The Washington Post published a commentary acknowledging that support for impeachment is now "reaching beyond the usual suspects," and the Associated Press covered the spike in pro-impeachment resolutions from local officials across the country. Resolutions recently passed in Vermont and California, and this weekend Democratic Party officials in Michigan voted to urge local officials to pass another. Meanwhile, 14 Democratic candidates for Congress have announced their support for impeachment.

These local efforts are beginning to advance impeachment at the national level. The resolution by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to investigate impeachment is slowly but steadily gaining co-sponsors, including three this month. It now has 29 co-sponsors -- roughly one out of every seven Democrats in the U.S. House -- a promising start that ensures that the legislation attracts more votes when it reaches the floor.

These activist and legislative efforts helped finally push the "i-word" on to the notoriously conservative cable news last week. On Wednesday, Joe Scarborough aired an impeachment debate on MSNBC -- one of the first times the subject has been debated this year on cable. Scarborough's producers invited me to make the case for impeachment after learning of the new book I co-authored, "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush."

Since impeachment rarely receives any consideration on television, I took the opportunity to explain our case, even if it meant going on Joe Scarborough's turf. Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who opposes impeaching President Bush, said during the show that he was "fascinated" by some arguments for impeachment. He accurately described the groundswell:

There's a movement out there right now calling for George W. Bush to be impeached. Just take a look at how many cities and towns across America have either drafted resolutions calling for the president's impeachment or are considering doing so. Not only that, but 11 candidates for the House of Representatives and three for the U.S. Senate are all running on the impeachment platform. Why do they want the president gone? Well, here are the common reasons cited. The war in Iraq, which they say Bush lied to get us into; warrantless eavesdropping, authorized by the president; the torturing of prisoners; and the president`s response to Hurricane Katrina.

It is significant that impeachment activists have received Scarborough's attention. When we debated the topic, Scarborough even conceded that the arguments for impeachment in our book were "intellectually honest." That's because it's easy to make an intellectually honest case for impeachment: President Bush has publicly admitted to breaking the law. Here is how I explained the clearest example of the president's multifaceted illegal conduct -- spying on Americans:

the fact is that the law provides a clear-cut way that the president has to do these things. He has to go to the FISA court. He knowingly violated that law. And the law says -- there are two laws, in fact, that say that when you do that, you are guilty of a crime. There it is. That is one of the high crimes and misdemeanors.

Pat Buchanan was quick to argue that even Senate Democrats weren't supporting impeachment. While many Washington Democrats appear to be spineless these days, a growing number of House Democrats are supporting a resolution to investigate impeachment. This debate is the start of many to come. Impeachment is finally out of the bottle, and it is not going away. C-SPAN plans to televise a discussion of our impeachment book, moderated by Amy Goodman in New York on March 28, and our attorneys are receiving more requests to explain the legal case for impeachment from grassroots groups and reporters.

This week the Senate will also consider censuring President Bush for illegal wiretapping, a rare move that shows even the conservative upper house may be realizing that President Bush is out of control. But we must remember that a censure resolution won't remove a single wiretap from Americans' phones. Congress and the American people must take real action to address President Bush's illegal policies in wiretapping, Iraq, torture and undermining the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

President Bush has repeatedly broken the law and brazenly promised to continue to betray his oath of office and our Constitution -- clear impeachable offenses. We must grow the impeachment movement across the country and in the halls of Congress to catalyze a substantive debate over illegal conduct, not politics.

William Goodman is the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But as you know, the President says he was acting on his inherent authority under the Constitution, and even your resolution acknowledges that no federal court has ruled that a president does not have that authority as Commander in Chief, so aren?t you jumping the gun?

