Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Charge Bush with Murder

Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left at 10:42 AM on July 28, 2008.

On Tuesday, July 15, the House of Representatives voted 238 to 180 to send an article of impeachment, introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, to the Judiciary Committee for a hearing-but not to lead to impeachment. The hearing, scheduled for July 25, will cover Bush's abuse of power-a topic that strangely continues to frighten House Democratic leadership, even as Bush's approval levels have plunged to just 15 percent in a recent New Jersey poll-a level significantly below that of Richard Nixon when he resigned from office.

Over the past several years, a number of different experts-as well as a sizeable percentage of the American people-have come out in favor of impeaching President Bush for a number of different reasons, chief among which is taking our country to war with Iraq under false pretenses-resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, including over 4,000 American troops.

"To leave impeachment as a rusty sword really jeopardizes the structure of the rule of law in the country," said former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzmann, a leading figure in the Watergate hearings, and co-author of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens

Yet, even before the Democrats took power in Congress after the 2006 mid-terms, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment was "off the table." Unlike past wars, there has been no shared sacrifice in this one. While Franklin D. Roosevelt had four living sons at the time of WWII, and all four served in battle in the armed forces, official Washington has been virtually untouched by Iraq War. Perhaps that's why they've been so willing to let things slide.

Not so fast, says legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, in his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Bugliosi, you see, still has the prosecutor's sense of the demands of justice, and if one life taken lawlessly is one too many, he is hardly about to sit idly by and say nothing about the greatest slaughter our nation has engaged in since the Vietnam War.

"The overriding assumption here has to be that if, in fact, Bush lied to the nation in taking it to war, we all should want to find some lawful way to bring him to justice," Bugliosi writes, "That has to be the predisposition among all good men. It cannot be otherwise. I don't like to see anyone get away with murder, even one. And here we're talking about the needless killing and slaughter of over 100,000 human beings for which this man may be criminally responsible."

"Criminal prosecution is not a substitute for impeachment," warned Holtzmann. But Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, adopted a more sweeping view of things.

"Vincent Bugliosi's theory of criminal prosecution for murder for going to war under false pretenses, if implemented, would impart much-needed gravitas to a faltering justice system," said Boghosian.

Nor is Bugliosi uncertain or shy about pressing his argument that Bush clearly did lie the nation into war. He is particularly focused on a number of key documents-such as the October 1 national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iraq and the unclassified October 4 version-how they conflict with one another, and with what the American people were being told.

"The prosecutor's case is built on two damning bodies of evidence that will stand up well in court," Boghosian argued. "One set are documents proving that George W. Bush intentionally told the American public precisely the opposite of what US intelligence told him -- that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country."

In particular, Bugliosi cites the October 7, 2002 letter from CIA Director George Tenet, telling Bush, "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. Should Hussein conclude that a U.S. led attack [against him] could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions." In short, rather than Hussein being a danger if we didn't attack him-as Bush was arguing-the CIA was saying he would likely only be a danger if we did attack him.

"Even more damning evidence is contained in the so-called Manning memo, because it shows how Bush was ready to use fraud to provoke Hussein," Boghosian continued. "Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, wrote that Bush was so distressed when UN inspectors failed to find weapons of mass destruction that he enumerated three ways to provoke a confrontation with Hussein. He proposed flying U2 aircraft over Iraq, falsely painted in UN colors hoping that Hussein would fire on them, breach UN resolutions, and justify war. These memos reveal Bush's state of mind: he was determined to invade Iraq against his intelligence advisors, and he never believed Hussein had weapons, or why would he conjure ways to provoke Hussein into war. In a court of law, this evidence is beyond reproach and should make for a spellbinding trial."

But veteran journalist Robert Parry-who broke the major elements of the Iran/Contra Affair in the 1980s-thinks it will be extremely difficult to bring to trial, simply based on past experience. "Whether the legal system is any more cable of handling this than the political system, I'm not sure," Parry said. He pointed, for example, to the way that Bush's father derailed justice in the Iran/Contra prosecutions.

"What Bush (Sr.) was able to do was stop the whole process," Parry pointed out. "[Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor] Lawrence Walsh was considering a grand jury to investigate former President Bush. There was tremendous pressure from the consensus in Washington -- and from many of the media people ... Many of his younger prosecutors felt that their careers would be damaged or destroyed. They basically talked him out of it."

While Bugliosi's argument opens up the floodgates to possible prosecution in hundreds of jurisdictions across the country, Parry thinks the odds are still not good, drawing a parallel to the efforts of New Orleans District Attorney Lloyd Garrison, investigating the Kennedy assassination.

"Garrison had some reasonable points to pursue, but he faced extraordinary resistance from the FBI, and from federal prosecutors," Parry said. The example of what Garrison suffered cannot be encouraging.

As a journalist and historian, Parry is as concerned with uncovering the truth, and having it publicly acknowledged as he is with criminal liability, so he refers to a wide range of different options, including non-criminal truth-and-reconciliation models, as well as international law forums.

"Remember, going back to Nuremberg, Justice Jackson said, we're not just doing this because we're imposing justice on the defeated. We are setting down principles that will apply even to the victors. That was carried over into the UN Charter," Parry recalled.

The United States has fallen a long way since Jackson set that high bar. But throughout the bleak history of the past eight years, there have numerous, if all-too-isolated points of light. Even military lawyers have rebelled against the sham justice at Guantanamo. And so it's still possible that the shameful neglect of those who have suffered and died on the battlefield in Iraq could be enough for some prosecutor, somewhere, to decide that he or she owes it to a local soldier to see that their death is properly avenged.

"The positive aspects of Bugliosi's approach are that a murder trial brings into the public forum, the public conscience, the extent to which the American people have been lied to by the government. Putting the government on trial is long overdue since the events of 9/11," said Boghosian.

"It might take an 80-year old guy or someone very, very brave," Parry said. But Bugliosi has one thing going for him. He only needs to find one prosecutor out there who feels as driven as he is.

Tagged as: iraq war, george w. bush, prosecution, vincent bugliosi, robert parry

Paul Rosenberg is a regular blogger for Open Left