serving at Fuluga, however, Nelson seemed to refer to the root causes and results of the American invasion of Iraq as a whole. In that respect, the estimates vary but are all truly staggering.

Iraq now has over 650,000 dead from war related violence, according to a study by the British medical journal, Lancet.Fifty-six percent of those who died by violence died by gunshot wounds, according to the study, 13 percent by car bombs, 14 percent from other explosions and another 13 percent by air strikes. And Iraq’s infrastructure has collapsed, leading to massive healthcare problems, according to the study.

In order to escape the violence and chaos in their own country, between 1.4 and 1.7 million Iraqis have fled to Syria as refugees, overwhelming that country’s resources, according to official reports. An estimated 1 million Iraqis are displaced within their own country. The possibility of “all out” civil war threatens to make the refugee situation far worse.

For all of that, over 3,700 American military service men and women have died, not to mention almost 1,000 more Americans working for private contractors and over 40,000 Americans wounded.

There are also tens of thousands more Americans suffering from diseases contracted in Iraq, as well as from emotional trauma from the battlefield.

Today, terrorists, who were largely absent from pre-war Iraq, have a strong foothold there. And the Bush administration’s own estimates indicate that there is no end in sight to the Iraqi quagmire.

Some might call that a debacle, even a shameful debacle, coming from America’s military leader who presumptuously declared, “Mission accomplished,” shortly after U.S. troops captured Baghdad.

Meanwhile, there’s little debate that America’s own infrastructure is also crumbling, and Huntington Beach is no exception. Councilmember Debbie Cook, for example, has voted against various spending projects based on what she said is the city’s $300 million infrastructure funding short-fall.

Several HBI advocates approached Cook with their impeachment resolution because of her progressive political credentials, but all were firmly rebuffed.

HB resident Tom Lash, who met privately with Cook to discuss the proposal left her office disillusioned. “Her mantra was ‘It is not going to happen’ and ‘I am not going to waste political capital on this issue,’” he told the OC Voice.“I lost a great deal of respect for her in that short meeting,” he added.

Cook told the OC Voice that she rejected the impeachment proposal for “so many reasons,” including that, in her opinion, it is partisan, emotional rather than rational, vague and irrelevant to local issues and futile anyway, plus the fact that “most people,” including her, “don’t know much” about the issue.

“I can’t think of a single reason to do it,” she said. “Should we get involved in something that‘s going on in San Francisco or Mexico,” she asked, rhetorically. “I don’t think partisan politics serves local government,” she added, “I think this whole issue smacks of partisanship, just like when they [Republicans] went after Clinton.”

President Bill Clinton was impeached during his second term by the Republican controlled House over a sexual relationship he had with an adult White House intern, but he was acquitted by the Senate and served out his term.

“I think we need to focus on things important to our city,” Cook said, adding that she’s not going to spend any time studying the issue. “They’re misinterpreting the community if they think they’re going to get traction on that issue,” she said of the impeachment advocates.

Cook may be right. Other than Hansen, none of the other city councilmembers has bothered to respond to the impeachment call in any way. Success for HBI in Surf City may be a political fantasy, especially given that even the Democratic Party controlled House of Representatives is stone cold to the idea of impeachment.

Undeterred as of press time, HBI plans to return to the city council on Sept. 4 for what could be another futile attempt to bring accountability to the politics of war.

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Oct. 2007

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