Site Map

THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER

Chapter 4:  THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER

The Legal Framework for the Prosecution

That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
-Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765

No living Homo sapiens is above the law.
-(Notwithstanding our good friends and legal ancestors across the water, this is a fact that requires no citation.)

WITH RESPECT TO THE POSITION I take in this chapter about the crimes of George Bush, I want to state at the outset that my motivation is not political. Although I've been a longtime Democrat (primarily because, unless there is some very compelling reason to be otherwise, I am always for "the little guy"), my political orientation is not rigid. For instance, I supported John McCain's run for the presidency in 2000. More to the point, whether I'm giving a final summation to the jury or writing one of my true crime books, credibility has always meant everything to me. Therefore, my only master and my only mistress are the facts and objectivity. I have no others. This is why I can give you, the reader, a 100 percent guarantee that if a Democratic president had done what Bush did, I would be writing the same, identical piece you are about to read. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the belief of many that George Bush lied to the American public in starting his war with Iraq is that the liberal columnists who have accused him of doing this merely make this point, and then go on to the next paragraph in their columns. Only very infrequently does a columnist add that because of it Bush should be impeached. If the charges are true, of course Bush should have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. That's almost too self-evident to state. But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe.  That's just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he'd still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely  and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths?[1]  For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did.

Let's look at the way some of the leading liberal lights (and, of course, the rest of the entire nation with the exception of those few recommending impeachment) have treated the issue of punishment for Bush's cardinal sins. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about "the false selling of the Iraq War. We were railroaded into an unnecessary war." Fine, I agree. Now what? Krugman just goes on to the next paragraph. But if Bush falsely railroaded the nation into a war where over 100,000 people died, including 4,000 American soldiers, how can you go on to the next paragraph as if you had been writing that Bush spent the weekend at Camp David with his wife? For doing what Krugman believes Bush did, doesn't Bush have to be punished commensurately in some way? Are there no consequences for committing a crime of colossal proportions?

Al Franken on the David Letterman show said, "Bush lied to us to take us to war" and quickly went on to another subject, as if he was saying "Bush lied to us in his budget."

Senator Edward Kennedy, condemning Bush, said that "Bush's distortions misled Congress in its war vote," and "No President of the United States should employ distortion of truth to take the nation to war." But, Senator Kennedy, if a president does this, as you believe Bush did, then what? Remember, Clinton was impeached for allegedly trying to cover up a consensual sexual affair. What do you recommend for Bush for being responsible for more than 100,000 deaths?  Nothing? He shouldn't be held accountable for his actions? If one were to listen to you talk, that is the only conclusion one could come to. But why, Senator Kennedy, do you, like everyone else, want to give Bush this complete free ride?

The New York Times, in a June 17, 2004, editorial, said that in selling this nation on the war in Iraq, "the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11, ... inexcusably selling the false Iraq-Al Qaeda claim to Americans." But gentlemen, if this is so, then what? The New York Times didn't say, just going on, like everyone else, to the next paragraph, talking about something else.

In a November 15, 2005, editorial, the New York Times said that "the president and his top advisers ... did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections." But if it's "obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans" in taking them to a war that tens of thousands of people have paid for with their lives, now what? No punishment? If not, under what theory? Again, you're just going to go on to the next  paragraph?

In this book, I'm not going to go on to the next unrelated paragraph.

In early December of 2005, a New York Times-CBS nationwide poll showed that the majority of Americans believed Bush "intentionally misled" the nation to promote a war in Iraq. A December 11, 2005, article in the Los Angeles Times, after citing this national poll, went on to say that because so many Americans believed this, it might be difficult for Bush to get the continuing support of Americans for the war. In other words, the fact that most Americans believed Bush had deliberately misled them into war was of no consequence in and of itself. Its only consequence was that it might hurt his efforts to get support for the war thereafter. So the article was reporting on the effect of the poll findings as if it was reporting on the popularity, or lack thereof, of Bush's position on global warming or immigration. Didn't the author of the article know that Bush taking the nation to war on a lie (if such be the case) is the equivalent of saying he is responsible for well over 100,000 deaths? One would never know this by reading the article. 

If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren't speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem  ludicrous. [2] But we are dealing with the president of the United States here.

On the other hand, the intensity of rage against Bush in America has been such (it never came remotely this close with Clinton because, at bottom, there was nothing of any real substance to have any serious rage against him for) that if I heard it once I heard it ten times that "someone should put a bullet in his head." That, fortunately, is just loose talk, and even more fortunately not the way we do things in America. In any event, if an American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options being the imposition of the death penalty.

Although I have never heard before what I am suggesting in this book -- that Bush be prosecuted for murder in an American courtroom -- many have argued that "Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes" (mostly for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But for all intents and purposes this cannot be done. (For a discussion on this matter, see notes at the end of this book.)

I want to make it very clear that, like the majority of Americans, I feel Bush "intentionally misled" this nation into war, and everything I say in this chapter is predicated on, and flows from, that belief. If my belief (and that of the majority of American people) is wrong, then I of course apologize to Bush and his people for writing this book, and Bush, knowing his innocence, has nothing to worry about. All I can tell you is that as a former prosecutor with twenty-one murder convictions without a loss, seeking and obtaining a death penalty sentence against eight of the murder defendants, I am probably in a better position than the average person to know what type of evidence is necessary to go to trial with and secure a conviction of murder. And in my opinion 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. I am very confident that, based on the evidence I set forth against Bush on the following pages, a competent prosecutor could convict Bush of murder.

Assuming at this point (see later text for full discussion) that Bush deliberately misled this nation into war, could he be prosecuted for murder and tried by an American jury? I have been unable to find any legal reason why he could not. We all know that no one is above the law, which would, perforce, include presidents. And no federal or state murder statute says that it only applies to certain people, not presidents, or golf pros, or hair stylists, et cetera, and only if the killing is committed in certain places, like a home, or a car, out on the street, and so forth, not a battlefield.

But how, you may ask, could George Bush be prosecuted and convicted of murder when he didn't personally kill anyone? Indeed, the killings took place in Iraq. The reason is that it is not necessary for a criminal defendant to have physically committed a murder to be guilty of it. For example, I convicted Charles Manson of the seven Tate-La Bianca murders even though he himself did not participate in any of the killings, nor was he even present at the time. I was able to obtain this conviction 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. If Bush is guilty of the murders I believe him to be, because he took this nation to war under false pretenses, he obviously did not do this all by himself. Necessarily, he conspired with certain members of his inner circle, coconspirators like Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

But, one might wonder, since even Bush's coconspirators didn't physically kill the victims who would be named in the criminal indictment (the 4,000 American soldiers who were killed in Iraq) -- Iraqi soldiers and civilian insurgents did -- how could he be guilty of murder under the vicarious liability rule? The reason is that if a conspirator (or anyone for that matter) deliberately sets in motion a chain of events that he knows will cause a third-party innocent agent [3] to commit an act (here, the killing of American soldiers by Iraqis), the conspirator is criminally responsible for that act. In the law, as in its well-known sense, the word "cause" means "to bring about, to bring into existence." Bush, in invading Iraq, certainly brought about the existence of Iraqi opposition, and his act caused Iraqis to kill American soldiers in much the same fashion that a person causes a gun to fire a bullet that kills someone by pulling the trigger. In fact, in the criminal law, third party innocent agents are referred to as "mere instruments" of the principal. To argue that Bush isn't responsible in this case would almost be the equivalent of a conspirator arguing, "My coconspirator never killed the victim, his gun did."

Here, the object of Bush, Cheney, and Rice was that there be a war in Iraq, which they knew would inevitably result in American casualties. And as the court said in the 1993 case of Gallimore v. Commonwealth of Virginia: "The doctrine of innocent agent ... allows a defendant not present at the commission of the crime [here, the killings in Iraq] to be convicted as a principal in the first degree if the defendant engaged in actions which caused the actual perpetrator to commit the crime as an innocent agent of the defendant." Courts have said that the innocent agent "is not an offender," and the defendant "is guilty as if he had done the act himself," the defendant, under the law, deemed to be "constructively present." 

Note that it does not have to be shown that the principal wanted the innocent agent to commit the act, only that he caused him to.

In many states and federally, the innocent agent doctrine is even codified. Title 18 United States Code, §2(b) provides: "Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him ... would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal."

In other words, if Bush personally killed an American soldier, he would be guilty of murder. Under the law, he cannot immunize himself from this criminal responsibility by causing a third party to do the killing. He's still responsible. George Bush cannot sit safely in his Oval Office in Washington, D.C., while young American soldiers fighting his war are being blown to pieces by roadside bombs in Iraq, and wash his hands of all culpability. It's not quite that easy. He could only do this if he did not take this nation to war under false pretenses. If he did, which the evidence overwhelmingly shows, he is criminally responsible for the thousands of American deaths in Iraq.

Apart from the vicarious liability rule of conspiracy, there is a separate and independent companion legal theory of criminal responsibility that imputes guilt to the nonperpetrator, and prosecutors routinely use it side by side, when the evidence permits, with the vicarious liability rule -- the law of "aiding and abetting."

The heart of conspiracy complicity is the agreement among the co-conspirators to commit the crime, as distinguished from aiding and abetting, whose heart is participatory in nature. In very general  terms, one is guilty of a crime under the theory of aiding and abetting if he instigates or encourages the commission of the offense (in the law, to instigate is "to stimulate or goad to action, especially a bad action"), or assists the perpetrator in some way in the commission of said offense. Here, Bush clearly instigated the killing of the American soldiers by his invasion of Iraq, which is all that would be necessary, in itself, to make Bush guilty of murder under the theory of aiding and abetting. So Bush would be criminally responsible for the deaths of the 4,000 American soldiers under both the legal theories of vicarious liability and aiding and abetting.

It should be noted that Bush could only be prosecuted after he is no longer president. The U.S. Constitution itself is a little ambiguous as to just when a president may be prosecuted for his crimes. In discussing the impeachment of a sitting president, Article I, Section 3, cl. 7, provides: "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment [which is not a criminal prosecution] shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States, but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, judgment, and Punishment, according to Law." The language "the Party convicted" implies that a conviction of a president by the U.S. Senate in an impeachment trial and his removal from office are a condition precedent to his being prosecuted in an American court of law for his crime or crimes committed while in office. But the language could be more explicit on this point.

However, it has always been accepted by constitutional scholars that a president cannot be prosecuted criminally while he is still in office. To discern the "original intent" of the framers on this question, one must turn to The Federalist (commonly referred to as The Federalist Papers), a collection of eighty-five essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the nom de plume "Philo-Publius" between 1787 and 1788 in support of the proposed constitution (which was of course ratified and went into effect in 1789). 

In The Federalist no. 69 (essay 69), Hamilton writes at page 446: "The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office, and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law."

In other words, even if the evidence were clear that a president had committed a crime such as rape or murder, it was the position of Hamilton that he could not be arrested and prosecuted until after he was first impeached and removed from office following conviction by the Senate -- that is, until his removal he should have temporary immunity from ordinary criminal process. And this, as indicated, has been adopted as virtual law down through the years.

So after the inauguration of a new president on January 20, 2009, unless Bush's successor is outrageous enough to pardon him, he can be prosecuted, like any other citizen, for any crime he committed while president. And here, since we're talking about murder, there is no statute of limitations.

During the Watergate scandal in 1973 and 1974, although impeachment of President Nixon was contemplated, Nixon, we know, resigned in 1974 before he was impeached by the House of Representatives. After his resignation, there were calls by many that he be prosecuted in a court of law for his alleged crimes, as he could have been.  President Ford obviated this by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he may have committed during Watergate. I was in favor of the Nixon  pardon in that Nixon's forced resignation was more than enough punishment for the particular offenses he committed, but I certainly would not be for any Bush pardon, for obvious reasons.

