 Several years ago, I wrote two books about President Bush and the involvement of him and his administration in starting war in Iraq, in part based on false statements and deceptions to the American people into Congress. First of these books is the impeachment of George W. Bush and the second one is called Eating Justice. How Bush and Cheney attacked the rule of law and plotted to avoid prosecution and what we can do about it. My co-author was Cynthia Cooper for both books. The reason I wrote these books was because I was in the House of Representatives during the impeachment proceedings against Rick Nixon. And one of the most important things that the Congress has ever done. And one of the things is withstood the test of time and the test of history. Because Congress looked in a very fair way to have this year's committee in a very fair and thorough way the misdeeds of the President of the United States, then Richard Nixon, and voted on a bipartisan basis to hold him accountable and to vote for his impeachment. That's a very, very important watermark and history of this country and history of the law and history of presidential accountability. After that, Richard Nixon resigned. Unfortunately, a pardon was granted. But the fact of the matter is nobody could ever say that he didn't commit these misdeeds because the record was full and the record was bipartisan and the record was complete. I wrote these books basically outlining the arguments as to why there should be an inquiry, why there should be an effort to hold George W. Bush accountable. Remember, the Iraq war involved the Commencement War against a country that had taken no military action against us. We're not being threatened. We're not being attacked. So taking war-making action against a country like that would be in violation of our treaties, UN obligations, and so forth. Beyond that, going to war involves loss of American lives and thousands of Americans died in the war, tens of thousands of Americans were injured in the war, and a trillion dollars of U.S. money was spent on that war. A trillion dollars that could have gone to rebuild our infrastructure or deal with our education, improve our educational system, build healthcare, rebuild our country. Instead, was wasted on that war. Beyond that, of course, the devastation and destruction of Iraq itself and the injury and harm to the Iraqi people was immeasurable. You can't undertake this kind of an action without having a full understanding of why it happened and how it happened. We know, and I knew at the time in the book on the impeachment, President Bush outlines the deceptions that took place. And we know that there were deceptions about claims that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were in cahoots. And many Americans thought that Saddam Hussein, a majority of Americans by the time Bush and his administration got finished with the lies, a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 9-11. American soldiers who volunteered for the military when they got to Iraq were saying, this is payback for 9-11. So one of the tragedies of the war is that America deceived into believing that we were responding to the attacks of 9-11. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with attacks of 9-11, as we now know. So I was very, very concerned that we do what we done with regard to President Nixon and misdeeds of great magnitude that harmed this country and its democratic process. And I call for an impeachment inquiry into President Bush's conduct. Can you imagine so many years after the commencement of the war in Iraq, which the overwhelming number of American people believe was in the state? We have never had a full inquiry into how the President of the United States took us in this war. And we know he did so on a basis of deception. Why did he take us into this war? And what was the reason for it? And what was the decision-making process? A lot of that has never been disclosed, never been analyzed. And I think that the failure to do this does huge damage to our democracy. If we don't hold our president accountable, if we don't try to understand how a tragedy of this magnitude could happen, we're just paying the seeds to have it happen all over again. How many Iraq wars can we go through? How many does this country afford? Other countries have managed to do inquiries into their war-making decisions with regard to Iraq. The British had this Chilcott inquiry, it was a very long inquiry, and the Dutch government also had an inquiry. But in both cases, they found that their Dutch government and the British government lied to the parliament and lied to the population. And that's exactly what happened in the United States. If we allow presidents to deceive us into wars, we'll deplete our resources, we'll become over militarized, it'll hollow our nation out. We need to be focused on building our country in a way to peaceably other countries and other people. We certainly have an obligation to find out why and how a president of the United States could lead the country into war, lie to the American people, lie to the Congress, actually engage in crimes and do that, and then get away with it. If we allow this to go on, we've sent a message of impunity that presidents can do whatever they want, and then God help us as a nation and God help us as a democracy.