George W. Bush should be held accountable for his crimes. The problem goes much deeper than Bush and his cohorts. But the Congressional hearings, independent investigations and likely indictments that loom, would help expose and slow this country’s sad and steady descent into a pseudo-religious, globalized, anti-democratic corporate/military police state; an American Fascism. Where’s the World Court when action is needed against the former leadership of a powerful developed country that can’t be so easily pushed around? George Bush and his co-conspirators should be indicted for the following:

1) Lying this country into unleashing an unnecessary and illegal imperialist war of aggression and occupation against a nation that had done nothing to the United States. A war that has torn Iraq apart, an occupation that has killed, mutilated, and traumatized tens of thousands of civilians. A war that has forced over 2,000,000 people to leave their homes. A war that has proven to be a brutal and spectacularly ill-planned jack move, for oil and global position, that helped snap the US economy by wasting billions upon billions of taxpayers’ dollars; dollars that could have been used to help provide jobs and job training, health care, education, small business loans, to assist the millions of working people who built this country. There’s no good reason to, now, make the same mistake in Afghanistan. What will the U.S. be able to do that the Soviet Union couldn’t?

2) Authorizing acts considered violations of basic human rights and war crimes by the Geneva Conventions and the vast majority of people around the world, including: the illegal detention, torture, assassination and murder of innocent civilians and prisoners of war, in both well known, secret American and American-sponsored gulags stretched around the world, as well as the indiscriminate use of the banned chemical weapon of mass destruction, white phosphorous.

3) Acting with extreme disregard for the First and Fourth Amendments by implementing the illegal and warrant-less covert monitoring of millions of law abiding US citizens’ phone calls, postal mail, e-mails and financial transactions. Then once caught, lying about the true nature, role and scope of secret police activity within this country, all the while questioning the patriotism of honest American citizens who called into question the government’s policy of riding roughshod over the Bill of Rights.

4) Collaboration in the criminal manipulation and suppression of the African American and Democratic vote in Florida, in 2000 and in Ohio, in 2004. These blatant violations of the Voting Rights Act enabled the coup-like theft of two consecutive Presidential elections.

5) Overseeing a rampaging and anti-democratic foreign policy, which included: (a) Invading and occupying Iraq (b) Overthrowing the elected and progressive government of Haiti and kidnapping its President (c) Backing the attempted toppling of the elected revolutionary government of Venezuela (d) Meddling in the national elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Costa Rica and (e) Instigating war in the Horn of Africa.

6) Performing in a sickeningly slow, inept and criminally negligent fashion in response to Hurricane Katrina and its on-going aftermath. While the poorest of the poor lay dying, Bush, who has proved to be as stubborn as he is dim, took time to strum a guitar. Distant from reality, the Emperor posed for photo-ops while standing naked before the world.

7) Committing numerous other acts suggesting that he and the arrogant, secretive, and greedy Cheney-led junta, which spoke through him, were somehow above the law, somehow above the will of the people, somehow above the Constitution.

Editor’s Note: Rep. Lloyd Daniel is a writer, educator and advocate. His website address is www.lloyddaniel.info