Still, one might say, prosecuting Nixon for conventional crimes like obstruction of justice and illegal wiretapping is one thing. But prosecuting Bush for murder, and where the killings resulted from his taking this nation to war -- like those fought through the ages with hundreds of thousands of troops -- is quite another. It is because of this expected reaction by many to what I am proposing that I want to make one very important observation off the top. For those skeptics who say that to prosecute for murder a president who takes this country to war -- and to do so in a regular American courtroom and in the very same way that, in an adjacent courtroom, a defendant is being prosecuted for murdering a liquor store proprietor during a robbery -- is simply too revolutionary a notion to be viable, I say this.  Since a regular courtroom is the only place a president such as Bush  could be prosecuted for murder, if you maintain this position you therefore must be willing to say that if a president takes America to war under false pretenses (even those as base, hypothetically, as for his own personal gain), and if thousands of Americans, even 50 million Americans, die as a direct result, other than removing him from office through the impeachment process, the president should be absolutely immune from all criminal responsibility and punishment, even one day in the county jail, and he should be able to go on with his life. Unless you are willing to say this (and if you do, you're going to sound awfully foolish), then you likewise must learn to accept and live with the revolutionary notion. There is no third alternative.

So although Bush supporters can say that Bush should not be prosecuted for murder because they don't feel he acted improperly, they cannot possibly say that it is wrong for Bush to be prosecuted for murder if he did what I say he did. To say that is to admit that you have no respect for our American system of democracy. That you prefer that presidents have the same rights and protections as tyrannical dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein had. So unless you want to take this completely untenable position, you should consider the legal and logical propriety of my proposed prosecution of George Bush for murder.

As we proceed in this discussion, one has to realize that, as they say in the law, this is a case of "first impression," meaning a case for which there is no legal precedent. This is not fatal, per se, since by definition every legal precedent, on any legal situation, itself had to emanate from some case of first impression in the past standing for the proposition.

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. 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. Anyone who is satisfied that Bush lied to the country in taking it to war, but whose predisposition, nonetheless, is to frustrate justice against Bush is, simply put, a very bad human being. So the only proper state of mind is that if the prosecution frequently tries to do whatever it can lawfully do to overcome factual and legal obstacles to bring about justice in even an ordinary criminal case, we should be willing to move hell and high legal water to bring about justice in this case, where so much more is at stake.

Could Bush nip any prosecution of him in the bud by arguing that he could not be prosecuted for murder over the Iraq war for the simple reason that on October 11, 2002, Congress, by a joint congressional resolution, authorized him to use force against Iraq, so how can anyone treat him as a criminal for doing something he was authorized to do by Congress? The answer is that the congressional authorization is no legal defense to a prosecution of Bush for murder. Consent of the victim, though a defense to some crimes (e.g., theft, rape), is not a defense to the crime of murder. And here we're not even talking about the consent of the American soldiers in fighting a war that brought their deaths, and whose only option other than fighting was to be court-martialed. We're talking about congressional consent. But even if the argument were made that Congress, in a democracy, represents all Americans, including these soldiers, again, consent is not a defense to the crime of murder. Further, even if it were, it is boilerplate law that fraud vitiates consent. So the consent that Congress gave Bush is nullified by the deliberate misrepresentations he made to Congress in inducing it to give him its consent. I will come back to  this issue later in this chapter.

And Bush's criminal conduct can't find sanctuary in the U.S. Constitution either, which, as I have explained, allows for his prosecution after he leaves the presidency. Surely Bush couldn't be heard to argue that a president is incapable of committing a crime under the U.S. Constitution -- the Constitution even shielding him from the crime of murder.

Assuming Bush lied to take us to war, and thousands of humans died as a direct result thereof, does his conduct fall within existing legal requirements for a crime and criminal prosecution in an American courtroom? Can a legitimate case for murder be constructed against him whose legal architecture will hold up and withstand judicial scrutiny?

Before I set forth the evidence that proves Bush is guilty of murder, I unfortunately first must talk about the legal elements that comprise the crime of murder, a necessarily dry and sometimes arcane discussion for which I ask your forbearance. Murder is defined as "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." All true crimes (as opposed to so-called public welfare offenses like selling alcohol after a certain time of day or hunting during the off-season) require two elements. The first is the prohibited act, referred to in the law as actus reus. To be a crime this act has to be accompanied by mens rea, criminal intent. The U.S. Supreme Court said in Morissette v. United States that criminal intent involves an "evil-meaning mind," variously described with respect to different crimes as "intentional," "knowing," "fraudulent," "malicious," etc. Each crime has a different mens rea. The mens rea for theft is the intent to steal, for arson the intent to burn down the dwelling of another. The mens rea for murder is malice aforethought. For there to be a crime, the commission of the prohibited act and the criminal intent (mens rea) have to concur in time. 

In this case, the "act" by Bush would be his ordering his military to invade Iraq with American soldiers, 4,000 of whom have already died because of the war. If this act was not accompanied by the required intent on Bush's part, no crime would have been committed. The necessary intent that would have to be shown, as indicated, is malice aforethought, satisfied if Bush either intended to kill the soldiers by ordering them to war, or he started the war with reckless and wanton disregard for the consequences and indifference to human life. However, neither of these two states of mind would be "criminal" if they occurred under circumstances of legal justification, such as self-defense.  Hence, the criminality of an act depends solely on the actor's state of mind at the time of the subject act. For example, if X intends to kill Y and does so, but he had a reasonable fear (the so-called reasonable man test) that he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm at  the hands of Y, there would be no criminal intent on his part since he acted in self-defense, and the killing would be called a justifiable  homicide. The same act by X of intending to kill Y and doing so would be an unlawful killing, murder, if the killing were not in self-defense.

So we can say that malice aforethought exists (and hence, no self-defense) if there is an intentional killing of another (or indifference to human life) without any lawful excuse or justification. Bush's primary defense to any murder charge against him would be, as he argued to the nation, that he was conducting a "preemptive strike" on Saddam Hussein; that is, the self-defense argument -- he reasonably believed that Iraq constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country, so Bush struck first. In other words, his mind was pure. He had no criminal or evil state of mind. In a trial of Bush, the prosecution would have to show that he did have a criminal state of mind. The evidence would be the many lies he told that Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction made him an imminent threat to the security of this country, and his attempt to deceive the nation into believing that Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda in 9/11. Therefore, Bush did not act in self-defense and hence, did have a criminal state of mind. Since he had criminal intent, every killing of an American soldier that took place during Bush's war was an "unlawful killing" and murder.

Before we get into the seminal issue of whether Bush acted in self-defense, let's return, to examine in more depth, the requirement for murder of malice aforethought.

You should know that the term "malice aforethought" is a legal anachronism that everyone continues to use, while ignoring the conventional meaning of the words. "Malice" means a hatred, an ill-will for another. Though that frequently is the situation in a murder case, all legal authorities agree that no malice in the traditional sense has to be shown to secure a murder conviction, and many murders are committed without the slightest presence of hatred by the killer against the victim, e.g., a contract killing. So hatred or ill-will toward those American soldiers who died in the war, which Bush obviously never had, does not have to be shown. And the word "aforethought" is an ancient appendage to the word "malice" that has no relevance in the  current criminal law. Although the word literally means the thought must precede the criminal act, in the term "malice aforethought," aforethought doesn't mean this. It only means that the malice exists at the time of the killing, that it is not an afterthought. So what does malice aforethought mean today in the criminal law? It means simply a specific intent to kill (express malice) or an intent to commit a highly dangerous act with reckless and wanton disregard for the consequences and indifference to human life (implied malice).

In most states, in order to have first (as opposed to second) degree murder there has to be not only a specific intent to kill (express malice) but this intent to kill has to be premeditated. The courts have consistently held that although a spontaneous intent to kill does not constitute premeditation, premeditation does not have to be long at all. There are cases where a period of time as short as several seconds sufficed. In a prosecution of George Bush, we're dealing with a pre-meditation to go to war that took place over months, so there is no question that there was premeditation in this case. 

Implied malice (no intent to kill) will only give you second degree murder. However, some states, like Texas, do not have degrees of murder. Even a killing where there was only implied malice and no specific intent to kill can not only result in a conviction of murder (which it could in any state), but a sentence of death, which in most states can only be imposed after one has already been convicted of first degree murder.

The most common malice aforethought is a specific intent to kill. Any Bush apologist who is unfamiliar with the criminal law will undoubtedly say that even assuming for the sake of argument that Bush lied to the country to take it to war, and the war was not in self-defense, it is ridiculous to think he could be prosecuted for murder because he obviously never intended to kill anyone (other than enemy soldiers). But the criminal law dealing with murder is, unfortunately for them and particularly Bush, not that simplistic. Not only is there implied malice, which does not require an intent to kill, but in Bush's case a very credible argument could be made that in a real sense he did intend to have American soldiers killed in his war.

In a typical intent to kill (express malice) case, A picks up a gun and fires a bullet into B's head, intending to kill him. A typical implied malice situation would be where there's no intent to kill, but the act the defendant committed, which resulted in a death, involved a high degree of danger to others and the defendant's state of mind was that he was willing to take that risk -- he acted with reckless and wanton disregard for the consequences, showing an indifference to human life. For instance, a defendant killing someone while driving 100 mph in a school zone, or blowing up a building without legal cause, even though he is unaware that someone was in the building. In these two situations, and others like them, not only didn't the defendant intend to kill, but he had no way of knowing whether someone would die or not.  As opposed to the implied malice situation, while Bush never specifically intended to kill any American soldier, he absolutely knew American soldiers would necessarily die in his war. Therefore, a case could be made that unless Bush intended to have a war without any casualties, which is nonsensical on its face (and an argument that would make Bush sound absurd), he did, in fact, specifically intend to have  American soldiers killed.

Am I just engaging in a play on words here? I don't think so. As the court said in a 1963 Illinois case, People v. Coolidge: "Since every sane man is presumed to intend all the natural and probable consequences flowing from his own deliberate act, it follows that if one willfully does an act, the natural tendency of which is to destroy another's life, the irresistible conclusion ... is that the destruction of such other person's life was intended."

But assuming, just for the sake of argument, that a court would not accept the position that Bush did, in fact, have an intent to kill, then we are left with Bush's conduct being somewhere inbetween express malice (intent to kill) and implied malice (no intent to kill, but not caring if someone is killed). Courts create new law all the time, and I can easily see a court ruling that when a defendant engages in conduct that not only creates a situation where someone might die, but which he knows will result in their deaths, this would satisfy the intent to kill requirement of first degree murder. I mean, what difference does it make if someone intends to kill B, or doesn't intend to kill B but intends to do an act that he knows will kill B? As the expression goes, it's a distinction without substance. It would be elevating technical words ("intent to kill") over the substance and spirit of the law of murder to say there was no intent to kill in the Bush type of situation, and hence, no first degree murder. For the monumentally horrendous act that Bush committed -- taking a nation to war where there's not just one victim, but thousands -- all fair and true men have to say that whether or not Bush is guilty of first degree murder should be left up to an American jury to decide, and if they say yes, left to an appellate court to rule on the legal propriety of its verdict.

I was saying that courts (judges) create new law all the time. I can give you a perfect example dealing with first degree murder itself that will be a surprise to many lay readers. The classic type of first degree murder is where there was a premeditated intent to kill. But there's one other type of murder in all the courts of the land, both federal and state, for which many defendants have been convicted and paid the ultimate penalty of death -- the felony-murder rule. Since the law took cognizance of the fact that certain felonies were so inherently dangerous, in and of themselves, that the risk of death was high, to discourage this conduct they came up with the felony-murder rule.  The rule provides that if a "killing takes place during the perpetration or attempted perpetration of certain felonies, the killing is automatically first degree murder, even though there was no malice, setting the definition of murder as the "unlawful killing of a human with malice aforethought"on its head. The main underlying felonies that are usually mentioned in statutes throughout the land are robbery (where the felony murder rule has been applied far more than in any other crime), burglary, kidnapping, arson, and rape. All that has to be shown is that the defendant had the requisite intent to commit the underlying felony. Once that is shown, and a death occurs, the ordinary requirements for first degree murder that there be malice aforethought and premeditation are dispensed with, and the robber, for instance, is guilty of first degree murder. (Many legal scholars have said  that the intent to commit the underlying felony is transferred into an intent to kill; a legal fiction, of course.)

