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As seen in issue 55 of Closer Magazine, published on 2009-01-06 in the "Featured" section.
Should We Try The President For Murder?
A former Los Angeles district attorney argues the case
By: Harris Meyer
[Editor’s note: A friend said Election Day felt like "the triumph of light over darkness." But for many, it does nothing to wipe away the filth of George W. Bush’s crimes. In the aftermath of Obama’s victory, there has been talk of a "truth and reconciliation" commission so Bush and his gang can come clean and be absolved. But for one veteran prosecuting attorney, forgiveness would be just another crime.]
Many of us have fantasies of retribution against President George W. Bush. Former prosecutor and best-selling crime author Vincent Bugliosi’s fantasy is to try Bush on murder charges for the deaths in Iraq of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers who perished in a war propelled by lies.
The difference is that Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson for murder and co-wrote the book “Helter Skelter” about the Manson case, has access to publishers. He argues in his hot-selling new book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" (Vanguard Press), that there is jurisdiction and strong grounds for a first-degree murder case against Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and top aides such as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Karl Rove.
Bush could be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney General, any U.S. Attorney, any state Attorney General, or even any county district attorney for murder because he caused the death of American soldiers with malice aforethought, “without any lawful excuse of justification,” Bugliosi says. Nothing less than the death penalty would suffice for the seriousness of Bush’s crimes, he insists.
In a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles, Bugliosi, 73, says his publisher has sent the book to all 50 state attorneys general with a cover letter from him, asking them to read the book and offering his services as a consultant or special prosecutor. One problem with that is that AGs generally don’t handle murder cases. In some states, including Florida, the AG’s office has no jurisdiction over most types of murder and felony cases.
“I don’t like to see anyone get away with murder, even one,” he writes in the book. “And here we’re talking about the needless killing and slaughter of over 100,000 human beings… We should be willing to move hell and high legal water to bring about justice in this case.”
Bush’s only legal defense, Bugliosi says, would be to argue that by invading Iraq, he was defending the nation against an imminent attack. But there is powerful evidence undercutting that defense, he says.
That evidence, Bugliosi says, is the many lies Bush and his aides told about Saddam Hussein’s readiness to use Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction against us, and Bush’s efforts to deceive the nation into believing that Hussein was involved with al Qaeda in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Let me say upfront that I enjoyed, and learned some things, from reading Bugliosi’s 249-page polemic and that I completely agree with him on numerous statements in the book. One is that the U.S. media and ruling elites have been dead wrong on so much “conventional wisdom” that one should ignore their general dismissal of the idea of holding Bush criminally liable.
That said, Bugliosi does not convince me at all that a murder prosecution of Bush for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legally, let alone politically, viable. For one thing, he is so contemptuous of Bush’s ignorance, laziness, and lack of interest in what’s going on around him that he casts doubt on whether a jury would believe Bush knew enough to have criminal culpability.
Neither does he convince Myles Malman, a former state and federal prosecutor who served on the U.S. attorney team that successfully prosecuted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on drug charges in Miami in 1990.
“It’s absolutely absurd,” said Malman, a Fort Lauderdale white collar defense attorney who admits he’s no fan of Bush and the Iraq war. “The president has immunity for acts done within the scope of office. He was acting under the War Powers Act, which gives him authority to commit U.S. soldiers overseas to combat actions. And Congress voted to give him authority.”
A much more convincing argument can be made for prosecuting Bush and his cronies for conspiring to commit torture against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Former New York congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and others have made that case.
Such a prosecution could conceivably be carried out in the International Criminal Court, the courts of a European country, or even a U.S. federal court. Attorneys and human rights activists in the U.S. and Europe have been writing about and discussing how a war crimes case could be brought against Bush and other administration officials.
Red Cross investigators concluded in a secret report last year that Bush administration officials could be found guilty of war crimes for their complicity in CIA torture of high-level al-Qaeda prisoners, the New York Times reported. In addition, in a Physicians for Human Rights report, Major General Antonio Taguba, who led a 2004 Army investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, accused the Bush administration of committing “war crimes.” He wrote
that “the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systemat ic regime of torture” and should be held accountable.
Holtzman notes that the 1996 War Crimes Act makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national to commit a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions, including the deliberate “killing, torture, and inhuman treatment” of detainees. Violations of the act that result in death carry the death penalty.
Why not pursue that course? In my interview with Bugliosi, he contended, remarkably, that the allegations of torture are “on too limited a scale for a typical war crimes trial,” though he acknowledges he’s no authority on that issue. And he contends the International Criminal Court lacks jurisdiction, though he admits there are caveats to that.
