Congressman joins call to impeach Bush

SEATTLE, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A Washington congressman said he has joined the effort to impeach U.S. President George Bush on grounds he misled the country before the Iraq invasion.

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that three recent books on the Bush administration convinced him that the president should be impeached, even though he will be out of office in January.

"It's increasingly clear to me that we were led into a war without any justification whatsoever," McDermott said in an interview Wednesday with the newspaper. "And the president deliberately did this. It wasn't an accident of any kind."

McDermott said that in the weeks before the 2003 invasion he was sometimes called "Baghdad Jim" for arguing that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and its leader, Saddam Hussein, hadn't been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Both are now known to have been true.

Bush could be impeached even after he leaves office, McDermott said.

"There's nothing that requires that impeachment be done when someone is in office," he told the Post-Intelligencer. "The time has come for this guy to pay for what he's done."