Under the felony murder rule many robbers (and other felons) have been convicted of first degree murder throughout the years not only where there was no malice aforethought, but even where the killing was accidental. A robber, for instance, was convicted of first degree murder under the felony-murder rule where, as he was leaving the store in which he had robbed the owner, he told the owner not to say a word or he'd be harmed, and fired into the ceiling to scare the owner.  The shot, after two or three ricochets, pierced the head of the owner, killing him. In fact, the felony-murder rule applies even where the defendant is not the killer! There have been cases where the proprietor of the store fired at a robber, missed him and hit and killed a customer.  And the robber was convicted of first degree murder of the customer.

In any event, if the law can find an intent to kill when the defendant never had such an intent, even where the defendant specifically did not want to kill, surely, in a case of first impression, a court should have little difficulty finding an intent to kill in those situations where the defendant intentionally commits an act that he knows will kill people.

As indicated, in most states, to obtain a conviction of first degree murder, a prosecutor must prove a premeditated intent to kill. However, in the federal courts, the best place to prosecute Bush, there is authority for the proposition that the premeditation necessary to constitute first degree murder does not have to be an intent to kill. It can also be a premeditated intent to do an act "without regard for the life and safety of others," which is implied malice. In the 1983 case of United States v. Shaw, the premeditation was in the form of lying in wait, but not specifically to kill, only to fire at a passing car, the defendant thereby doing an act exceedingly dangerous with reckless and  wanton disregard for the consequences, though no specific intent to kill was shown. So current law would seem to authorize the first degree murder prosecution of Bush in the federal courts without the prosecution even having to prove an intent to kill.

In any event, at an absolute minimum, in the absence of a legal justification such as self-defense, Bush's taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law.  Ironically, the case relied on in the federal courts for the best definition of implied malice in a second degree murder prosecution is United States of America v. Bush, where the court, in its words, describes the present Bush's conduct to a T. It said, "Malice does not necessarily imply ill-will, spite, hatred or hostility by the defendant toward the person killed.  Malice is a state of mind showing a heart [not regardful] of the life and safety of others ... Malice can also be defined as the condition of mind which prompts a person to do willfully, that is, on purpose, without adequate justification or excuse, a wrongful act whose foreseeable consequence is death or serious bodily injury to another."

Who would argue that under the language in United States of America v. Bush we should regard as criminal someone who, knowing he is too drunk to drive, nevertheless gets in a car and drives it at night, killing someone, but not a president who deliberately lies to a country to take it to war where thousands are killed, dying violent deaths?  What reason could you have for arguing this other than that you are a conservative Republican, and Bush is a conservative Republican, and therefore anything he does, even murder, is just fine with you?

As I have said, under state or federal law Bush could at least be prosecuted for second degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment (only a conviction of first degree murder can carry a possible sentence of death), and that would be better than nothing. But this should only be a fallback position. Bush's alleged crime is so prodigious and on such a grand scale that it would greatly dishonor those in their graves who paid the ultimate price because of it if he were not to pay the ultimate penalty. This is why all attempts should be made to prosecute him for first degree murder.

THE FIRST LIE GEORGE BUSH TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Getting on to the most important question by far of whether Bush has a viable defense to his killings in that he acted in self- defense, as  noted previously, if Bush either lied when he said Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction made him an imminent threat to the security of this country, or lied when he led Americans to believe that Hussein was involved in 9/11 --  both of which justified in the minds of Americans our going to war -- this clearly wouldn't be the conduct of a person acting in self-defense. Therefore, such a legal defense would necessarily fail at his trial.

In attempting to answer whether Bush lied about either of these two matters, we obviously have to make reference to and examine Bush's conduct and statements before, during, even after he went to war -- circumstantial evidence -- to determine what his state of mind was at the time he went to war. For those who feel a case based on circumstantial evidence is, by definition, not a strong one, let me correct a common misperception. Circumstantial evidence has erroneously come to be associated in the public mind and vernacular with an anemic case. ("Oh, that's just circumstantial evidence.") But nothing  could be further from the truth. In fact, most first degree murder cases are based on circumstantial evidence. This is so because other than eye-witness testimony (and in some jurisdictions, a confession), which is direct evidence, all other evidence, even fingerprints and DNA, is circumstantial evidence.

We can't open up the top of a defendant's head, peek in, and say; "So that's what was on your mind at the time you engaged in the subject conduct." (Recall that a defendant's criminal intent or state of mind has to concur in time with his criminal act.) Obviously, we have to look at his conduct and his statements to infer what was on his mind. I've convicted many defendants of first degree murder based solely on circumstantial evidence by putting one speck of evidence on top of another until ultimately there was a strong mosaic of guilt. You can analogize circumstantial evidence to the spelling of a word. One letter by itself could be the first of thousands of words. But with the addition of each letter, you narrow the number of words those letters can belong to. Pretty soon there's just one word you can be spelling, and that word is guilty.

Let's first briefly look at some of the evidence (there undoubtedly is more I don't even know about which could be uncovered by a prosecutor with the power of subpoena if this matter proceeded forward legally) showing that Bush and his people lied to the country on the issue of whether Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country. (Keep in mind that if no imminent threat is shown, then Bush's defense of self-defense would be defeated. The threat has to be imminent.) I think you will see that Bush did not honorably lead this nation, but deliberately misled it into a war he wanted.

***

1. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Bush lied to Congress and the American people when he said Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country so he could get their support for the war, is the preposterous nature of the allegation itself. Hussein, an imminent threat to America? As humorist Will Rogers would say, "That's the most unheard of thing I ever heard of." Almost a highwater mark in folly.  At the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Hussein's Iraq, after a devastating eight-year war with Iran that had concluded just three years earlier in 1988, was proven to be extremely weak. And since then, as everyone, including Bush's father, agreed, Iraq had even become much weaker because of the economic sanctions against it resulting from the Gulf War, as well as the great number of U.S. inspections that forced Iraq to destroy most of its weapons and all nuclear facilities. Back on October 15, 2001, which is before he knowingly decided to become a pitiable water-carrier for the Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the press: "Iraq is Iraq, a wasted society for 10 years. They're sad. They're contained ... "

The conclusive proof of the military weakness of Hussein's Iraq at the time of the war in Iraq was that it fell to Coalition forces in only three weeks, with only 128 Americans dying, and 44 of these by accident or friendly fire. Thousands upon thousands of Iraqi soldiers died in the very short conflict. Army major Kevin Dunlop said in the midst of it, "It's not a fair fight. We're slaughtering them." When we couple this with the fact that we know Hussein wanted to live -- and no person who was not insane (as Hussein was not) and wanted to live would even dream of attacking the United States or helping anyone else to do it -- the absurdity of Bush's contention that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country is apparent. That alone is circumstantial evidence of the strong likelihood that he himself had to know the notion was absurd, and therefore he was lying.

Wait a minute, Bush apologists might say: True, it turned out that Hussein never had any weapons of mass destruction, but not only did virtually the entire country think he did (including many prominent Democrats in Congress), but that having them, he constituted a threat to this country. So if almost the whole country felt this way, why is it preposterous that Bush would have, too? Translation: maybe Bush and his people were as stupid as everyone else. In other words, he may have acted in self-defense, and his act was a reasonable one. At first blush, this sounds like it may have a little merit. But there's one very big difference between Bush and his people on the one hand and the rest of the nation on the other. Bush and his people were the ones who came up with this entire preposterous notion. The rest of the nation's people (more appropriately, sheeple) merely went along with it as an accepted truth. The fact that the whole argument that Hussein was an imminent threat to this country, and that we should invade Iraq, originated with Bush and his people substantially weakens the contention that they were as stupid as everyone else in buying into this absurdity.  They didn't buy into anything. They invented it, and then proceeded to dress up their invention with one lie and distortion after another.  (We'll examine these in detail later.)

The Bush administration has said that Bush never used the word "imminent" in describing the threat of Hussein. He didn't have to.  From the context of everything he said, no other inference could be drawn but that Bush was asserting that America was in imminent danger of harm from Hussein. This is why analyst after analyst said that Bush claimed Hussein was an imminent threat. Moreover, Bush used words that meant imminent. Just a few examples: he said Iraq could act "on any given day"; that "before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger must be removed"; "Some ask how  urgent this danger is to America. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time"; "Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime" gives weapons of mass destruction "to a terrorist ally"; Iraq constituted "a threat of unique urgency"; "Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes." And when Bush said at a press conference on March 6, 2003: "Saddam Hussein is a threat" to our nation no less than six times (he also said: "Saddam and his weapons are a direct threat to this country"), that, by definition, meant he was an imminent threat. The word "is" means now, not in the future. If Bush intended to convey the latter, the only proper words to have used would have been "Saddam Hussein will be (or might be) a threat to America" or "in the future" or "near future." Indeed, in Bush's statement to the nation on the evening of March 17, 2003, two days before he invaded Iraq, he said, after talking about the impending war with Hussein and Iraq: "When evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth. Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice in formal declarations. And responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense. It is suicide.  The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now."

It should be pointed out that the very fact Bush never used the word "imminent," though certainly not conclusive, is itself circumstantial evidence of his criminal state of mind. Let me explain. Bush and his people had to know that the word everyone uses, legally and otherwise, in any discussion of self-defense is "imminent." Since the evidence is very clear that the threat from Hussein was not imminent, it is a safe assumption that they thought it would be dangerous for them to use the word because by doing so they would be more apt to be asked what evidence they had that Hussein was about to strike any day, a question they could not answer. And if they failed to answer it, it would be so much more difficult for them to later claim they were acting in self defense. So they stayed away from the word "imminent" the way the devil stays away from holy water. They chose instead to use other comparable words (like "now," "any given day," "urgent," etc.) to convey the same thought. If they truly thought they were acting in self-defense, how is it possible that not once in the many months of the buildup to war did any of them, in all their speeches and interviews, use the one word that was associated with self-defense more than any other? The one word that was the most natural and obvious one for them to use? I firmly believe it was because of a conscious effort on their part to not use the word. And this deliberate effort is just one more nugget of circumstantial evidence, which, though small, is totally compatible with all the other evidence pointing irresistibly to their guilt.

***

2. The fact that Bush stopped pursuing, for all intents and purposes, the person responsible for 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, by diverting most of this country's resources and military personnel to his pursuit of Hussein, who was not involved in 9/11, is circumstantial evidence that it was always Hussein whom he really wanted to go after, and  9/11was just a convenient pretext enabling him to do so. Indeed, it has since emerged from many sources that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had been dreaming about invading Iraq for years before 9/11. Since Bush sent ten times as many troops to Iraq as he did to Afghanistan, doesn't that suggest that Hussein was much more important to Bush than Bin Laden? But how could that possibly be? The fact that Bush was willing to shirk his constitutional duty to "take care that the laws [of this nation] be faithfully executed" by all but abandoning pursuit of the person (Bin Laden) responsible for  3,000 American murders -- the one he promised to bring back "dead or alive" -- is circumstantial evidence that his passion for invading Iraq  and removing Hussein from power was so strong that he would be much more likely to lie to the American people about Hussein being an imminent threat to this country.

***

3. It clearly appears that Bush deliberately lied to the nation in his first nationally televised address on the Iraqi crisis on the evening of October 7, 2002, when he spoke from Cincinnati, Ohio, at the Museum Center. As noted earlier, Bush told the nation that Hussein was "a great danger to our nation," either by Hussein himself using "unmanned aerial vehicles" with "chemical or biological" payloads "for missions targeting the United States" or by providing these biological or chemical weapons to a "terrorist group or individual terrorists" to attack us. Bush framed the threat as being imminent when he said this  could happen "on any given day." 

On October 8, the day after Bush's Cincinnati speech, and only after the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence exerted considerable pressure on him, CIA director George Tenet declassified a letter he had sent to Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate committee. The letter from Tenet -- which was signed for him by John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA who was Tenet's number one deputy -- was read that day to a joint hearing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It stated that the CIA had concluded that "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." Clear translation: Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country, and would not use any of his chemical and biological weapons against us unless we attacked him first; that is, he would only use these weapons in self-defense.