But mostly it’s that Bugliosi wants Bush’s head, and admits that everyone and everything else is secondary. It could be hard to prove that the president was directly involved in authorizing torture, he writes, because Bush covered himself by signing a 2002 directive mandating that detainees be treated humanely. Convicting the White House lawyers who wrote the memos justifying torture wouldn’t suffice.
In building his case for murder charges, Bugliosi focuses a long segment of the book on the lies and deceptions Bush, Cheney, and other top administration figures used to lead the nation into war. He rebuts what he thinks would be Bush’s main defense -- that he was acting for the self-defense of the country.
The first lie was Bush’s repeated message that Saddam Hussein’s purported WMD made him an imminent threat to the United States, though Bush and his top figures never exactly used the word “imminent.”
Bugliosi notes that on the evening of Oct. 7, 2002, Bush, speaking from Cincinnati, warned that Hussein was “a great danger to our nation.” Bush cited the risk of “unmanned aerial vehicles” with “chemical or biological” payloads “for missions targeting the United States,” or of Hussein providing these WMD to a “terrorist group or individual terrorists.” He said this could happen “on any given day.”
Like the excellent prosecutor he used to be, Bugliosi effectively impugned the president’s credibility. He noted that on Oct. 7, before Bush’s speech, the CIA couriered a letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham of Florida.
The letter said the CIA had concluded that Hussein “for now” was not considering terrorist attacks against the United States and most likely would not use any WMD against us unless we were about to attack him first. The bottom line was that the CIA did not see Iraq as an imminent threat.
The classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA to the Bush administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee on Oct. 1 stated the same conclusion. Bugliosi notes that Tenet was close to Bush and briefed him on national security every morning, including the morning of Oct. 7.
So when Bush told the nation on the evening of Oct. 7 that Iraq was an imminent threat, Bugliosi writes, “he was telling millions of Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. In other words, to further his own personal agenda, Bush lied to the country, and on the very gravest matters concerning war and peace.”
The book also has a strong section on how the Bush administration and the CIA deceptively edited the NIE into an unclassified public version requested by Sen. Graham, known as the “White Paper.” It was released on Oct. 4, 2002, one week before Congress authorized Bush to use force against Iraq.
The White Paper deleted the dissents within the intelligence community that Graham wanted the public to hear, and changed the conclusions – and the certainty with which they were stated -- to make them more frightening.
For example, the classified NIE, subsequently declassified, said “although we have little specific information on Iraq’s [chemical weapons]… Saddam probably has tocked at least 100 metric tons… and possibly as much as 500 [metric tons] of [chemical weapons] agents…” But the White Paper deleted the words “although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile.” Instead, the section started with, “Saddam probably has…”
Bugliosi argues that this showed criminal intent. “Like typical criminals, Bush and his people left their incriminating fingerprints everywhere, showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt on their part.”
Unfortunately, Bugliosi, who identifies himself as a Democrat, lets congressional Democrats off far far too easily for their failure to critically examine the Bush administration’s case for war. He excuses the failure of most members of Congress to go to the secure room to read the classified NIE by claiming that they “are very busy people with many other matters to attend to.”
Then he offers an explanation that should infuriate the hundreds of thousands of Americans who protested in the streets prior to the invasion, shouting that the case for war was built on lies.
“How could these members of Congress have imagined that a presidential administration consisted of a bunch of people who were deliberately lying to them and the American public about a matter of war and peace?” Bugliosi asks. “Since there is no prior record of such criminal conduct in American history, why would they have any reason to be skeptical about what they were being told?”
Actually, plenty of historians would reply that any number of previous presidents and administrations have deceived the American people into unnecessary, destructive wars and foreign adventures, including Vietnam, the Nicaraguan Contra war, Grenada, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine War in 1899, in which an estimated 4,000 U.S. soldiers died. But that’s the subject of another article.
In my interview with Bugliosi, he acknowledged the failure of Congress but said that’s irrelevant to his murder case against Bush. “Congress’ negligence or laziness doesn’t exonerate Bush at all,” he said. “We’ve never had a monstrous individual like Bush before. I’m not excusing Congress but it’s understandable that [they would not] believe Bush was lying to them and that the president would engage in conduct that would smack of such great criminality.”
Even if Bush is never prosecuted for murder or anything else, in the end Bugliosi’s book is satisfying for its vision of holding him accountable. The author reminds us of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who spent the last years of his life hounded by prosecutors in Spain and Chile on murder and torture charges.
“The least I can do,” Bugliosi writes, “is to put the thought in Bush’s mind for the rest of his life that he may someday be held accountable in a criminal courtroom for all the murders he alone is responsible for.”
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