Kucinich to Press Congress to Impeach Cheney

Congressman Dennis Kucinich issued a statement today announcing that he intends to submit a resolution before Congress next week that will bring articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. His resolution has 21 co-sponsors. Here's a quote from his statement:

"Congress must hold the Vice President accountable. The American people need to let Members of Congress know how they feel about this. The Vice President continues to use his office to advocate for a continued occupation of Iraq and prod our nation into a belligerent stance against Iran. If the Vice President is successful, his actions will ensure decades of disastrous consequences."

David Lindorff, an investigative reporter and columnist, links Kucinich's resolution to allegations of a cover-up of the truth behind the Minot-Barksdale nuclear missile flight. Central to Lindorff's assertions is the Air Force investigative report's failure to explain how our nuclear arsenal's electonic anti-theft alarm system was disarmed in this incident. Here's a quote:

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52's wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes, according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems -- automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn't mention any of this, this means if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone -- and actually at least two people, since it's long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem -- had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

The Air Force investigation resulted in the termination of 70 persons -- including the base commander. Here's another quote from Lindorff:

But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked? There is speculation that the order may have come via an alternate chain of command.

Lindorff speculates that Vice President Cheney may have been at the end of an "alternate chain of command." He says,

In a couple of weeks, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is planning on calling for a Privilege of the House vote in Congress on moving his Cheney impeachment bill (H Res. 333) to a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has been stalled by House Democratic leaders since being filed last April 24. Such a hearing should demand answers from the vice president and his staff about his treasonous efforts to push the country into yet another war in the Middle East. It should also grill Air Force personnel about the true nature of the Minot nuclear incident.

Kucinich is also in the running for the 2000 Democratic party's presidential nomination. If Lindorff's allegations are true and Kucinich has some evidence to prove it, I suspect that his presidential aspirations will improve.

If Kucinich has nothing to offer more than other well-documented examples of the Vice President's abuse of power, I suspect that his presidential aspirations will be rapidly coming to an end.