The media reported (very cursorily) on the matter, most noting only that the letter was declassified on October 8, 2002. It could conceivably have been written a couple of months earlier. But a source at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, told me (in a telephone conversation on March 10, 2003) that the date of the letter was October 7, 2002, and the physical letter itself was couriered to Graham that same day, October 7, before Bush's speech that night. Senator Graham's press office told me that the letter was also faxed to Graham's office at 4:27 p.m. on October 7.

Though the letter was not addressed to Bush, there can be little question that Bush received a copy of it, and even if he didn't, he certainly knew of its contents. The CIA is an agency of the executive branch of government, and the CIA director is responsible and answerable only to the president. As Thomas Powers wrote in his book, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA: "The President is the sun in the CIA's solar system. The Central Intelligence Agency and its Director serve the President alone." The Senate Intelligence Committee isn't even in the executive branch of the government, and it is inconceivable that Tenet would confide something to them that he would not to the president. No one would believe this.  Also, since Tenet, who had become a close friend of the president, briefed the president every morning in the Oval Office, it is equally inconceivable that on the morning of October 7, 2002, Tenet would tell Bush that Hussein was an imminent threat to this country, and later in the day tell the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that he was not.  (By the way, the White House press office confirmed to me that Tenet did brief Bush in the Oval Office on the morning of October 7. Bush left Washington on Air Force One at 5:50 p.m. that day and started his speech to the nation in Cincinnati at 8:01 p.m.)

Bush had said that with respect to going to war with Iraq: "I'll be making up my mind based upon the latest intelligence." Facts are stubborn little devils, and whatever other CIA document or documents the Bush administration might come up with to support Bush's statement to the American people on the evening of October 7, 2002, it cannot get around the fact that at the time of his speech, the very latest intelligence of the CIA about Hussein was that he was not an imminent threat to this country. And just as obviously, this CIA assessment on October 7 would not have been made overnight. It almost certainly preceded October 7 by weeks, maybe months, throughout all of which time Tenet would have been informing Bush of essentially the same conclusion he expressed in his October 7 letter.

In fact, we know it preceded October 7 by at least one week. The classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA to the Bush administration and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 1, 2002, sets forth the same conclusion as the October 7 letter in slightly different words. (See later text). It should be noted that this October 1 CIA report, then, also gave Bush notice, prior to his speech in Cincinnati, that the CIA did not consider Hussein an imminent threat to this nation.

So when Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7 that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, 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 of matters concerning war and peace. And there was no way he could invoke national security as a defense for his lie. As it turned out, he didn't have to offer any defense at all. When the aforementioned memo surfaced on October 8, 2002, a few papers briefly mentioned the apparent contradiction between Tenet's letter and Bush's speech to the nation and then the matter was immediately forgotten. None of the books or articles or newspaper columns on the case since then that I am aware of focused on this matter. In other words, the media gave Bush a pass and let him get away with his monumental lie to the nation.

To summarize this all-important point, since we know, by the Bush administration's own admission, that it was relying on U.S. intelligence to form its conclusion on whether Hussein was a threat to the security of this country, and since we know that U.S. intelligence (in the form of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies that gave their input into the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate) told the Bush administration that Hussein was not an imminent threat, by definition Bush and his people could not have been acting in self-defense when they went to war in Iraq. That is, not if they were relying on U.S. intelligence as opposed to some Washington, D.C., fortune-teller. In other words, Bush and his gang can't have it both ways.

***

4. Bush, at a trial, would never, of course, admit that he took the country to war under false pretenses, not in self-defense. But as I have indicated, this can be shown by circumstantial evidence. However, we also have direct evidence of Bush and his people lying in several statements on an extremely important document, which is circumstantial evidence of their state of mind that they wanted, intended, to lie, and that was their modus operandi.

The most important prewar intelligence report that the Bush administration relied upon to justify its going to war in Iraq was the aforementioned October 1, 2002, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a CIA report that utilized the input of every intelligence agency in the federal government, such as the Defense Department's DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the National Security Agency, etc., and was classified "Top Secret." The NIE report (titled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction"), which was sent to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was of course kept under  lock and key in a secure room. But although any member of Congress could have read the report, as set forth in Hubris, the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraqi War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, "Senate aides would calculate that no more than a half dozen or so members actually went to the secure room" to read it.  One might ask why? One reason is incompetence, another reason is sloth. Yet another reason is that members of Congress are very busy people with many other matters to tend to, though none more important than becoming as knowledgeable as possible before voting on whether to go to war.

But one thing has to be said in defense of the many Democratic members of Congress who didn't read the report yet voted for the war, mouthing almost the same dire warnings of the Iraqi threat as Bush and his team did. (In the House of Representatives, 81 Democrats voted for the war, 126 against it; no Republican voted against it.  In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted for the war, 21 against it, and only one Republican voted against it.) The Bush administration conducted many briefing sessions for congressional members in which the briefers grossly overstated and distorted the existing evidence, just as they did to the American public. How could these senators and representatives who were present at these briefings have been expected not to accept what they were being told, and say to themselves, "I'm going to try to check all this out myself"? 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? 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?

As former Democratic senator Bob Graham, who was a member of the Senate at the time, said, "Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him [President Bush] to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud." Democratic senator Tom Daschle, the senate majority leader at the time, said, "Bush was telling me that Iraq had WMD and we had to move."

But perhaps most importantly, even if more members of Congress had bothered to read the classified NIE report, it would have been unavailing because we know that all of the CIA conclusions in the report that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were wrong. But the senators and representatives would have had no way of knowing this at the time. It was the responsibility of the Bush administration, not individual members of Congress, to vet all CIA documents and information for accuracy.

The 2004 report on prewar intelligence of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [4] said that the CIA's conclusions in its October, 2002 NIE classified report on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting." (The committee gave, as examples, the CIA saying it was its belief that Iraq was "reconstituting its nuclear program," had "chemical and biological weapons," and was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents.")  Now, why would CIA professionals do something like this? The most reasonable inference, and many independent observers agree, is that the Bush administration, seeking to secure the support of Congress in using force in Iraq, was putting relentless pressure on the CIA to state as strong a case for war as they could. In preparing the NIE report, people at the agency like CIA director George Tenet, whose very job depended on the pleasure of the president, must have felt like a rope in a tug-of-war between their conscience on one side and the lying, immoral Bush administration on the other side.

But even the CIA's bloated and inaccurate conclusions in its classified NIE report weren't good enough for the Bush administration.  Additionally, the classified version contained some vigorous dissents to these conclusions. When, on October 1, 2002, Democratic senator Bob Graham, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (commonly referred to as the Senate Intelligence Committee), requested of the CIA that it provide an unclassified, public version of the NIE report Graham and his committee had just received, so the American people could see these dissents and reservations, the Bush  administration reportedly had its chief water-carrier, Condoleezza Rice, contact George Tenet at the CIA and tell Tenet what the American people really should see. Who won out? Graham or the water-carrier? The twenty-five-page unclassified version of the classified  NIE report, titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs" and issued by the CIA on October 4, 2002, clearly showed that the water-carrier carried more weight with the CIA than Senator Graham.

As Senator Graham told me in a conversation on November 29, 2007: "The unclassified version the CIA sent over [which became known as the 'White Paper'] not only didn't give me what I requested, they gave me a document that was nothing more than propaganda, a full-throated cry for war with no tempering information." The White Paper, issued by the Bush administration to Congress and the public to persuade them to support its rush to war, deleted the very dissenting opinions Graham wanted the public to hear. Moreover, the CIA  literally changed its conclusions in a way that made them more frightening to the American public. There can be little question at all that by unstated words, or more, Rice communicated to Tenet that the Bush administration (of which the CIA, in the executive branch, is a part) wanted a stronger report, which would be the Bush administration's version of the original classified NIE report. It is inconceivable that without the intercession of Rice or some other Bush administration representative, the CIA would decide, on its own and in print, to contradict a report it had just issued three days earlier. This new version, then, was the Bush administration's version of the original classified NIE report. [5]

Let's now look at the NIE's October 1, 2002, classified report and then the Bush administration's October 4, 2002, unclassified version, the White Paper, which was presented to Congress and the American people just one week before the congressional vote authorizing the Bush administration to invade Iraq. We'll see how the Bush administration lied to the American public to make the case for war much stronger. Like typical criminals, Bush and his people left their incriminating fingerprints everywhere, showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt on their part. But they never did so as openly and audaciously as they did with the NIE report and White Paper. Bush and his people's selective use of intelligence information and outright distortion of facts to justify going to war with Iraq would have caused even Machiavelli's jaw to drop.

Here's the evidence. When the 2002 NIE report (the original top-secret CIA classified report which the Bush administration publicly promoted as its gold standard, its main evidence for going to war) was declassified in part in July 2003 and April 2004, we learned that it said, for instance: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions ... " Bush's White Paper, shown to the American public and Congress, deleted the words "We judge that" (words that clearly signified this was merely a CIA opinion) and started with the words "Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs ... " So essentially opinion was turned into fact by a compliant CIA operating under the heel of the gang of thugs in the White House. For those Bush apologists who say this change was not an important one, and that I'm nitpicking, I would respond -- then why did Bush and his people bother to make the change? By definition, by their doing it they revealed that they believed their change did make a difference, that it was substantive and important. There would have been no other valid reason to make the change. 

Going on, the CIA's classified NIE report says, "We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin) and VX." In the White Paper issued by the Bush administration to the American public and Congress, the words "We assess that" are deleted and it reads "Baghdad has begun ... "

In the classified NIE report, the words are "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW [chemical weapons] stockpile [they had no information], Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in the last year." The White Paper issued to the American public and Congress deleted the words "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile." It simply reads, "Saddam probably has ... "

The classified NIE report says, "We judge that Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW [biological weapons] and is capable of producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives." In the White Paper, the honorable and moral and ethical and patriotic and very religious people in the White House deleted the words "We judge that" and started with the words "Iraq has some lethal ... "  Then, incredibly, after the words "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives" in the original NIE report, the White Paper actually inserted these words that were not even in the report: "including potentially against the U.S. homeland." We're in the majors, now, folks. This is big-time deception.

How, you may ask at this point, would these thugs have the guts to change the language of an official document that they had to know at some point would become declassified? I guess for several reasons.  First, by the time the NIE document was declassified, it would be long after the start of the war the Bush administration wanted so badly; Secondly, they know how completely out of it the American public (the Walking Dead) is and how they only focus, if at all, on what's happening today, their memory lasting as long as a breath upon a mirror. And finally, they know from experience that with the very weak liberal media, and pathetic liberal TV personalities like Charlie Rose, Ted Koppel, and George Stephanopoulos -- physiological marvels who are somehow able to sit erect in front of a camera without a spine -- they can literally get by with murder. After all, this is 2008, and I'm just a former prosecutor working out of a converted stall of my garage in far-off LA. Yet before this book, who has really hit these despicable human beings the way they deserve to be hit?

Continuing, the classified NIE report stated that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles called UAVs, "probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents." But in the White Paper, our friends in the Bush administration left out a footnote to this in the original NIE report that stated that the U.S. Air Force director for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance did not agree. The Senate Select Committee said that by eliminating that footnote from the unclassified version, the White Paper given to Congress and the American public "is missing the fact that [the] agency with primary responsibility for technological analysis on UAV programs did not agree with the [CIA]  assessment."

The White Paper said that" all intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons." But this was a lie. The White Paper deleted the dissent of the Intelligence and Research bureau of the State Department that "the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing ... an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

Was anything else deleted from the classified report? Yes. The White Paper said that Baghdad, which, prior to the Gulf War in 1991 was attempting to develop a nuclear weapon, was "vigorously trying" to buy uranium from Niger to reconstitute its nuclear program. But Congress and the American people weren't told that the classified  NIE report contained a dissent to this conclusion from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which said that such claims were "highly dubious."

Likewise, the White Paper said that Hussein was purchasing high-strength aluminum tubes, which were believed to be intended for use as "centrifuge rotors" in the production of nuclear weapons. But Congress and the American people were not told that the classified NIE report contained dissents from the U.S. Department of Energy as well as the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which said that they believed the tubes were "not intended" for and "not part of" any alleged Iraqi nuclear program.

