Does Congress Need Impeachment Hearings to Investigate Trump?

By Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

12 May 19

ntil recently, the debate among Democrats over impeachment was mostly a straightforward argument about the 2020 fallout over taking this drastic step to deal with a drastically dangerous president. Few impeachment supporters were under the illusion that the process would actually lead to the removal of Trump from office by the requisite two-thirds vote in a Republican-controlled Senate. But some thought impeachment might dramatize Trump’s misconduct and energize Democratic voters. Others, notably Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, disagreed, fearing that a doomed impeachment effort would take Democrats far off message in 2020 while psyching Trump supporters out of their skulls.

The release of the redacted Mueller report, with its abundant evidence of presidential obstruction of justice, didn’t change many minds among Democratic impeachment opponents, who may have concluded (as presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg put it) that Trump deserved impeachment, but still deemed it a politically dubious course of action this close to an election year.

But Mueller’s clear indication that impeachment would be the only way to hold Trump accountable for his conduct provided another strong talking point for moving in that direction: that politics be damned, it was House Democrats’ constitutional responsibility to rein in this lawless president. This was the position, for example, of another 2020 presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren.

And now, as the Trump administration clearly signals its determination to stonewall the House by refusing to cooperate with investigations, release documents, or allow official testimony, there’s a new argument for impeachment making the rounds: It’s the only way to prevail in the inevitable legal fights between Trump and Congress over evidence of presidential misconduct, as Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein noted at Politico:

Judges have repeatedly ruled that Congress has a greater claim to sensitive government documents and personal information when it can point to an ongoing legal matter, instead of just a congressional investigation or legislative debate. And impeachment would give lawmakers that legal matter — the process is essentially a court procedure run by Congress where the House brings charges and the Senate holds the trial …

[L]egal experts and lawmakers across the ideological spectrum acknowledge that formally unleashing impeachment would bolster Democrats’ arguments that they deserve to see the president’s tax returns, interview senior officials, peruse special counsel Robert Mueller’s trove of evidence and see the details of Trump’s personal dealings with foreign leaders.

Indeed, impeachment might not only “trump” executive privilege in a court review of congressional subpoenas, but could also gives courts a solid reason to speed up hearings and appeals on the subject, much as the U.S. Supreme Court did in United States v. Nixon, the unanimous decision forcing that president to release tapes which included the famous “smoking gun” evidence of obstruction of justice. In that case, SCOTUS ruled just three weeks after oral argument subsequent to an expedited appeal from a district court.

The question of timing is becoming central to Democrats’ dilemma. If their efforts to investigate Trump get perpetually snarled in the courts, the whole conflict could drag beyond the 2020 elections. And the political risks of impeachment may grow higher by the day as well. Many Democrats think Hillary Clinton erred grievously in 2016 by campaigning against Trump’s character and ethics rather than promoting her own agenda for addressing the concerns the GOP demagogue was exploiting. Nothing would quite keep campaign 2020 more focused on Trump’s character and ethics than ongoing impeachment proceedings.

Public opinion offers no clear prescription. Around the time the Mueller report was released, pro-impeachment sentiment among Americans generally and Democrats specifically had been waning for a good while. Now there’s at least one new poll showing support for impeachment rising again among both Democrats and independents.

If, as Pelosi publicly suggests, Trump is “goading” Democrats into impeaching him, he may ultimately get his way as the House finds itself boxed out of any other approach. Already attitudes are hardening among House Democrats, as Jonathan Allen reports:

“There’s a deep concern, particularly among institutionalists, about the balance of power,” said a senior aide to one moderate Democrat who noted that the administration’s refusal to comply with subpoenas has angered some lawmakers who had been reluctant to escalate the fight.

That is, the pace is speeding up even for most Democrats who have been reluctant to go down a path that could lead to impeachment.

Should they become convinced that impeachment will give them the hammer to bust open Trump’s lockbox of potentially fatal secrets, pressure for impeachment could finally overcome 2020 fears. Democrats may conclude that beating Trump in the court of public opinion requires a step down a very uncertain path.

The Alarming Rise of Civilian Deaths in the War on Terror

By Phyllis Bennis, In These Times

12 May 19

New reports show an escalation in civilian casualties from U.S. operations in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia — and a pattern of U.S. denial about the scale of the problem.

here is no military solution” is an often-heard saying since the “global war on terror” began almost 18 years ago.

We need political solutions to the military conflicts we’ve embroiled ourselves in over the last two decades, most policymakers agree. But in the meantime, the last three administrations have sent in the military to pave the way for a political solution — and have kept them there, allegedly to protect civilians from the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in Syria and al-Shabab in Somalia, among other militant groups.

Yet all too often, these civilians become casualties of the very military forces Washington supposedly deployed to protect them.

A series of new reports document an alarming escalation of civilian casualties caused by U.S. operations in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia — and with it, a pattern of U.S. denial about the scale of the problem. The result is a global war on terror that persists in killing and injuring civilians — including children — in ever rising numbers.

Syria

ISIS claimed the city of Raqqa, in north-central Syria, as the capital of its so-called “caliphate” in January 2014. The Obama administration launched a bombing campaign in Syria that fall, followed by ground troops in 2015.

The group’s control of the city was marked by horrible conditions for the civilian population — including brutal punishments for infractions of ISIS's religious rules, extra-judicial killings and sexual slavery. The fighting across Syria involved both ISIS and the various powers operating in the country: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, the U.S. and Russia, not to mention the Syrian government and a variety of opposition forces. As a result of this global onslaught, Raqqa and its beleaguered inhabitants faced constant death and destruction for years.

