Author
|
Topic: Bush to be tried for murder in the USA? (Read 665 times) |
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender: 
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.66
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
|
 |
Bush to be tried for murder in the USA?
« on: 2008-06-21 15:59:49 » |
 |
"O heaven, that such companions thou 'ldst unfold, and put in every honest hand a whip to lash the rascals naked through the world."
William Shakespeare: Othello, Act IV, Scene II
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080707/story
Bugliosi v. Bush By Brett Story
June 19, 2008
In early June, a much-awaited Senate committee report formally concluded what had already become common wisdom: that President Bush and members of his Administration made false claims about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in order to build a public case for war.
These are grounds for impeachment, some argue--adding that it's not too late. Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced thirty-five articles of impeachment against President Bush on June 9, accusing the President of war crimes and deceiving the public.
But famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, foreshadowing the Senate committee report with much of the same damning evidence, argues in a new book that Bush "deserves much more than impeachment"--a penalty he considers incommensurate with the crimes committed. In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, the New York Times bestselling author and prosecutor lays out the legal case for prosecuting President Bush in a US courtroom after he leaves office.
Bugliosi writes, "4000 young Americans decomposing in their grave today died for George Bush and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney." His book is not only a scathing indictment of the President and his Administration but also a blueprint for holding him criminally accountable. Bugliosi accuses Bush of taking the nation to war in Iraq under deliberately false pretenses and thus holds him culpable for thousands of subsequent deaths, detailing in The Prosecution the legal basis for such a case and laying out what he argues is the requisite evidence for a murder conviction.
While at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, Bugliosi successfully prosecuted twenty-one murder convictions without a single loss, most famously that of serial murderer Charles Manson. He also penned a number of best-selling true-crime books, including Helter Skelter and Outrage.
The Nation spoke to Bugliosi in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles about his new book and the political challenges of bringing its title trial to realization.
You begin your book by acknowledging its controversial premise and the difficulty people will have with the argument, as you lay it out, that George Bush should be put on trial for the murder of the nearly 4,000 American soldiers who've died fighting the war in Iraq. What do you think is so contentious about the idea of prosecuting a President, past or present, for murder?
The average American instinctively feels without having read my book that if an American President takes his nation to war under any circumstances, he can't be prosecuted for murder. Related to that, people find it very hard to believe that an American President would engage in conduct that is so extremely criminal. You just don't expect that of a President.
Americans just can't believe an American President would engage in conduct that smacks of such criminality, and thus the whole notion of taking the President to court for murder is a revolutionary one.
In order to make the legal case for murder the prosecution, you write, would have to show that George Bush had a criminal state of mind--in legal terms, "malice aforethought"--when he led the country to war. That strikes me as no easy task. Can you explain how exactly you would go about arguing such a mindset?
To satisfy the main elements of murder--murder being an unlawful killing of a human being with the requisite state of mind--the following question would have to be answered: Did George Bush, or did he not, take the nation to war in self-defense, as he claimed, as a pre-emptive strike? Bush said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was therefore an imminent threat to security of the country, so we had to pre-emptively go to war against him. If the prosecutor can show that President Bush did not take the country to war in self-defense but instead under false pretenses, then all the killings that have taken place would be unlawful killings, and therefore murder.
Without getting into legal complexities and technicalities, which I do in the book, let me give you just one example of the kind of evidence that could be used to make just such an argument. In President Bush's first speech to the nation, on October 7, 2002, from Cincinnati, he told the American people that Saddam Hussein was great danger to our nation, either by Hussein attacking us with WMDs, or by giving these weapons to a terrorist group to do so. Bush said this attack could happen on "any given day," meaning that the threat was imminent. The only big problem for Bush in a trial is that on October 1, just six days earlier, the CIA sent Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a classified, top-secret report, that represented the consensus opinion of all sixteen US intelligence agencies on the issue of whether or not Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country. On page 8, it clearly and unequivocally says... that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country; that he would only be a threat to us if he feared that America was about to attack him. So we know--not think, but know--that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7, 2002, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of the nation, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. Even if we have nothing else at all, this alone shows that Bush took this nation to war on a terrible lie, and therefore all the killings of American soldiers in Iraq were unlawful killings and therefore murder.