By far the most serious and inexcusable change the Bush administration made in its White Paper is that the classified NIE report said that Hussein would only use the weapons of mass destruction he was believed to have if he were first attacked; that is, in self-defense. It read: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war. Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland if Baghdad feared [that] an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable ... " With Bush and his people desperately trying to frighten the American people into war by making them believe Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this nation, these were the very last words in the world they would want the American people to hear. So they simply omitted every one of these all-important words from the White Paper. [6]

So 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. Indeed, that Iraq would only attack us if they, Iraq, were in fear of an imminent attack on them by us. How evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can Bush and his people be? Yet unbelievably, they got away with all of this.

I have a question for Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, who has said, "I read the National Intelligence Estimate cover to cover a couple of times." Since it was the consensus of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies that Hussein was not an imminent threat to this country unless he feared we were about to attack him, wasn't keeping this all-important conclusion out of the White Paper so egregiously wrong that even you should have said to your gang: "you know, guys, these other distortions are bad enough. But this is going too far."  What I'm saying is -- was there no level of deception beyond which you were unwilling to go in helping your boss take America to war under false pretenses? Of course, certain questions answer themselves by being asked.

Although the truth is often an elusive fugitive, what do all of the above deliberate deletions and distortions in the White Paper -- every one of which went in the same direction, to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein and Iraq -- show very, very, very clearly? They show, unmistakably, the state of mind of Bush and his people to deliberately lie and distort the truth to further their objective of persuading the American public and Congress that it was the right thing, in self-defense, to go to war with Iraq now. With that state of mind, which we know (not think) they had, all of the many other allegations about the Bush administration's lies and distortions necessarily become more believable.

What the above also shows is that the CIA's George Tenet, Bush's personal friend, entered into a Faustian bargain and sold his agency and America out. As six former CIA officials wrote to Tenet at the time Tenet published his memoirs in April of 2007: "you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the C.I.A. officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld ... Although [the] C.I.A. learned in late September 2002 ... that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama Bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered Bin Laden an enemy ... you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda ... Your tenure as head of the C.I.A. has helped create a world that is more dangerous. It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated."

***

Before we continue, let's briefly discuss a matter that infuses all of these points -- whether the Bush administration put undue pressure on U.S. intelligence agencies to provide it with conclusions that would help them in their quest for war. The Senate Intelligence Committee was split on the issue. While Republicans on the committee claimed the administration did not exert such pressure, the Democrats, though agreeing with the report's conclusion that the Bush administration never tried to coerce an intelligence agency to "change" a finding the agency had already reached in a report, did not agree with the Republicans that no political pressure had been placed on U.S. intelligence analysts by the Bush administration. Senator John Rockefeller said that the Senate committee's report "fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly. It was clear to all of us in this room ... and to many others that they had made up their mind that they were going to go to war."

Indeed, the evidence is clear that the Bush administration did put pressure on the intelligence community. Before I present just some of the evidence, consider this. If a man told you that while he was walking down the street he saw orange trees on the block, and another said he did not, whom would you believe? Assuming neither man was crazy or lying, obviously you'd believe the man who saw the orange trees. The one who didn't could have had all sorts of reasons for not seeing the orange trees, such as not looking, or being distracted with other thoughts. But how can you refute the statement of the man who saw the orange trees?

Here, there is much, much evidence -- the witnesses who saw the orange trees -- that the Bush administration pressured the CIA and others. This is just some of the evidence.

In an interview with Good Morning America in 2004, Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, said that on September 12, just one day after 9/11: "The President in a very intimidating way left us -- me and my staff -- with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11." Clark explained in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, that when he told Bush the day after 9/11 that the CIA was already explicit that only Al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, Bush wasn't satisfied with this answer and insisted that he and his people look again for an Iraqi connection. "Absolutely; we will look again," he  old Bush. "But you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little [with Al Qaeda], as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen." "Look into Iraq, Saddam," the president said "testily," according to Clarke.

At a meeting in August 2002 of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency on the proposed war in Iraq, Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's under secretary of Defense for Policy, showed up at the meeting (which several DIA analysts said was very unusual) and proceeded to criticize the CIA's failure to turn up any link between Bin Laden and Hussein. The obvious message was that he didn't want them to do likewise. (Feith at the time was running a rogue intelligence operation out of his office for the Bush administration that was dedicated to finding any real or imagined link between Hussein and Al Qaeda -- regardless of how poor the source -- to help make its case for war. A favorite source of Feith's shadow intelligence unit was the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a sworn enemy of Hussein whom the Bush administration at one time was grooming to replace Hussein when he fell, and whose "information" was sometimes flat-out fabricated.)

Robin Raphel, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service, said that in the buildup to war, key decisions were "ideologically based. They were not based on analytical, historical understanding." She said the invasion's timing was driven by "clear political pressure" and the atmosphere was one of apprehension, in which the Bush administration people kept close watch on others. "There were political people round and about. One had to be careful."

David J. Dunford, a Middle East specialist for the State Department who was put in charge of the Iraq Foreign Ministry right after the invasion, said that prewar in the Bush administration, "you could feel there was a drive to go to war no matter what the facts."

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, said that in 2003 there was significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the [Bush] administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than any he had seen in his thirty-two years at the agency.

Kenneth Pollack was a Clinton administration National Security official who strongly and outspokenly supported the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on June 20, 2003, which was after the war started, he said he had heard "many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastised for failing to come to more alarming conclusions."

In an article in the journal Foreign Affairs on February 10, 2006, retired CIA agent Paul Pillar, who oversaw CIA intelligence assessments about Iraq from 2000 to 2005, accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq. "Intelligence was misused publicly [i.e., to the American public] to justify decisions that had already been made." He wrote that as a result of political pressure, CIA analysts began to "sugarcoat" their conclusions regarding the threat posed by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Larry Johnson, a registered Republican and former CIA official who voted for and contributed to Bush's 2000 campaign for the presidency and thereafter became the deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, said that in "April of last year [2003], I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst in particular told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of State."

***

5. Continuing on with the pieces of evidence showing that the Bush administration lied to the country when it claimed that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, though we obviously have no admission from Bush or his people that they cooked the books and distorted the truth to take us to war, the closest thing to an admission from an insider is contained in the famous "Downing Street Memo" from Bush's staunch ally in the war, Britain. The July 23, 2002, memo, written by Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide of British prime minister Tony Blair, was not really a memo but the minutes of a meeting between Blair and members of his war cabinet on the impending Iraq war. The minutes (memo) said that Sir Richard  Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (the equivalent of our CIA), told Blair at the war cabinet meeting that, from his meetings in Washington with Bush administration officials, it was obvious that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, Bush and his gang had decided to go to war with Iraq, "so now let's fix the facts to warrant what we've already decided we want to do." This is criminal, folks, and the source for this information couldn't be more credible and reliable -- a high-level official from Bush's biggest ally in the war, the British. The Bush administration consistently twisted and distorted the truth by omitting, exaggerating, or trivializing the facts to fit its purpose.

Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit, said during the Bush administration's relentless buildup for war: "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level [Bush administration] pronouncements, and there is a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA."

***

6. The evidence of "cherry-picking" by the Bush administration in taking the nation to war, only giving the American public information that supported the Bush administration's position, never anything that refuted it or threw it open to question, could be the subject matter of an entire book.

A March 6, 2004, New York Times article, quoting several U.S. government officials, said, "U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Bush administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons." But these reports were "dismissed" because "they did not conform" to the Bush administration position. "It appears," one government official put it, "that human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting and useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq."

Here is an extremely important example of cherry-picking, and even then, the cherry was a rotten one that should never have been swallowed. The main source the Bush administration relied upon to claim that Iraq had a fleet of mobile labs (or "factories") producing biological poisons (proven by UN inspectors to be false information before the war) was an informant aptly code-named "Curveball" by his German handlers. Curveball claimed that he had actually been a part of the team that built the labs. Although Bush used "information" from "Curveball" in several prewar speeches, including his 2003 State of the Union address, and Secretary of State Powell used the same information in his address before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, and everyone agrees that Curveball's information was one of the most important pillars Bush and his administration used to justify going to war, the CIA itself never even personally interviewed Curveball, a Baghdad-born chemical engineer who sought political asylum in Germany in 1999 after earlier being fired from his job and jailed for theft.

But the biggest problem is that "Curveball" was a completely unreliable informant. Curveball's German handlers in the BND (German intelligence service), who knew him well, said that Curveball was "not a psychologically stable guy.  He's not a completely normal person." Indeed, when Tyler Drumheller, in 2002 the head of clandestine services in the CIA's European division, met with the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington, the German officer told  Drumheller that Curveball, a heavy drinker, had had a mental breakdown and was "crazy. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator."  Just one example of a Curveball fabrication: In Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations he said that "an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer [Curveball] actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents." But the Presidential Commission on Illegal Weapons noted in its 2005 report that when the alleged 1998 accident happened, Curveball "was not even in Iraq at that time, according to information supplied by family members and later confirmed by travel records."

Indeed, almost everything about Curveball seemed to be a lie. Even the name he used, Ahmed Hussein Mohammed, was a false name (true name: Rafid Ahmed Alwan). He said he graduated number one in his chemical engineering class at the University of Baghdad. But a later check of the school records revealed he finished at the bottom of his class. His childhood friends called him a" great liar" and a "con artist."

The Los Angeles Times, which interviewed five senior officials from BND, reported in its November 20, 2005, edition: "The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast" when he heard Powell use Curveball's information in his speech before the United Nations as "justification for war." [7] The official told the Times:  "We were shocked. Mein Gott. We had always told them [U.S.] it [what Curveball said] was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence." It was simply a report on what Curveball told them which they forwarded on to U.S. intelligence agencies (specifically the CIA and DIA), never saying the information contained in the report was verified. Another German official told the Times: "This was not substantial evidence.  We made clear [to the U.S.] we could not verify the things he said."

In a speech at Georgetown University on February 5, 2004, CIA director George Tenet confirmed what this German official had told the Times. In the process he inadvertently all but confirmed that the CIA, at the Bush administration's stated or implied behest, was knowingly distorting intelligence information. Speaking of Curveball, Tenet said his CIA had "missed the notice [obviously from the Germans] that  identified" him ''as providing information that in some cases was unreliable and in other cases fabricated. We have acknowledged this mistake." But how in the world could trained CIA analysts look at correspondence and other information from German intelligence and see what Curveball is alleging but not see where the Germans are saying this source is not reliable and is a fabricator? I mean, I guess anything is possible. But how believable is this? Not at all.

In fact, in 2005 Drumheller told the Presidential Commission on Illegal Weapons that everyone in the CIA's chain of command knew about the severe problems with Curveball's credibility, and documentation on his unreliability was circulated widely within the agency. (The Times reported that Drumheller had told it the same thing.)  James L. Pavitt, the CIA's deputy director of operations at the time, told the Times that "there was yelling and screaming about this guy" at the agency.

"CIA officials," the Times wrote, "now concede that the Iraqi [Curveball] fused fact, research he gleaned on the internet, and what his former co-workers [in Iraq] called 'water cooler gossip' into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the September 11 attacks." Never mind. What Curveball was saying sure as hell sounded good to Bush and his people, who were gunning for war, and ready to use any information, confirmed or not, from an unreliable source or not, that could help them in their immoral and I say highly criminal marketing campaign to sell America on the Iraqi war.

The Bush administration never once shared what they knew about Curveball's lack of credibility with Congress or the American people.  Indeed, there is no evidence that either Congress or the public even knew of Curveball's existence. All they knew was that the CIA said it was its belief that Iraq had biological weapons of mass destruction.

***

7. One of the most notorious instances of the Bush administration using thoroughly discredited information to frighten the American public into war was the famous Niger incident. Briefly, in Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech he declared that "the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," sixteen now infamous words that have come back to haunt the Bush administration. Uranium, once enriched, can be used for nuclear weapons fuel. The country in Africa was alleged to be the former French colony of Niger, a very poor country in northern Africa. One of Niger's resources is uranium.  And, indeed, the 2002 NIE said that Baghdad had been vigorously seeking to buy uranium from Niger.