FEINGOLD: Not at all. You know, we'?ve had a chance here for three months to look at whether there's any legal basis for this, and they're using shifting legal justifications. First they try to argue that somehow, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they can do this. Its pretty clear that they can't. Then there's the argument that somehow the military authorization for Afghanistan allowed this. This has basically been laughed out of the room in the Congress. So the last resort is to somehow say that the President has inherent authority to ignore the law of the United States of America, and that has the consequence that the President could even order the assassination of American citizens if that's the law. So there is no sort of independent inherent authority that allows the president to override the laws passed by the Congress of the United States.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you're so convinced that the President has broken the law, why not file an article of impeachment?

FEINGOLD: Well, you know, that's an option we could look at, if somebody thought that was a really good idea. There are other options out there. In fact, this conduct is right in the strike zone ? even though the Founding Fathers didn't have strike zones, they didn't have baseball ? but it is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors. We have to consider, is it best for the country to start impeachment proceedings? Is it best for the country to consider removing the President? We?re not mandated to impeach a president who has broken the law, but I think we are required to do our job, to live up to our oath of office, and say, wait a minute, there has to be ? at least as a first step ? some accountability. Proper accountability is a censuring of the President, to say, ?Mr. President, acknowledge you broke the law, return to the law, return to our system of government.? That?s what I think we should do.

Feingold, a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, released a five-page censure resolution that accuses Bush of violating the Constitution and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The resolution says censuring Bush also is warranted by "his failure to inform the full congressional intelligence committees as required by law, and his efforts to mislead the American people about the authorities relied upon by his administration to conduct wiretaps and about the legality of the program."

In 1999, Senate Republicans tried but failed to bring a censure resolution against President Clinton after he was acquitted by the Senate on House impeachment charges that he committed perjury and obstructed justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

"The outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemies' ability to communicate as it plots against America poses a key test of our Democratic leaders," he said. "Do they support the extreme and counterproductive antics of a few or do they support a lawful program vital to the security of this nation?

Feingold was the lone senator to oppose the 2001 Patriot Act. Two weeks ago, he was joined by only three other senators in opposing a renewal of the law with some new curbs on police powers. Feingold called the curbs meaningless.

Feingold's "censure" (in essence, Congress critters issuing a "rebuke," or a mild slap on the wrist instead of indicting Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors) is a pathetic effort that will fail miserably because the whores of Congress are either onboard with the neocons or were long ago cowed into silence, as whores with closets filled with skeletons usually are.

Russ Feingold will soon enough become the poster child for Karl Rove's effort to portray Democrats as friends of "al-Qaeda" and Islamic terrorism. "We are a nation at war," declared Scott McClellan, even though we are not officially or legally a nation at war, and "if Democrats want to argue that we shouldn't be listening to al Qaeda communications, it's their right and we welcome the debate." Of course, the NSA snoop program has nothing to do with "al-Qaeda" phone calls. It has everything to do with snooping Americans in opposition to Bush and his neocon La Costra Nostra.

If we are to believe a poll released by the CIA's newspaper, the Washington Post, far too many "adults in the United States see nothing wrong with the domestic electronic surveillance program initiated by their federal government." 54% believe trashing the Bill of Rights is "acceptable," while a scant 32% are against reducing the Constitution to little more than "just a goddamned piece of paper," as our supreme leader, our Reichspräsident, Der Führer, declared not long ago. Such survey results, if we can trust them, demonstrate most Americans have flat brainwaves when it comes to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to naming Simpson cartoon characters, they are sharp as shiny new tacks.

Of course, all of this is moot, to say the least. The NSA has spied illegally on Americans for decades, as the Church Committee revealed in 1976. "In 1967, as part of a general concern within the intelligence community over civil disturbances and peace demonstrations, NSA responded to Defense Department requests by expanding its watch list program. Watch lists came to include the names of individuals, groups, and organizations involved in domestic antiwar and civil rights activities in an attempt to discover if there was 'foreign influence' on them," explains a supplementary staff report issued by the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity, otherwise known as the Church Committee. "In response to pressures from the White House, FBI, and Attorney General, the Department of the Army established a civil disturbance unit."