But it was the U.S.-led bombing campaigns in Raqqa for which civilians and their city paid the highest price. The April 2019 Amnesty International report title sums it up: “Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times.”

The assault was relentless. “One U.S. military official boasted about firing 30,000 artillery rounds during the campaign — the equivalent of a strike every six minutes, for four months straight — surpassing the amount of artillery used in any conflict since the Viet Nam war,” the report notes. It added that “unguided artillery” is “notoriously imprecise.”

Amnesty documented 1,600 civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes on the city, limiting their count mostly to those the organization and its partners were able to reasonably verify on the ground. “Raqqa’s soaring civilian death toll is unsurprising,” the report concludes, “given the Coalition’s relentless barrage of munitions that were inaccurate to the point of being indiscriminate when used near civilians.”

In one incident, a five-story residential building where four families were taking shelter was completely leveled by an air strike. “Almost all of them — at least 32 civilians, including 20 children — were killed,” the report said. And worse: “A week later, a further 27 civilians —including many relatives of those killed in the earlier strike — were also killed when an air strike destroyed a nearby building.”

Pentagon officials who routinely bragged about their “precise” bombing of the city acknowledge the killing of only 159 civilians in Raqqa — about 10 percent of those Amnesty confirmed. So far, they’ve dismissed the rest as “non-credible,” while refusing to launch serious investigations of the real toll.

There’s no doubt that more serious investigations like Amnesty’s in Raqqa would document far more casualties in all the theaters of the global war on terror.

Afghanistan

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is in its 18th year, and more civilians are dying every year.

In the first months of 2019, the United Nations determined that, for the first time since the UN Assistance Mission began documenting deaths, more civilians had been killed by U.S. and U.S.-backed forces than by the Taliban or ISIS. Nearly half of those deaths caused by the U.S. and its allies occurred as a result of U.S. airstrikes, which killed a significant number of women and children.

A U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan intoned the well-known trope that U.S. forces “hold ourselves to the highest standards of accuracy and accountability,” before repeating that familiar refrain about a political solution: “The best way to end the suffering of noncombatants is to end the fighting through an agreed-upon reduction in violence on all sides.”

According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul now controls only about 54 percent of the country's districts. Eighteen years of war and occupation haven’t eliminated the Taliban — quite the contrary. The U.S., Russia and various Afghan civil society groups are all negotiating with the Taliban, while the U.S.-backed Afghan government fades under a morass of corruption and incompetence.

The war in Afghanistan has been a failure not only in political but in human terms. As of at least 2017, Afghanistan's infant mortality rate — the proportion of babies dying before their first birthday — was exactly where it was when the Taliban was in control, before the U.S. invasion: Number one in the world.

Somalia

The largely invisible U.S. war on Somalia has been underway sporadically since the early 1990s. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. operations there have included Special Forces and other ground troops hunting for al-Qaeda, al-Shabab and other militant organizations. Beginning under the Obama administration, the main focus has been an air war carried out largely by drones.

In 2017, President Trump loosened the already not-very-tight regulations governing drone attacks, reducing Obama-era rules that were supposed to protect civilians. The result was a significant escalation in drone strikes in the country: The number of attacks in 2017 rose to 34, and then rose again in 2018 to 47 — and this year's total looks on pace to surpass even that.

The U.S. Africa Command rather remarkably claims it has killed only two civilians in the dozens of airstrikes launched in the last two years. But Amnesty International's Brian Castner calls that a ”denial of reality.” In the New York Times, Castner writes that “in five of those airstrikes alone, Amnesty International can identify by name 14 civilians killed. By denying these casualties, our government is essentially trying to gaslight an entire country.”

The escalation of U.S. military intervention across Africa has remained largely under the public radar. But it continues — and just like in the more well-known U.S. war theaters, it results in the same consistent failure of military operations to end security threats.

According to the extraordinary journalist Nick Turse, “Over these last years, the number of personnel, missions, dollars spent, and special ops training efforts as well as drone bases and other outposts on the continent have all multiplied… Almost no one, however — neither those senators nor the media — has raised pointed questions, no less demanded frank answers, about why [security] crises on the continent have so perfectly mirrored American military expansion.”

Perhaps that’s because — as in Afghanistan and Syria — these operations do nothing about the extreme poverty, climate change, corruption and wars (often launched by the West) that together provide the source and the impetus for extremist actions.

The human toll

Behind the numbers is an almost unbearable human toll.

“I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me,” said one bereaved woman from Raqqa. “I’ve lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children.”

Yet denial of the scale — and in many cases, the very existence — of civilian casualties has been a feature of Washington's global war on terror since its origins. In 2002, Gen. Tommy Frank, then-U.S. commander Central Command, asserted that “we don't do body counts.”

The toll from bombs, drone strikes and firefights is only the tip of the iceberg. Not included are the hundreds of thousands killed in war zones around the world by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, by hunger stemming from food system disruption, and by disease resulting from the bombing of water treatment facilities, hospitals and clinics.

The hoary old statement is still true: There is no military solution to any of these conflicts. As long as failing military actions are still taken, however, civilians will continue to die. And they are being killed by the very soldiers and pilots, bombers, National Security Councils, congressional war-funders, parliaments, prime ministers and presidents who claim to be liberating them.