The only problem was that the Niger allegation was not true. In fact, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador to Iraq, was sent to Niger by the CIA in February of 2002 because Vice President Cheney's office wanted to know if there was anything to an intelligence report that referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake (a form of lightly processed ore) to Iraq by Niger in the late 1990s. After spending eight days investigating the matter in Niger, where he had been a U.S. diplomat in the mid-1970s, Wilson reported back to the CIA that it was "highly doubtful" such a transaction had ever taken place, and in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, he attacked the Bush administration for claiming there was any truth to the story.

Further, the Los Angeles Times reported in its December 11, 2005, edition that Alain Chouet, the former chief of the counterintelligence division of France's national spy service (Direction Generale de la securite Exterieure), had told the paper that nearly a year before Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Niger, his group, per the CIA's request, conducted an extensive investigation in Niger, where the uranium mines are owned and operated by French companies, and found that there was absolutely no evidence to support the claim. Chouet said his spy service furnished the CIA with this information, and when the allegation  continued to surface, his unit repeatedly warned the CIA that there was no truth to it. A former CIA official confirmed to the Times that the French had, indeed, given the agency this information. The Times reported further that another French government official informed the paper that when Bush said in his 2003 address he was basing his information on a British report, French intelligence viewed the British report as "totally crazy because there was no backup for this." Nevertheless, he said, the French once again conducted an investigation, turning things "upside down" to see if there was any basis for the story, but again, they found nothing.

No wonder. The original documents making the claim that the country of Niger had agreed to sell Hussein uranium were crude forgeries. The story first surfaced in Rome, after the documents were taken (along with many other documents and items like a wristwatch, stamps, perfume, etc.) in a purported January 1, 2001, burglary at the Republic of Niger's embassy there. In late September of 2001, the documents came into the hands of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, which in mid-October sent a report on the entire incident to the CIA.

There were several indications that the documents were forged. For instance, although the main document (dated July 6, 2000) said its contents were "top secret," it was only stamped "confidential." And it bore the signature of a Niger foreign minister who hadn't served in that capacity for several years. Even the representation of Niger's national emblem was incorrect. Also, an accompanying document had the heading of an organization that had ceased to exist five months prior to the date of the document. And so on.

On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that "based on thorough analysis" his agency concluded that the "documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." Indeed, author Craig Unger conducted extensive research into the Niger incident for a 2006 article in Vanity Fair and interviewed many former CIA and DIA officials who worked for these agencies at the time, such as Melvin Goodman, a former senior analyst at the CIA and State Department; Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations of counterterrorism at the CIA; and Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former  chief of staff. Unger uncovered at least fourteen instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union address by Bush in which analysts at the CIA, the State Department, or other government agencies that had examined the Niger documents "raised serious doubts about their legitimacy -- only to be rebuffed by Bush administration officials who wanted to use them."

The Niger documents, even though they were thoroughly discredited by U.S. intelligence, were seen by Bush and his people as providing them with the opportunity to frighten and deceive the American public. The water-carrier, Condi Rice, started the propaganda campaign on September 8, 2002, when she told CNN: "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were apparently quite taken with the mushroom cloud allusion and began using it, or variations of it, in many of their speeches to the country.

Several days before Bush's speech to the nation in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, in which he alleged that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the country, his National Security Council sent a draft of the proposed speech, which asserted that Hussein "has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa -- an essential ingredient in the [nuclear] enrichment process -- to the CIA. The CIA faxed a reply back telling the White House to delete the uranium reference, but the White House was persistent, sending another draft deleting only the 500 metric ton reference.  George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that this time he personally called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley (the current National security adviser) on October 7 and told him that the president "should not be a fact witness on this issue" because the "reporting was weak." The attempt to purchase uranium was removed from the draft, but as noted earlier, Bush still stuck in his speech that night in Cincinnati that Hussein "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." And in subsequent speeches by Bush and his administration, they used the Niger reference.

Finally, the Department of Defense asked the CIA's National Intelligence Council, which oversees all federal agencies that deal with intelligence, to look into the Niger matter. On January 24, 2003, four days before the president's State of the Union address on January 28, the council sent a memo (drafted by national intelligence officer Robert G. Houdek) to the White House stating that "the Niger story is baseless and should be laid to rest."

So how did the sixteen words get into Bush's address to the nation on January 28? Everyone claims ignorance, including Condoleezza Rice. Rice -- whose very job it was as national security adviser to coordinate all intelligence from the intelligence community and present it, with advice, to the president in a cohesive manner -- while acknowledging that the Niger information was "not credible," claimed, unbelievably, that no one in the White House was aware of this until after Bush gave his address. "No one knew at the time in our circles that there were doubts and suspicions" about the Niger information, she  said. "We wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now." She says she never saw the January 2003 memo and even says, "I don't remember reading [an October 6, 2002] memo" from CIA director George Tenet which she admits was addressed directly to her that said the Niger-uranium claim was without merit. Why didn't she read it? "Because," she said, "when George Tenet says, 'Take it out,' we simply take it out. We don't need a rationale from George Tenet as to why to take it out." But Condoleezza, how would you even know what to take out if you didn't read the memo?

CIA director George Tenet did Rice one better. Although on January 27, 2003, the day before Bush's State of the Union address, he was given a draft of it at a National Security Council meeting, he claims he never read it, so did not know the sixteen words about Hussein trying to buy uranium from Niger were in it. Tenet later acknowledged in July of 2003 that his CIA, however, had "vetted" the speech, and apologized for himself and his agency. "These sixteen words should never have been included" in Bush's speech, he said.

Also in July, there was another mea culpa, this one by Stephen Hadley, Rice's number one deputy, who fell on his sword for the Bush administration. He admitted to reporters that he had read two memos the CIA sent to his office at the National Security Council on October 5 and 6 (the one on October 5 addressed to him and the one on the 6th addressed directly to Rice, a copy being sent to the White House Situation Room) before Bush's speech on October 7. Bush's chief speech writer, Michael Gerson, received copies of both memos, Hadley said. The memos, Hadley acknowledged, stated that the Niger information was no good and the reference to it should be removed. However, Hadley claimed that by the time of Bush's State of the Union address less than four months later he had forgotten about what he had read, and he took full blame for the incident. "I should have asked that the 16 words be taken out" of Bush's address, he said.  Note that Hadley's admission proves the falsity (and almost assuredly the lie) of Rice's statement that prior to Bush's State of the Union speech, "no one in our circles" knew about the problems with the Niger reference. I mean, if Hadley, Rice's chief deputy at the National Security Council, and the White House Situation Room were not in  Rice's circle, who was? 

If you believe that Rice never read the CIA's October memo sent directly to her, and never learned, from her chief deputy Hadley or anyone else, that doubt had been cast on the Niger claim (if, during their workday, Rice and Hadley didn't discuss extremely important things like this, then what did they talk about?), and you believe that Tenet never bothered to read a draft of Bush's State of the Union address which was given him to read, and Hadley (a man known for his attention to detail), just a few months after reading about the CIA's challenging the validity of the Niger claim, had completely forgotten about it, and Bush, after seeing the Niger reference deleted from his Cincinnati speech, never asked and was told why, then you are probably the type who would believe someone who told you he had seen a man jumping away from his own shadow, that Frenchmen were no longer drinking wine.

The truth was that the Bush administration, desperately trying to find a way to include the Niger reference in Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, finally found it by simply quoting and embracing a British intelligence report on September 24, 2002, that Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger, a report that the CIA warned the British should not be given credence. In closed-door testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in July of 2003, Alan Foley, a CIA expert on weapons of mass destruction, testified that Robert G. Joseph, a senior adviser to Rice, faxed a draft of the president's State of the Union speech with the Niger reference in it to the CIA days before the speech. Foley told Joseph that the Niger reference should be taken out. Joseph then suggested alternative language be used attributing the Niger reference not to U.S. intelligence but to the British report, and Foley assented.

Of course, you have to know (I'm being sarcastic here) that although Joseph was a chief adviser to Rice, he was running off completely on his own on this, and his superiors, Hadley and Rice, had no idea what he was up to. That is why when the entire Bush administration was later embarrassed by the erroneous Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union address, and they learned it was all Joseph's fault, he was reprimanded and fired. Right. He was not, of course, since he was only a spear-carrier for Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Hadley. And if you fire an emissary spear-carrier, you have to worry, don't you, about  his spilling the beans in an expose book.

As Colonel Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, said about Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al., "They were just relentless. You would take language out" of a speech and they would find some way to "stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique."

"All of these things," Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) said, referring to the Niger nuclear threat issue, "simply were not true. The [Bush] administration knew that, but they did not share that with me or anyone else in Congress that I know of."

Because of what Bush said in his State of the Union address, America could only think that there was a strong possibility that Hussein was planning a nuclear attack on us, exactly what Bush and his people wanted them to believe to build up their claim of self-defense (a pre-emptive attack) in going to war. The information was phony and the Bush administration had been told it was phony, but Bush and his people decided to lie to the American public to drag them into a horrendous war, one in which over 100,000 people have died horrible deaths.

Has any American president, ever, engaged in such monumentally criminal and deadly activity? No. Indeed, I don't believe any other president would even have dreamed of doing such a thing.

If all of the above, enough to enrage a saint, doesn't make your blood boil, it's only because you are a bloodless wonder, and belong as a feature exhibit at the Smithsonian.

***

Before I move on to a discussion of the second lie Bush foisted upon the American people (that Hussein was connected with Al Qaeda and 9/11), I want to discuss another point that fortifies the conclusion that Bush's war in Iraq had nothing to do with self-defense. The question that presents itself is, Why was Bush in such an incredible rush to go to  war? The UN inspectors were making substantial progress and Hussein was giving them unlimited access. So why the rush? Surely he and his advisers couldn't possibly have truly believed that Hussein would launch a nuclear attack on us any day. Everyone knew that even assuming the worst -- that Hussein was working on developing a nuclear capability -- he wasn't even remotely close to having nuclear weapons yet. As former general Anthony Zinni pointed out, if indeed Hussein was a threat, "containment [of him by inspections] was working remarkably well." So again, why was Bush acting like a child who just had to get his hands on that piece of candy?

It would be difficult to come up with better evidence than the following that Bush wanted to go to war at all costs, that he was not acting in self-defense, and he was lying to the country when he said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that made him an imminent threat to this country. In self-defense one kills because he has to in order to survive, not because he wants to kill his assailant and is searching for an opportunity to do so. Yet it clearly appears Bush was doing the latter.

With over 100 UN inspectors swarming all over Iraq from November 27, 2002, up to March of 2003 to ascertain if Hussein had any WMD [8] and reporting that after 731 inspections they had not found anything, surely Bush had to know that Hussein wouldn't try, right under the inspectors' noses, to develop any nuclear capacity or other weapons of mass destruction to use against us, and he couldn't do so even if he wanted to since he'd be discovered. Bush also had to know that if the United Nations' inspectors ultimately confirmed that Hussein had no such deadly weapons, and the inspectors stayed in Iraq to make sure Hussein never rearmed, he (Bush) could achieve his supposed objective of eliminating Iraq as a threat to the security of this country without the draconian resort to war. Wouldn't that have been better than having thousands of Americans and Iraqis die? Yes, if your objective truly was only to insure that Iraq no longer posed a threat to this country. But no, if Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction were just a pretext used by Bush to go to war.

On March 7, 2003, less than three weeks before Bush invaded Iraq, Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector in Iraq, addressed the UN Security Council. He said that since Hussein, in a letter to Blix, had invited UN weapons instructors back into his country in late November of 2002 (almost undoubtedly because just the previous month in Bush's speech to the nation from Cincinnati, it was obvious to Hussein that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq and he was justifying it on the allegation that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction), his inspection teams had faced "relatively few difficulties," the most notable of which was that Iraq, as it had since 1991 after the Gulf War, objected to U.S. helicopters and aerial surveillance planes flying over Iraq in the "no-fly" zones. However, Blix said, Iraq's objections to this "were overcome." He said that "at this juncture [March 7, 2003] we are able to perform professional, no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase [our] aerial surveillance."