As Frank Morales documents, the response to "domestic antiwar and civil rights activities" resulted in Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Operation Garden Plot. "By 1971, Senator Sam Ervin, later of Watergate renown, had convened his Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights which 'revealed that Military Intelligence had established an intricate surveillance system covering hundreds of thousands of American citizens. Committee staff members had seen a master plan-Garden Plot that gave an eagle eye view of the Army-National Guard-police strategy…. At first, the Garden Plot exercises focused primarily on racial conflict. But beginning in 1970, the scenarios took a different twist. The joint teams, made up of cops, soldiers and spies, began practicing battle with large groups of protesters. California, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic participants in Garden Plot war games,'" Morales writes.

In 1975, the details of Garden Plot and an associated program, Lantern Spike, were revealed to journalist Ron Ridenhour. It should be noted that under proposed legislation by Sen. Mike DeWine and Sens. Olympia Snowe, Lindsey Graham, and Chuck Hagel, Ridenhour would now be locked up in prison for 15 years and fined a million dollars (see my Booking First & Fourth Amendment Fifth Columnists) for reporting such information. Following nine eleven, Garden Plot, going under the name Noble Eagle, was activated "to respond to major domestic civil disturbances within the United States," as Wikipedia summarizes.

In 1984, the feds launched Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, an extension of Garden Plot, a plan to detain a large number of Americans to "fight subversive activities" and arrest "certain unidentified segments of the population," according to scholar Diana Reynolds. The FBI had meticulously collated a list of these "unidentified segments of the population" (dubbed the "ADEX" list, or in FBI parlance, the "Custodial Detention" list; see Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims & Methods of America's Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980).

In addition to Noble Eagle, the Pentagon, under a program called Eagle Eyes, activated TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) and CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity) to deal with "domestic terrorist threats against the military" and report and collate into sprawling databases "suspicious activity," for instance a "peanut-butter protest [against the Houston headquarters of Halliburton]"regarded as a "potential threat to national security," according to Newsweek. In January, Dick Cheney called the CIFA program "vital" to the "country's defense against Al Qaeda," that is to say peanut butter sandwich wielding "al-Qaeda" operatives. Another Pentagon database, according to an "NBC Investigative Unit," including "nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center" and additional "documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities."

According to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer who "blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests" in 1970, the documents revealed by NBC "tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again." Pyle worked as an investigator for the late Senator Sam Ervin's Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and later for the Church Committee, mentioned above.

NBC comments that the "public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens-many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.," in other words the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, violated by Bush and his minions, and prompting Russ Feingold to introduce his ill-fated censure, "an appropriate and responsible step for Congress to take in response to the President's undermining of the separation of powers and ignoring the rule of law," as the Post Chronicle reports.

Indeed, in the mid-70s, the "public was outraged" over military snooping on citizens. But that was then and this is now-and now the public has bought the "al-Qaeda" fairy tale (a myth that "threatens to overthrow history," as Gore Vidal would have it) and the benighted masses believe the government when it promises the NSA snoop program is limited to phone calls placed from caves in Afghanistan or huts in the tribal area of Pakistan. Most Americans, afflicted with amnesia and intellectual incuriosity, are unaware of what the NSA has done since Truman wrote his October 24, 1952, memorandum establishing the National Security Agency and thus the National Security State. "58 years later, the National Security State has metastasized into a horror for the United States and the world," writes Sheldon Drobny.

Russ Feingold is a brave man to oppose all of this. Unfortunately, he is performing a certain bodily function in the face of a cyclone.

In his presentation at the so-called "Intelligence Summit," Tierney, an Arabic speaker, described how he received the "Saddam Tapes" from federal authorities last year as part of his job as a contract translator. It was supposed to be a routine assignment, but Tierney said he soon realized the tapes had special significance and decided to make them public. Tierney said he believes other tapes, which have not yet been heard, will eventually reveal that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Tierney also said that he believes Iraq orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks, with Saddam Hussein using American scientist Steven Hatfill as a "proxy" to carry out the mission.