You call the hypothetical case you've just laid out a case of "first impression"--a case for which there is no legal precedent. What are the implications for such a trial, if it were ever to be held, for American politics and American democracy?
What it does is tell future Presidents in no uncertain terms that if they commit a horrendous crime, they can be held accountable, just like any other private citizen.
There is no murder statute at the state or federal level that says it only applies to certain people--not Presidents, or golf pros or hair stylists. It applies to everyone. And there is no statute that says murder has to take place in a certain place, and not a battlefield. So President Bush has no immunity from prosecution.
No other American President has been prosecuted for any crime--there's no history of it. That doesn't mean they can't be. The closest we came to it was in 1974, when Nixon resigned and there was a great demand that he be prosecuted for the crimes he committed while he was in office--obstruction of justice, wiretapping, perjury. The threat of this was so real that President Ford stepped in and pardoned him. I think that was closest we ever came. Clinton was tried in the Senate and acquitted. I'm talking about putting George Bush in an American courtroom, where next door someone might be on trial for killing a liquor store owner. He cannot be charged as a war criminal because the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction here, so it would have to be an American courtroom.
At this very moment, in fact, there is a documentary being produced for the big screen based on my book. And the filmmakers are about to reach out to prosecutors throughout the land to find a prosecutor willing to prosecute George Bush. So what I'm talking about here is very real. I've established jurisdiction in this book for prosecutors on a state or federal level to go after President Bush. With the literally hundreds of prosecutors out there and the powerful evidence of guilt I've set out, it's hard to believe there's not at least one prosecutor, maybe more, courageous enough to say this is America, and in America no man is above the law.
I've also drafted a letter to DAs across the country offering my services. I'm dead serious about this. With my record as a prosecutor with twenty-one consecutive murder convictions, I would never in a million years argue for a prosecution against the President of the United States unless I knew I was standing on firm and strong legal grounds.
I'm going after Bush and I'm not going to be satisfied until I see him in an American courtroom prosecuted for murder.
You are, of course, famous for your prosecution of Charles Manson, the notorious cult leader and mass murderer who was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders. What similarities, if any, would you expect to encounter in preparation for the trial of President George Bush compared with someone like Charles Manson?
Well, with Manson we're talking about seven murders. With Bush it's hundreds of thousands. But in a general way I'd prosecute the cases similarly, even though there are great differences. Neither Bush nor Manson participated in the act, physically, of murder. So in both cases I'm going after someone who didn't themselves commit the act. But both, in their leadership, can be argued to hold responsibility through the rule of conspiracy for the deaths of innocents.
It has to be said, you also just seem to really hate George Bush. You state that your aim in writing this book is not political, and yet there is a palpable anger, which you admit to, that comes across powerfully in certain passages. For example, you call Bush a "spoiled, callous brat who became President only because of his father's good name" and Rove a "pasty, weak-faced, and mean spirited political criminal." Where does this anger come from?
The anger is based on one thing, and one thing only. These people deliberately and knowingly took this nation to war under false pretenses, and therefore they are murderers. I don't like to see anyone get away with murder, never mind over 100,000 murders. O.J. Simpson got away with two murders, and I was outraged, so I wrote a book about it. I do not like people who commit murder.
In the [Scott] McLellan book which just came out, he called the war in Iraq a serious strategic blunder. A blunder is a mistake, and people who make mistakes are innocent and not guilty. George Bush, I believe and I argue, is guilty.
|
|
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4289
Reputation: 8.79
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Bush to be tried for murder in the USA?
« Reply #1 on: 2008-06-28 13:09:52 » |
|
Bush Behind Bars?
Source: lewrockwell.com
Authors: Dan Spielberg
Dated: 2008-06-23
In his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Vanguard Press, 2008), Vincent Bugliosi, the man who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson for murder, argues convincingly that President George W. Bush's conduct in taking the U.S. military to war against Iraq under false pretenses in March of 2003 qualifies him to be prosecuted for murder in any state in the nation. The victims in the case would be all the soldiers from that state that were killed in the war against Iraq. He lays out his case in a devastatingly logical and methodical manner, weaving together all the relevant facts to paint the definitive portrait of just how reckless and criminal was the behavior of President Bush in his push for war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Famous for his true crime books, such as the book about Charles Manson that launched his literary career, Helter Skelter, Bugliosi shows us that he is still in fine form.
