23-year-old Army Lieutenant intelligence officer honorably discharged October 2007 from Fort Huachuca, Arizona--despite being scheduled and willing to deploy to Afghanistan in early 2008--after being investigated for expressing that “Vice President Dick Cheney should be impeached, in particular for his role in deliberately deceiving members of Congress regarding pre-war intelligence on Iraq” to fellow officers.

Thomas shared the following with Courage to Resist November 5, 2007:

I came to the conclusion that not only had Bush administration officials lied about pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the political objectives of the war were first and foremost to gain control of Iraq's energy resources and second, to establish a more representative government than the Ba'ath regime, but still one that subordinated the interests of the Iraqi people to the supposed interests of the United States.

I reached the conclusion that these two goals were incompatible and irreconcilable; in short, the achievement of the first goal would undermine the sovereignty and therefore popular legitimacy of any Iraqi government, making the second goal impossible to achieve.

I was brought under investigation in order to determine whether or not I had violated numerous articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The determination was that I could be punished specifically for making contemptuous statements against the Vice President of the United States. (UCMJ Article 88).

I had on numerous occasions expressed that Vice President Dick Cheney should be impeached, in particular for his role in deliberately deceiving members of Congress regarding pre-war intelligence on Iraq. I regarded this as a subversion of the Constitution, considering that Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives the Legislative, not the Executive branch, the power to declare hostilities. It naturally follows that Congress must receive accurate, honest intelligence reporting from the Executive Branch in order to make a responsible decision on matters of war and peace. Bush administration officials effectively usurped this power by lying to Congress. It also follows that if Saddam Hussein was not an immanent national security threat, the invasion of Iraq cannot honestly be considered legal under international law.

I expressed all of these things to a handful of peers as well as legislators, in an effort to build support for the impeachment of the Vice President, whom I view as the one of the remaining chief architects of this subversion of the Constitution and the imperial enterprise we have undertaken in Iraq under the guise of national security. You simply cannot have an empire and a secure democracy. You can only have one or the other, not both. The expansion of empire abroad will eventually and inevitably lead to the erosion of democracy at home.