Afterward, in a talk with NRO, Tierney addressed comments he made in February 2003 on "Coast to Coast AM," a radio program devoted to paranormal phenomena. On the program, hosted by George Noory, (who took over from predecessor Art Bell), Tierney discussed a possible nuclear-related facility in Iraq. A description of Tierney's remarks on the "Coast to Coast AM" website says:

Tierney's methods of ascertaining this location were rather unconventional. "I would ask God and just get a sense if something was valid or not, and then know if I needed to pursue it," he said. His assessments through prayer were then confirmed to him by a friend's clairvoyant dream, where he was able to find the location on a map. "Everything she said lined up. This place meets the criteria," Tierney said of the power generator plant near the Tigris River that he believes is actually a cover for a secret uranium facility.

Tierney told NRO that he appeared on the program because he wanted to reach a large audience. "I don't believe a lot of the stuff that goes on on 'Coast to Coast,'" he said. "It's a forum to speak to people who are searching for answers, and that's why I went on." But as far as what he said about the influence of his religious faith on his work as a weapons inspector, Tierney said he has no regrets: "I don't take back anything."

"I am a Christian - I would describe myself as an Acts Christian," Tierney told NRO. "If you look at the book of Acts for the early church, it's pretty exciting stuff. I mean, Christianity, you can do your hour-a-week thing in church, or you can skip the spiritual mountaintops. That's what I've been going for for years."

Tierney said he had originally planned to pursue a career as a classical guitarist when "God sort of grabbed me by the collar and said, 'I don't want you in that.'" He joined the military and eventually found himself working as an intelligence analyst.

In the job, Tierney was required to go through hundreds of reports of possible threats each day. "One of those might involve a nuclear attack against the United States," he said. "If you don't catch it, it could happen, because you, as the analyst, failed. So I'm sitting there going, 'Alright, God, I need help. Thank you for showing me which one of these things is important and which one is not."

Tierney also served as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, and he said he remembers thinking about the book of Psalms as a kind of guiding construct for his work. He particularly recalled the 18th Psalm, verse two, which, in the King James version, says, "The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower."

The phrase "high tower" struck him deeply. "It talked about God is my fortress, God's horn is my salvation and my high tower," Tierney said. "In that context, it's not talking about protection. From a high tower, you can see the enemy coming. So God is my intel. And I took another verse [from Proverbs] that said, 'In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.' What I did was I sort of tweaked it a little bit - In all thy UNSCOM inspections, He shall direct thy paths to the weapons of mass destruction." (UNSCOM was the United Nations Special Commission, the agency originally charged with Iraqi weapons inspections.)

Tierney said he applied that inspiration to a particular site, a facility that might have been part of an Iraqi nuclear program. There was, he said, "a report, I don't want to get into too much of the details right now, but it ended up being a description of an underground uranium enrichment plant. It took me eight months to put the things together, but I came up with a location within a short distance of Tarmiyah where EMIS took place - electromagnetic isotope separation." Tarmiyah had been a site involved in an earlier Iraqi nuclear program, a program that was quite advanced when it was revealed by defectors after the first Gulf War in 1991.

But the people in charge of searching for WMD didn't take Tierney seriously. When he brought it up with his superiors, he said, "People basically rolled their eyes, they didn't follow up on it." After leaving his position as an inspector, he still had the information, and was still frustrated by his inability to get it out. "I'm in a position of what do I do with this?" Tierney said. "Do I go public? Because then I could get in trouble for revealing classified information....I wanted to get it to UNMOVIC so they could check it out, and I didn't know what to do." (UNMOVIC was the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, the body that took over the work of UNSCOM.)

That's where his friend's dream came in. "I got on the phone with a good friend I haven't talked to in 15 years. And I just told her what was going on, and she cut me off and said, 'You know, I had a dream about two years ago.' And then she described a location. She didn't know what it was, she just knew it was important to somebody. She drew a picture of this, and it was the exact angle of this location, as a power generation station on the Tigris River. It had two inlets and two outlets, exactly in her picture, and she said, 'There was water flowing into this house, and there was something going on downstairs, and I was standing there and no one knew I was there' - this is in her dream - 'and there was a lot of activity going on, but they didn't know I was there.' And she had no idea, I didn't tell her anything. And right as I was trying to decide what to do with this, she gives me this."