The only remaining problem was that Iraq was unable to provide documentation on all the illicit weapons it claimed it had destroyed.  Still, when it directed the UN inspectors to some of the destruction sites, many destroyed bombs were found by the inspectors upon excavation and, Blix said, "samples have been taken." Also, Blix said, "The Iraqi side seems to have encouraged interviewees not to request the presence of Iraqi officials" to help ensure the "absence of undue influence." On a related matter, Blix said that Iraq contended its Al-Samoud 2 missiles were within the permissible range set by the UN  Security Council. When Blix and his people disagreed, Iraq agreed to start destroying all these missiles, and Blix said that as of March 7, the date of his address to the UN, "34 Al Samoud 2 missiles, including four training missiles, two combat warheads, one launcher, and five engines, had been destroyed. [9]

Blix, a taciturn and methodical Swedish constitutional lawyer, said that "after a period of somewhat reluctant cooperation there's been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side" to resolve all disarmament issues, and that these initiatives "can be seen as active, even proactive." Blix added that "no evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found" by his inspectors and "no underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far." How much time would it take to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks? He said that for his inspectors to absolutely confirm that Iraq  had no WMD "will not take years, nor weeks, but months." He noted that even after there had been "verified disarmament" in accordance with UN resolutions, "a sustained inspection and monitoring system is to remain in place ... to give confidence and to strike an alarm if signs were seen of the revival of any proscribed weapons programs."

And Mohamed El Baradei, the chief UN nuclear inspector in Iraq who was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that "we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq."

To anyone who did not want to go to war in Iraq unless necessary, this report from Blix and ElBaradei could not have been better news. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of one thousand people who wanted, if possible, to avoid the horror and bloodshed of a terrible war in Iraq, would have been extremely encouraged by the Blix and EIBaradei reports, and wouldn't have dreamed of invading Iraq in a few weeks. Instead, Bush ordered Blix, EIBaradei, and their inspectors out of Iraq,  refusing to grant them the requested time they needed to confirm the  absence of WMD. 

You see, when Blix and his UN inspectors reported that they were unable to find any weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq, and that within months the inspectors would probably announce they were certain no such weapons existed, in a very real sense the United Nations inspectors paradoxically became Bush's greatest adversaries, the biggest obstacle to his desire, his passion, to go to war. In other words, if the UN inspectors confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, this would have robbed Bush of his main argument for war, a war he wanted to fight at all costs. Yet when George Bush told the nation on the evening of March 19, 2003, that the war in Iraq had started, he had the breath-stealing audacity to say that "our nation enters this conflict reluctantly." He paved the way for this obvious lie by using the following identical words in speeches on January 28, February 10, and February 20, "If war is forced upon us ... " At this point, right and wrong had as much chance of surviving as a cow in a Chicago stockyard.

As Hans Blix would later say (on the Today Show, March 15, 2004) about the Bush administration: "I think they had a set mind. They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons of mass destruction ... They were wrong. There wasn't anything." Earlier, on February 24, 2004, Blix told People's Daily: "The Americans and British created facts where there were no facts at all. The Americans needed [Iraq to have] weapons of mass destruction to justify war."

Obviously, even before Blix presented his findings to the United Nations on March 7, 2003, Bush and his people were already completely aware, as everyone else was, that Blix and his inspectors were not finding any WMD. So Bush and his gang came up with a new demand, one that was not only beyond the power of the UN inspectors to satisfy, but one they virtually knew Hussein would never comply with, thus guaranteeing the war Bush wanted so desperately. Since Hussein was complying with UN orders to allow UN inspectors total access, and the inspectors were carrying out their mission effectively and finding nothing, on February 28, 2003, just three weeks before the war started, Bush suddenly raised the bar for avoiding war. Although the term "regime change" normally suggests a change of leadership, new leaders, Bush had said back on October 21, 2002, that "regime change" in Iraq could result if Hussein merely gave up all his weapons of mass destruction. "If he [Hussein] were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations," Bush said, "that in itself will signal that the regime has changed." Earlier, on October 7, 2002, Bush said, "By taking these steps to disarm, the Iraqi regime has an opportunity to avoid conflict ... Taking these steps would change the nature of the Iraqi regime itself. His [Hussein's] only choice is full compliance [with the UN resolution to disarm]." In other words, if Hussein complied with the UN resolution (1441) to disarm (something it has been confirmed he had already done way back in 1991 following the Persian Gulf War), he himself could survive since, as Bush said, a regime change would have taken place through Hussein's "change." It was, per Bush, Hussein's "only choice."

But on February 28, seeing that Hussein had apparently already complied with the UN resolution, Bush suddenly said that he would only not go to war if Hussein himself departed from Iraq for good, the condition the White House war-mongers just about knew Hussein would be unwilling to comply with.

To summarize, when it became clear that the whole purpose of Bush's prewar campaign -- to get Hussein to disarm -- was being (or already had been) met, the despicable man from Crawford and his people, to save their war, came up with a demand they had never once made before -- that Hussein resign and leave Iraq.

In a speech to the nation on the Monday evening of March 17, 2003, Bush said that "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict."  Hussein stayed put, and U.S. planes started dropping bombs on Baghdad on March 20, 2003, at 5:30 a.m. Baghdad time (9:30 p.m. EST, March 19). Bush had his war, and over 100,000 people would pay for it with their blood and lives.

***

I would like to raise one other matter -- the effort of France to take this nation back from the brink of a catastrophic war -- before getting to a discussion of Bush's second lie.

When France (as well as Germany, Russia, China, and most other nations that were members of the UN) refused to go along with Bush's rush to war, many insipid Americans started viciously attacking France verbally, even going so far as to boycott French food and restaurants. And even after it was discovered that Hussein had no WMD and was not involved in 9/11, these meathead Americans continued their denunciation of France. But the reality is that France never opposed the notion of war with Iraq. Responsibly seeking to avoid, if possible, the inevitable horror of armed conflict, it only opposed Bush's mad and irresponsible rush to war in Iraq. Such a war, French president Jacques Chirac feared, would outrage Arab and Islamic public  opinion and "create a large number of little Bin Ladens." In a joint interview with CBS and CNN in Paris on March 16, 2003, three days before Bush invaded Iraq, Chirac said, "France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. But we just feel there is another option, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war. And we should pursue it until we've come to a dead end, but that isn't the case." [10]

In other words, if we did come to a dead end after exhausting all nonviolent options, then he would not oppose war as a last resort. (Earlier, on February 5, 2003, Dominique de Villepin, the silver-haired French foreign minister, told the UN, "For now, the inspection process has not been completely explored. The use of force can only be a final recourse.") What other "more normal way" did Chirac have in mind?  He spelled out the obvious: "The UN inspectors have said on several occasions that it [confirming whether or not Iraq had WMD] was not a  matter of years, but not a matter of days either -- that it was a question of months. Is it one month, two months? I am ready for any agreement on this point that would have the backing of the inspectors."

Literally hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis (now in their graves or otherwise disabled for life and suffering incalculably) were alive and leading normal lives at the time Chirac made this appeal to reason. But reason only visits those who welcome it. What was the Bush administration's response to Chirac's proposal for a deadline of possibly one or two months before going to war? Vice President Dick Cheney told CBS's Face the Nation on March 16, 2003, that "these are just further delaying tactics." You know, let's get on with the show, though Cheney was a no-show during the Vietnam War when it was his generation's time to fight.

THE SECOND LIE GEORGE BUSH TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

With respect to the second lie that Bush told the American public in the run-up to war -- his unmistakable innuendo and implication [11] that Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda in 9/11 -- the evidence against him is overwhelming. And very unfortunately for Bush, unlike his first lie, he doesn't even have the Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling Enron defense (unsuccessful) that everything was carried out by people in his administration, and he had no idea what was going on. You know, like the guy at the bordello who says, "I only play the piano here. I have no idea what goes on upstairs." Bush can't make this argument on his second lie because we have proof from Bush himself that when he strongly suggested that Hussein was involved in 9/11, he knew he was lying. On the evening of September 20, 2001, just nine days after 9/11 and long before he started implying that Hussein was involved in 9/11, he told Congress and the American people: "Americans are asking: 'Who attacked our country?' The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda." Not one word about Hussein and Iraq.

As reported in the March 14, 2003, edition of the Christian Science Monitor: "Polling data show that right after September 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein." Yet we know that it wasn't long before the majority of Americans (eventually, as high as around 70% in an August 7-11 Washington Post poll -- 62% of  Democrats, 80% of Republicans, and 67% of Independents) believed that Hussein was involved in 9/11. If it wasn't Bush and his people who were responsible for this suddenly widespread misconception, then who was it? You? Me? Danny DeVito?

Indeed, Bush and his people made their message that Hussein was involved so unambiguously clear, and did such a good job of convincing the American public of their lies, that after five years of revelations and the findings of the 9/11 Commission as well as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Hussein was not involved, and not the tiniest speck of evidence surfaced showing any umbilical cord between Hussein and 9/11, in fact, after Bush himself finally admitted on September 17, 2003, that there was "no evidence" of Hussein being involved, and said at a news conference on August 21, 2006, that  Hussein had "nothing" to do with 9/11, a September 2006 national CNN poll showed, unbelievably, that 43% of Americans still believed that Hussein was involved! And as previously indicated, a June 2006 poll of American soldiers in Iraq showed that an astonishing 90% of them thought Hussein was involved in 9/11, that they were fighting to bring about justice and to protect our country from further attacks.

"Dad," a young soldier said to his father in a phone conversation before he was killed in Iraq, "if we don't fight them here, we will fight them on the streets of America. They proved that on 9/11. We don't want IEDs [roadside bombs] and suicide bombers on the streets of America."

So we have the grotesque spectacle of young Americans fighting bravely and dying in Iraq thinking they are fighting the people responsible for 9/11, and Bush, knowing there is "no evidence" at all that Hussein or Iraq was involved in 9/11, seeing to it that the soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq were never informed of this fact.

If in fact Bush lied to this country in taking us to war, these young American soldiers, from their graves, cry out for justice. And their surviving loved ones, who will suffer unimaginably the rest of their lives over what happened to their son, father, or brother, cry out for justice.  If they don't, it can only be because they are unaware of Bush's monumental crime, unaware that Bush's lies led directly to the death of their loved ones.

Stephen Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said before the war that "the [Bush] administration has succeeded in creating a sense that there is some connection between September 11 and Saddam Hussein." Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, studied Bush's speeches and concluded: "Clearly, he's using language to imply a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11th.  There is specific manipulation of language here to imply a connection," and that in Iraq "we have gone to war with the terrorists who attacked us." And Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D West Virginia), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said  that the White House led the American public into believing there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11 in order to build support for the war in Iraq."

Let me just give you one representative example of how much most Americans were deceived by Bush. Wilson Sekzer, a retired New York City cop, lost his son Jason, who was working on the 105th story of Tower One on 9/11. He told Parade magazine in 2006: "After 9/11, I thought, I gotta do something. Somebody has to pay for 9/11. I want the enemy dead. I want to see their bodies stacked up for taking my son. That's when President Bush said 'Iraq.' [Obviously, he couldn't remember precisely what Bush said, but Bush's message was clear and that's why Sekzer formed the impression he did.] On the basis of that, I thought we should go in there and kick Iraq's ass. And I wanted Jason to have a part in it. And that's when I said, 'Put his name on a bomb."' (On April 1, 2003, a 2,000-pound bomb inscribed with the words "in loving memory of Jason Sekzer" was dropped on Iraq by a marine aircraft.) Later, when Sekzer was watching TV and saw Bush, in response to a reporter's question, saying, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," he recalled saying, "'What did he just say?' I mean, I almost jumped out of my chair. I said, 'What is he talking about? If Saddam didn't  have anything to do with 9/11, then why did we go in there?' I'm from the old school. Certain people walk on water. The President of the United States is one of them. It's a terrible thing if someone like me can't trust the President."

Bush had a mandate from the Wilson Sekzers of America to go after the terrorists responsible for 9/11. Instead, he decided to go after those who were not responsible, essentially abandoning the war on terrorism to go after Saddam Hussein, and over 100,000 people have died because of it. Yet up to this point, no one has brought Bush to justice. Or even tried to.

