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AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush's claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush's anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, "We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen."

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as "totally unjustified."

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. "I was given bad advice," he insisted. "My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened."

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that "George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn't realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it." McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.



"face it....perhaps your only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others!"

Ummmm, okay?

"Retreat, hell! We just got here!"-Captain Lloyd Williams, 2nd Marine Division, Belleau Wood, France, WWI

Right on M&M! This is exactly what would have happened if the terrorists didn't hit us first.

Marge: There's someone here who I think can help you. Homer: Who, Batman? Marge: No he's a scientist. Homer: Batman's a scientist? Marge: It's not Batman!

Look at the date Booms, look at the date.

This is a well written counter to the 'bush should have done more sooner' argument.

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

Kipling-

That is balls on M&M. I freakin hate..........HATE..............backyard lawyers from any political party that play the hindsight "gee I could have done it better" game.

By this time tomorrow I shall have gained either a pearage or Westminster Abbey........Nelson

_________________
YGBSM !

Here's another good one...

Found at: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories ... 86,00.html


"In a parallel universe if 9/11 never happened...

PRESIDENT-ELECT John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian- born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States.

Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on "Larry King Live,' said the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against Bush.

Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime' was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest and illegal search and seizure.

Kerry's campaign mantra "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to' clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's Sept. 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9/10 Commission' hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry.

The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?

The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al-Qaida training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al-Qaida, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.

Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al-Qaida continues to flourish.

Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMD, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.

In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program is just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al-Qaida was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.

In a Jan. 25 memo to Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al-Qaida and a response to the USS Cole.

At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots,' decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter' that hinted at "something big.'

With no other details on the "big,' and weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Under questioning by the "9/10 Commission,' Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly.' The bipartisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting' had destroyed American credibility and subjected the United States to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.

Last week, Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in America. Kerry was the clear response to that call.

In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which the new president is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One."



"The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war."