In the end, it all seemed to fit a Biblical pattern. "So the dream - look in the Bible," Tierney said. "There were dreams." Tierney gave the information to UNMOVIC, which, he said, did not adequately pursue it.

Tierney's penchant for applying his religious beliefs to specific intelligence issues was quite controversial in the later stages of his career in government. In 2003, the publication Army Times reported that Tierney's career as a Chief Warrant Officer ended when "the Defense Intelligence Agency said Tierney, an Arabic-speaking analyst and former U.N. arms inspector, overstepped his bounds when he prayed with an Iraqi Christian defector shortly before the 1998 Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq." The DIA concluded that Tierney had "demonstrated an unwillingness to comply with routine intelligence procedures."

Tierney argued that he was being discriminated against because of his religious beliefs, and his congressman, Rep. Charles Canady of Florida, tried to have him reinstated. But in the end, Tierney left the military. Later, in 2002, he worked as a civilian interrogator at the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but Army Times reported that "after two months at Guantanamo, Tierney was dismissed when DIA officials once against felt he wasn't following established procedures."

Tierney wasn't the only controversial figure at the "Intelligence Summit." The president of the organization that staged the conference, former federal prosecutor John Loftus, has in the past drawn attention for writing that the Bush family won its wealth by supporting the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Loftus has also written about his theory linking the Enron scandal to the September 11 terrorist attacks, claiming that Vice President Dick Cheney forbade American intelligence from investigating ties between Enron, the Taliban, and al Qaeda in the months leading up to the attacks. "The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely)," Loftus wrote. "Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney's whole house of cards will collapse."

Finally, there are questions surrounding the chief financial supporter of the "Intelligence Summit." Last week, the New York Sun reported that two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and John Deutch, had been scheduled to take part in the Summit, but pulled out at the last minute because of concerns over "new information they received regarding one of the Summit's biggest donors, Michael Cherney, an Israeli citizen who has been denied a visa to enter America because of his alleged ties to the Russian mafia." Cherney's organization, the Michael Cherney Foundation, is listed as the Summit's only "Platinum Sponsor," meaning Cherney contributed at least $100,000 to the event.

According to published reports, investigators for the House Intelligence Committee, working with government intelligence experts, have verified the Saddam Tapes as authentic. So in coming weeks, the controversy over them will be not about their authenticity but about how best to interpret them. And in that, the people associated with the Intelligence Summit start with a significant credibility disadvantage.

EDITOR'S NOTE: William Tierney responded to this article on Monday. His letter and Byron York's response are here.

- Byron York, NR's White House correspondent, is the author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President - and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time.

This also explains the furor over the Niger uranium fabrication which discredited the administration and resulted in the "outing" of Valerie Plame and the "swift-boating" of Joe Wilson. Cheney knew that the nuclear-link was crucial to hoodwinking the American people and could not allow Wilson to expose his lies.

The very same strategy is being used to demonize Iran. The IAEA has repeatedly said that there is "no evidence of a nuclear weapons program", and yet, the administration continues to mislead public without a shred of proof to the contrary.

In the last week, the United States has had at least two opportunities to resolve the standoff through peaceful means. Instead, they torpedoed both deals and intensified the belligerence.

Why?

It was astonishing to watch Condi Rice hit the panic-button as soon as Iran's foreign-minister offered to give up "industrial enrichment" of uranium if the IAEA would refrain from bringing the case before the Security Council. This was a "huge" concession on the part of Iran. They were giving up their legal rights under the treaty (NPT) and asking for nothing in return!

Condi's reaction?

She called IAEA chief ElBaradei straight away insisting that," The US cannot support this!"

Cannot support what? Negotiation? Deliberation? Peace?