The legal definition of murder, as Bugliosi tells us, is "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." Under the law, for there to be a true crime committed the two elements of a prohibited act (actus reus) and criminal intent (mens rea) must coexist in time. According to Bugliosi's legal argument, Bush's act in this case would be his sending U.S. troops to Iraq, resulting in the death of some 4,000 of them. The criminal intent that would need to be shown, malice aforethought, could be proven by demonstrating that Bush took them to war with "reckless and wanton disregard for the consequences and indifference to human life." The only legal defense that could be mounted against charges like this would be that Bush acted in defense of the nation. In order to prove that Bush did not act in defense of the nation in starting the war, knowing all too well that Saddam Hussein was no threat to this country, and had no role in the attacks of 9/11, Bugliosi takes us on a painful walk down memory lane.
He points out that one of the first references to Iraq made by the Bush administration after 9/11 was made on October 15, 2001, by then Secretary of State Colin Powell when he told the press "Iraq is Iraq, a wasted society for 10 years. They're sad. They're contained..." If that were the case, how were they supposed to be a threat to the world's strongest military power?
Bugliosi calls our attention to the fact that after Bush had started talking about the possibility of war with Iraq he said that his decision will be based on the "latest intelligence." What he never said, of course, is that on October 1, 2002, the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies said that Saddam Hussein was NOT an imminent threat to the U.S. Not long after that, on the afternoon of October 7, 2002, then CIA director George Tenet delivered a letter to Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical or biological weapons) against the United States." That evening Bush delivers a speech to the nation at the Museum Center in Cincinnati, Ohio in which he called Saddam Hussein a "great danger to our nation."
Then there is the infamous reference to Saddam Hussein's supposed quest for uranium in Africa in the President's 2003 State of the Union speech, which was based on documents which were believed to be forgeries by U. S. intelligence agencies. In October of 2002 George Tenet told Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley that the president "should not be a fact witness on this issue" and the reporting on it was "weak."
However, for many, the conclusive evidence that Bush knew Saddam Hussein was no threat to this country, therefore an attack on Iraq was unjustified, will be the memo which has come to be known simply as the "Downing Street Memo." This was written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on July 23, 2002, about high-level meetings he had with Bush Administration officials. This memo contained the statement that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."
In addition to providing us with the legal rationale and possible jurisdiction for such a prosecution of the President, Bugliosi also provides examples of how monstrously callous Bush has been since the war began in March of 2003. He provides several pages of photographs of scenes of carnage from Iraq juxtaposed with pictures of a grinning, clowning President Bush, having the time of his life. He also provides several quotes from President Bush made during a variety of stages in the war showing that the President was more concerned about going running, fishing or to a ball game than about the thousands killed in the war that he started. As Bush said in a press conference on December 4, 2007 he's been feeling "pretty good about life."
In the Acknowledgments section of the book Bugliosi provides a valuable insight into the world of book publishing when he claims that many people at the largest publishing houses in the country told him that although they agreed with the conclusions in the book, and thought that the book would make money, they wanted to have nothing to do with it out of fear. It was, they said, "too hot to handle." In fact two liberal law professors of his acquaintance were scared to even look at the book! Bugliosi claims that this is all due to the climate of fear created by the current right wing in America, which brands anyone who believes George Bush's actions to be criminal as a "pro-terrorist," "anti-American" sufferer of "Bush Derangement Syndrome." One is hard-pressed to disagree with him.
In a political environment where impeachment of President Bush is "off the table," those who wish to bring the man to justice may have to look to the courts, but the question is, of course, who would step up and prosecute him? There are not too many prosecutors today who posses Vincent Bugliosi's passion for justice rather than a passion for high conviction rates and career advancement. Even if no charges are ever actually filed against Bush, at least The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder stands as an historical record of one more American President's mendacity on the issues of war and peace.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.66
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
|
|
Re:Bush to be tried for murder in the USA?
