Impeachment Update: Conyers sent letters, did not call members back from recess

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS 
by Meg White

BuzzFlash brings you the latest in impeachment news with a sigh. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent out six letters Wednesday, each politely asking current and former administration and intelligence officials to give him a call.

Of course, Conyers is hoping for a little more than a chat. He's requesting testimony from six major players implicated in a high-level scam to fool Congress and the American people into going to war. The investigation stems from a book written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind. Suskind wrote that CIA director George Tenet ordered a letter to be forged and backdated to support the Bush Administration's assertions that Iraq had both weapons of mass destruction and ties to the 9/11 attacks.

There were exciting rumors last week that Conyers would call his fellow committee members back from their summer recess to investigate Suskind's claims. The rumors were sparked by an August 14 interview on the radio show Democracy Now!. Conyers seemed to say the Judiciary Committee was on its way back to Washington:

"The 110th Congress isn't over. We're starting our work, and then we're doing it in a period where the Congress is in recess. I'm calling everybody back. We've got a huge amount of work to engage in."

But it seems now, mere days before the Democratic convention, that Conyers didn't really mean "everybody." While he and his staff may be burning the mid-recess oil, committee members were not called back from the recess, according to calls made to the committee staffers.

Either way, Conyers is running out of time. It's doubtful those who received the letters from Conyers requesting their presence will even respond. In such a case, the committee would have to agree to the issuance of subpoenas, but there's no consensus as to when the witnesses should be considered AWOL (Conyers only asked them to call the committee "as soon as possible" in the letters). Furthermore, as we saw in the cases of Joshua Bolton and Harriet Miers, subpoenas can be ignored if the Justice Department has your back, even if the courts disagree. And as Karl Rove could tell you, even a contempt citation combined with an arrest attempt won't land you in jail.

Conyers did say on Democracy Now! that the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate crimes perpetrated by the Bush Administration is under consideration.  This more long-term goal might work out in terms of possible war crimes charges after the November election, but the party-mandated lag time in moving ahead with Kucinich's 35 plus one articles is the heftiest nail in the impeachment coffin so far.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

For a concise round-up of recent events, see Jason Leopold's article posted on The Consortium for Independent Journalism.

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