The State Dept made no attempt to explore the Iranian offer or see whether it would lead to greater concessions. It was simply dismissed outright.

It's not hard to figure out what that means as far as the chances for peace.

The State Dept reacted the same way earlier in the week when Russia and Iran were working out the details for enriching uranium outside of the country as a "confidence building" measure. Once again, State Dept. officials immediately rejected the "good faith" offer without pursuing further negotiations.

The obvious implication is that Washington wants another war and will subvert any attempt at negotiation or diplomacy.

What else could it mean?

Today's headlines are reiterating the same hogwash: "Iran Spurns Russian Proposal" (SF Chronicle) or "Iran Ruling out Russia in Nuclear Plan" (CNN) or "Iran Rejects Russian offer to Diffuse Nuclear Dispute" (NY Times). This is how the media uses the corporate-bullhorn to create the impression that Iran is being "defiant".

Baloney.

True, Iran has maintained throughout that they will not concede their rights under the treaty (NPT) but they have limited their demands to small amounts of uranium in a research and development program to be overseen by the IAEA inspection team.

Who could object to that?

The media has deliberately misled the public about the Russian negotiations as well as who was responsible for their ultimate failure. The New York Times, however, summarizes it the best in their March 13 article by Nazila Fathi:

"Russia had offered to enrich uranium for Iran for use for energy purposes if Iran would refrain from doing so. It made a last minute face-saving offer to allow Iran to continue some enrichment for research purposes but withdrew the offer under Western pressure."

"Western pressure"?

What the Times means is that Russia "withdrew the offer under United States pressure", because Bush and company have no intention of allowing ANY settlement to take place no matter how conciliatory or personally-compromising.

But didn't Iran's foreign minister say that "The Russian deal is no longer on the agenda"?

Yes and no.

Iran said that it wants to see what the Security Council does before they make any more decisions. As for the precise statement by Iran's foreign minister:

"As for the Russian proposal, if it considers Iran's right to conduct research in Iran on its own soil, it can be a topic of negotiation, because the right to conduct research in Iran is the Islamic Republic's right that we neither want to give up nor will give up".

Hamid Reza Asefi's statement is a straightforward defense of the basic terms of the treaty (NPT) a treaty to which the United States is also a signatory and has clear obligations. Should Asefi simply toss the "internationally-approved" treaty on the burn-pile because it no longer fits within the Bush administration's foreign policy strategy?

Yes, according to Bush.

The media's role in demonizing Iran cannot be overstated, nor can we really appreciate the extent of US recalcitrance without following the minutia of daily statements and demands. The United States has elevated the issue of Iran's imaginary nuclear weapons program to crisis level. We must assume that its part of the broader scheme to incite violence and spread the Iraq war throughout the region.

Total war?

Isn't that where all this bluster and harassment is headed?

But will the Bush administration be able to win UN Security Council approval for their war plans? Will there be sanctions?

No! No sanctions and no resolution condemning Iran's program.

The New York Times reported on Friday that, "A draft document, which the Council members have indicated they hope to issue next week as a nonbinding presidential statement, says the Council continues to hope for a negotiated solution 'that guarantees Iran's nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes."

"A nonbinding presidential statement"?

This is what we have been saying here for months and now the NY Times is reluctantly confirming it. There are no grounds for "punitive action" because Iran is not in "noncompliance". The entire matter has only reached this level of attention because the inordinate amount of raw power and arm-twisting the US can bring to bear in foreign affairs.

"A nonbinding presidential statement" is the equivalent of saying, "We have no proof that you are doing anything illegal, but we will scold you anyway".

It is an empty statement which has no legal precedent or authority and infers nothing about violations to the NPT. It is strictly a gratuitous proclamation designed to placate the war-mongering occupants of the Bush White House.

The Bush administration has no proof that Iran has violated the terms of its treaty.

The IAEA has no proof that Iran has violated the terms of its treaty.

The UN Security Council has no proof that Iran has violated the terms of its treaty.

The whole fiasco has been orchestrated to deceive the public and pave the way for war.