« Reply #2 on: 2008-07-17 13:25:11 » |
|
[Blunderov] Bush is a relatively young man and his family appears quite long lived. The world can change a lot in 20 or 30 years. Sometimes it can change enough to leave the formerly untouchable high, dry and sometimes swinging and twisting too. There is no statute of limitations on murder.
Vincent Bugliosi fleshes out some of his legal analysis in regard to the monstrous maroon in the White House.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROS20080717&articleId=9604
Some 140 federal and State Attorneys could prosecute Bush for Murder
by Sherwood Ross
Global Research, July 17, 2008
President Bush “beyond all reasonable doubt” is responsible for all the murders of American troops killed in Iraq and could be prosecuted by any of 140 Federal and State legal authorities, famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says.
Bugliosi said the president is guilty of “the most serious crime ever committed in American history…knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses,” killing 4,000 GIs, seriously wounding 30,000 more, and killing 100,000 Iraqis in the process.
While a federal prosecution by the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, or any of the 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country “would be the easiest procedure,” Bugliosi says, any of the 50 State attorneys-general also “could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state…who lost their lives fighting Bush’s war.”
Writing in “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder”(Vanguard Press), Bugliosi says Bush’s lies to the public constituted “overt acts” and their broadcast nationally via the media are a basis for prosecution in every state. Charges could include murder as well as conspiracy to commit murder, the veteran prosecutor said.
In his career in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Bugliosi successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder trials without a single loss, according to a biographical sketch in the book. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson murder case, became the basis of his classic, “Helter Skelter,” said to be “the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history.”
“Bush and his gang of criminals were constantly telling Americans that Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country, but they kept the truth from the American people that their CIA was telling them the exact opposite, that Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to this country,” Bugliosi writes.
In his speech of October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Bush said “The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gasses and atomic weapons…” even though a CIA report dated October 1 gave Bush notice that “the CIA did not consider Hussein an imminent threat to this nation,” Bugliosi pointed out.
As Bush did not act in self-defense, he did so with “a criminal state of mind,” with “criminal intent,” Bugliosi says, thus, “every killing of an American soldier that took place during Bush’s war was an ‘unlawful killing’ and murder.”
Bugliosi explains that a person is guilty of a crime under the theory of aiding and abetting if he instigates an act that leads to a crime. Bush’s invasion brought into existence the Iraqi opposition and his action caused Iraqis to kill American soldiers…” Besides, unless Bush intended to have a war without casualties, “which is nonsensical on its face,” Bugliosi says, “he did, in fact, specifically intend to have American soldiers killed.”
“In my opinion,” Bugliosi continues, “there certainly is more than enough evidence against Bush to justify bringing him to trial and letting an American jury decide whether or not he is guilty of murder, and if so, what the appropriate punishment should be.” Based on the evidence the author spreads out over 344 pages, he feels convinced “a competent prosecutor could convict Bush of murder.”
Bugliosi points out that he convicted Charles Manson of the seven Tate-La Bianca murders even though Manson did not participate in any of the killings, nor was he present at the time. He was able to secure Manson’s conviction, he noted, because of the “vicarious liability rule of conspiracy, which provides that each member of a conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes committed by his coconspirators or innocent agents of the conspirators to further the object of the conspiracy.”
Among the Iraq war conspirators Bugliosi identified are Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bugliosi said he knew less about former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s culpability but that a prosecutor could make that determination by obtaining documents and grand jury testimony from key people. The same procedure could also be followed in the case of former White House advisor Karl Rove, the attorney wrote.
Bugliosi charged Bush “is a grotesque anomaly and aberration. No president has ever done what he did and it is not likely this nation will see a president do what Bush did for centuries to come, if ever. At least we know that in the previous three centuries there was no one like this monstrous individual.”
“I would be more than happy, if requested,” Bugliosi continued, “to consult with any prosecutor who decides to prosecute Bush in the preparation of additional cross-examination questions for him to face on the witness stand.”
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based publicist and columnist. He formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and has contributed to national magazines. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross
|
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
