TUESDAY EVENING: The Clerk of the House is expected to read the articles of impeachment, which should take about 5 hours, at the conclusion of which Rep. Kucinich will make a motion.

Rep. Robert Wexler is the first to cosponsor and will be on Keith Olbermann today.

CALL THE MEDIA!

Email Your Congress Member - Congress has 72 hours to table it, send it to committee, pass it, or reject it.

The full text of the articles is available here
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Raw Story:

The White House does not have archival copies of e-mails exchanged between administration officials during the weeks leading up to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq nor for the first two months of the war there, according to a just-released filing concerning millions of e-mails alleged to have gone missing or been deleted.

“A White House declaration filed late last night … makes the stunning admission that the White House failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq,” says a release from Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a watchdog group suing for public records concerning the disappearance of internal White House e-mails.

Without computer backup tapes from this critical pre-Iraq war period, future researchers may be deprived a vital resource as the delve into the inner workings of the Bush administration as it decided to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

“The harm is that we’ve lost a huge piece of history,” says Anne Weismann, a lawyer for CREW.

Weismann estimated the total number of missing White House e-mails at “10 million-plus.”

Investigations into the missing White House e-mails already have shown that e-mails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were not archived on critical dates during the Justice Department’s investigation of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The White House already has said it also does not have backup tapes for those dates, Sept. 30, 2003, through Oct. 6, 2003.

“I’m sure there are other holes,” Weismann told RAW STORY Tuesday. “We just can’t get in to have the kind of forensic review that needs to be done” of what the White House has.

E-mails were missing from internal servers on a total of 473 days, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee, including dates around when Saddam Hussein was captured and during a court battle surrounding Cheney’s energy task force.

CREW is joined by the National Security Archive, an open-government group at in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration, which maintains internal computer systems and archives.

The White House filing revealed it had 483 backup tapes from May 23, 2003 to Sept. 29, 2003. CREW has posted the court documents here.

The Raw Story:

The Bush administration has violated Americans’ basic human rights by blocking access to information and creating more government secrets than at any other time in U.S. history, former President Carter said Wednesday.

Carter made the remarks at the start of a three-day conference aimed at helping other countries develop “access to information” laws, drawing participants from nearly 40 nations.

To applause, Carter said he looks forward to more freedom after a new U.S. administration takes office in January.

The Atlanta-based Carter Center has been working to help other countries with right-to-information laws since 1999, when it piloted a program in Jamaica. At that time only a handful of countries had such laws.

Today, nearly 70 nations have laws granting the public access to government information.

“Powerful leaders in order to stay in office deprive their citizens of a right to know,” Carter said. “Access to information can change the landscape of an entire society.”

It’s believed to be the first conference on helping countries develop the right to information laws, the center said.

Any government that denies its citizens the right to information will ultimately fail because a lack of trust fosters hard feelings, uprisings and coups, he said.

Dignitaries speaking at the conference included Maharafa Traore, the minister of justice in Mali.

Traore called access to information “one of greatest challenges” faced by the Malian democracy. Since 2002, with the help of the Carter Center, Mali has developed an independent administrative agency to ensure all branches of government are acting appropriately, he said.

“We have developed a platform on the basis of which there will be a new way of conducting business in our country,” he said.

At the end of the conference Friday, the center hopes to create a set of recommendations for the right-to-know laws based on the information shared among participants.

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On the Net:

The Carter Center: http://www.cartercenter.org

View London

The Foreign Office has been ordered to publish an early draft of the controversial dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

An information tribunal has ruled that the unpublished document, which was a precursor to the final dossier on Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs, must be made public.

The final document, which was issued by then prime minister Tony Blair in September 2002, was at the centre of a government scandal after accusations that the dossier had been ’sexed up’ in order to encourage support for an invasion of Iraq.

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was also found dead shortly after he was named as a media source for a documentary into the composition and collection of the information contained in the papers.

On February 9th 2005, a request was made under the Freedom of Information Act by Christopher Ames, a researcher, to view the draft.

But the Foreign Office had previously refused to allow the document to be viewed and may yet appeal to the High Court in order to avoid having to relinquish its confidentiality.
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Nadler will speak on behalf of Hillary Clinton at a candidates forum on

Sunday, January 13th
1-3 p.m.
Fulton Hudson Guild
119 9th Ave
Between 17th and 18th Streets
New York NY

Details on this event:
sharon@worldcantwait.org

Here’s a great opportunity to ask Congressman Jerrold Nadler very publicly to begin Cheney impeachment hearings.

The public is demanding it, as are many of his colleagues in Congress and on the House Judiciary Committee.

Rep. Nadler chairs the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and is choosing not to uphold the Constitution.

In November, the full House voted to send a resolution to impeach Cheney to the Judiciary Committee, and it was placed in Rep. Nadler’s subcommittee.

Rep. Nadler claims that impeachment is no longer a part of the Constitution, because we now have political parties. But we had parties when we held Nixon accountable. We’ve always had parties. No one can guarantee that Republicans in the Senate won’t vote to convict the least popular vice president in history. And it is not the job of the House to do its duty only when it can guarantee that the Senate will do its duty.

Impeach Cheney