Bush Impeachment Countdown -- 576 days to go

The front door might slam
But the back door it rings

-- "When Smokey Sings," ABC.

Today is January 9, 2005. There are 576 days until the estimated impeachment and removal of George W. Bush (for how this was calculated, read after the jump.) This is another in a daily series chronicling the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration.

Today's high crime: Murder and kidnapping in violation of international law. From Newsweek:

Now, Newsweek has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s.

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation.

How the countdown is calculated: Bush's expected removal is based on the date that Richard Nixon was forced from office: Aug. 8, 1974, the 565th day of his second term. It is only an estimate -- Bush could in fact be removed from office earlier than Aug. 8, 2006.