Note that Bush knew he couldn't ever say straight out that Hussein was involved in 9/11 because not only did he know he wasn't (as we have seen, Bush's own counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, told  him the day after 9/11 that U.S. intelligence knew that only Al Qaeda was involved in 9/11, not Hussein), but he knew if he said this, even the mostly mindless media would automatically ask, "What evidence do you have, Mr. President, that Hussein was involved?" and he wouldn't be able to say anything. So Bush and his people got around the media and gave the American public the same, identical message by innuendo, and they succeeded.

But the subtle effort to make this same point by innuendo is itself circumstantial evidence of the Bush administration's intent to deceive the American people into war. In other words, this isn't a case of a  bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters, and they just happened to accidentally come up with these words. It took thought, calculation, and a conscious effort to deceive (all of which would have been unnecessary if Bush and his people were being honest and straightforward with the American people) on the part of Bush, Cheney, and Rice to use words that never directly stated their position, but got across the very same identical message linking Hussein to 9/11 that they wanted to convey.

Is there any evidence, other than by inference, of what I am saying here? Yes. On March 20, 2006, after a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, a questioner in the audience asked Bush how he could maintain his credibility with the American public when, among other assertions he made before the war that turned out to be false, he had claimed "that Iraq was sponsoring the terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11"?  Bush was quick to say that he had never made a "direct" connection between Hussein and 9/11, then added, as he blatantly reframed the question to make it far more narrow: 'I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack on America." So this was all a matter of careful calculation on the part of Bush and his people.

Remarkably, even after Bush admitted, but only in response to the reporter's question on September 17, 2003, that he had "no evidence" that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, he audaciously continued, in the months and years that followed, to clearly suggest, without stating it outright, that Hussein was involved in 9/11. Not that we needed it, but Bush's admission that there was no evidence connecting Hussein with 9/11 proves beyond all doubt that every time he suggested thereafter that Hussein was involved, he was deliberately lying to the American people to gain their support for continuing the war.

If Bush is intelligent, he hides it very well. However, he is bright enough to think that giving a message by innuendo instead of flatly declaring it might afford him more protection for his lie. After the 9/11 Commission found that there was no connection between Hussein and 9/11, Bush told the media on June 17, 2004: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda." Mr. Bush, I'd like to see how far you would get with this position if you were being prosecuted for murder before a jury by a competent prosecutor.

These are just a few examples among many of Bush unequivocally suggesting that Hussein was involved in 9/11 when he knew this to be untrue. Consider, for instance, what he said when he was declaring victory over Iraq in his "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Dressed in a green flight suit and, like a war pilot, holding his helmet under his left arm, Bush emerged strutting from a Viking military jet. He was surrounded by adulating servicemen and women who cheered lustily for him during his speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier. (When you're a draft dodger like Bush was in the Vietnam War, how do you muster the guts to be a part of the heroic imagery that Karl Rove put together for Bush that day?) Addressing the 9/11 attacks on American soil, Bush said, "With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got." In other words, Hussein helped Al Qaeda take down the Twin Towers so we went after Hussein and Iraq.

The following year, in Bush's January 20, 2004, State of the Union address he said, "After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got." In an Independence Day speech in West Virginia on July 4, 2005, Bush said, "The war we are fighting [in Iraq and Afghanistan] came to our shores on September the 11, 2001. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people ... We will bring our enemies to justice." On February 24, 2006, in talking to the American Legion in Washington, D.C., about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush expressly said, "We're taking the fight to those that attacked us." There is only one way to interpret this: Iraq was involved in 9/11. What other interpretation can you possibly put on these words?

Anyone with an ounce of brains would know that Hussein would never have attacked or participated in any attack on the United States.  Despite Bush and Cheney lying through their teeth when they led the American people to believe this, [12] something happened in December of 2003 and June of 2004 that conclusively proves, all by itself, that the Bush administration never believed for a moment that Hussein was involved in 9/11 and it was all a lie when they strongly implied that he was. As you recall, on December 13, 2003, Hussein was captured by American soldiers in Iraq. Two days later, Bush all but said that it would be the Iraqi people, not America, who would mete out justice to Hussein. And on June 15, 2004, the Bush administration formally announced that it was turning Hussein over to the legal custody of Iraq to be prosecuted for crimes against the Iraqi people.

No one on radio or TV that I know of, not even liberal newspaper columnists who routinely savaged Bush, said to the Bush administration, either in December or June, "What? Something's wrong here.  You've been leading us to believe [because people understandably took what Bush said as the equivalent of his having said this] for over two years that Hussein was involved in 9/11. Aren't you going to bring him back to America to be tried on charges of murdering 3,000 Americans?" Turning Hussein over to the Iraqis for crimes he committed in Iraq, not bringing him to the United States for crimes he committed in the United States, was an unequivocal admission that the Bush administration knew (not just that, at the moment, they hadn't found any evidence) he had nothing to do with 9/11. I kept waiting to hear someone say this, but not a peep, from anyone. 

Actually; Bush didn't really have to say one single word suggesting that Hussein was involved in 9/11 to convince the American public that he was. Why? Because his entire buildup to the war in Iraq was predicated on 9/11. If there had been no 9/11 there would have been no war in Iraq, certainly not one the American people would have approved of. So when Bush kept telling the American people that Hussein was a threat to this nation's security, and in the very same speech juxtaposed his words with constant references to 9/11, it couldn't have been more normal and understandable for the American people to infer from the subliminal message that Hussein must have been involved in 9/11.

For instance, Linda Feldman, staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, in writing about Bush's prime-time national press conference on March 6, 2003, said, "President Bush mentioned September 11 eight times, and referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with September 11." Since Bush, then, in his bully pulpit, was connecting the war he was so fervently urging with 9/11 and terrorism, and since any rational person would assume that you only go to war with those terrorists who were responsible for 9/11, how many American people in the pews would be apt to parse  Bush's words and reach a different conclusion -- that Bush was up to no good?

Bush had an additional and very effective way to convince the American people that Hussein was involved in 9/11, and that was simply to lie to them by alleging Hussein had a close relationship with Al Qaeda. "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. They're equally as bad. They work in concert," Bush said on September 25, 2002. "We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United  States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," and that "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said in his speech to the nation on October 7, 2002. "We know he's got ties with Al Qaeda," Bush said about Hussein on November 1, 2002.  The Bush people correctly reasoned that if one believed these assertions, it would not take an Olympian leap of logic to conclude that Hussein most likely joined with Al Qaeda on 9/11. Particularly when most Americans already viewed Hussein as a villainous figure capable of nefarious deeds.

And again, to make its point of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration's modus operandi was to either flat-out lie, or present as true, evidence that they knew was highly questionable. An example was the report that surfaced soon after 9/11 that Czech security officials had been told by an informant that Mohammed Atta, an Al Qaeda terrorist who flew one of the highjacked planes into one of the Twin Towers on September 11, met in Prague on April 9, 2001, with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence agent stationed in Prague. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission investigated the matter and concluded that the meeting never took place. They learned that Czech officials were unable to confirm the story, and that the sole source for the story made his report to them after it had been reported in the Czech media that Atta had been in Prague a year earlier. What's more, they learned that the FBI had a  photograph of Atta taken by a bank surveillance camera showing him inside a bank in Virginia on April 4, 2001, and his cell phone records showed his phone was used in Florida on April 6, 9 (the day he was supposed to be in Prague), 10, and 11.

The Bush administration ignored all of this evidence and continued to cite the original, unconfirmed "I saw Elvis and he is still alive" report to Czech officials to lead Americans to believe before the war that Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda in 9/11.

Another example concerns Shaykh al Libi, a top member of Al Qaeda's leadership who was captured in Pakistan in 2001. Libi told U.S. intelligence debriefers that Iraq was training members of Al Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But the Department of Defense's DIA wrote in a February 2002 report that Libi's claims lacked details and information as to the Iraqis involved, the specific weapons used, and the location where the training took place. The DIA report went on to say it was probable that Libi was "intentionally misleading the debriefers ... Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios that he knows will retain their interest." (The 9/11 Commission in 2004 concluded  that Iraq had not been training Al Qaeda in the use of illicit weapons.)

But even though the Bush administration had been warned that Libi's story was very questionable, they went ahead and presented it as a fact to the American people. As we've seen, Bush did so in his October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. And in Powell's speech to the United Nations he cited Libi's information as being "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda in the use of illicit weapons. Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other members of the Bush administration  continued to cite Libi's claims in speeches and appearances all over America, helping the Bush administration to convince Americans that Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, even after the 9/11 Commission said in June of 2004 that their investigation found "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States" and there did not appear to be any "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Bush and Cheney continued to declare the opposite, Bush saying categorically that Iraq and Al Qaeda had "terrorist connections" and Cheney saying that "the evidence is overwhelming" of an Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship. Bush, being as lazy and as unknowledgeable as he is, probably couldn't have even picked out where Iraq was on an unmarked map before he decided to invade the country. Yet he apparently knew more about what was going on between Iraq and Al Qaeda than the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which based its conclusion on months of investigation and interviews with U.S. intelligence agents (including agents from the FBI and CIA) as well as on examination of the classified reports of these agencies.

Though all of official Washington already knew there was no connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda, on September 8, 2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its long-awaited report in which it said that it had found no evidence that Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda or that he had provided safe harbor to the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which again directly contradicted claims made by the Bush administration in its lead-up to the war. To the contrary, the committee concluded that "Saddam did not trust Al Qaeda or any other radical Islamist group and did not want to cooperate with them, ... refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support."

Indeed, a document written by Hussein (and in his possession at the time of his capture) directed his Baathist Party supporters not to join forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. He believed the latter were only eager for a holy war against the West, which was totally different from the agenda of his Baathist  Party to recapture power in Iraq. And Bin Laden had the same opposition to working with Hussein. According to a CIA classified report, several years before 9/11 Al Qaeda leaders had broached the possibility to Bin Laden of working with Iraq, but Bin Laden immediately rejected the proposal.

The reason why neither Hussein nor Bin Laden wanted to have anything to do with each other is that they were as incompatible as a mouse and a hungry cat. Hussein, whose governance in Iraq was secular and subjugated his people, and who worshiped vulgarian opulence, was the antithesis of Bin Laden, a religious fanatic who is violently opposed to all Mideastern autocracies (believing, he said, that they have "enslaved" their people) and lives like a Bedouin shepherd. Yet the Bush administration shamelessly tried to convince Americans that Hussein and Bin Laden were working closely together to destroy America.

Despite the Bush administration's claim of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the Senate Select Committee said that U.S. intelligence had been able to confirm only one single meeting -- in 1995 in Sudan between Bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence officer -- but nothing had come of it. The report also said the committee learned that at one point before the war Hussein was warned by his intelligence chief "that U.S. intelligence was attempting to fabricate connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda" to justify the invasion.

As for Zarqawi, the committee found that although he was in Baghdad for seven months in 2002, Hussein was unaware of his presence in the country, and when he later became aware of it, ordered his intelligence services to capture Zarqawi. The committee quoted a classified CIA report that concluded that Iraq "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."  (In Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he mentioned Zarqawi no fewer than twenty times, and said Iraq "today harbors a deadly terrorist network" headed by Zarqawi.)

Did this Senate report, which came out on September 8, 2006, stop the lies of the Bush administration? Not in the least. Condoleezza Rice, just two days later, said on Fox News that "there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda" before the war. One almost gets the impression that the mantra adopted by Bush and his inner circle was "Never admit anything, ever." You know, like the guy who is caught by his wife in flagrante delicto with another woman, and says to her, quoting the late comedian Richard Pryor: "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

If Bush and Cheney have any evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection that hasn't already been thoroughly discredited, what is it?  Are they too busy (Bush, too busy?) to provide the evidence? How dare they continue to lie to the American public when they have no support for their position from either the 9/11 Commission, the U.S.  Senate Intelligence Committee, or even their own FBI and CIA? Yet because of their persistent lies to the nation, as late as July of 2006, a National Harris poll found that an astonishing 64 percent of Americans believed that Hussein had had a strong connection with Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.

I'll say this about Bush and Cheney: Although they are both unusually small men in every sense of the word other than physical size, they have the gonads of 10,000 elephants. They are also, in my estimation, criminals who should be prosecuted for murder. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert says that what Bush and his people have done is "one of the great deceptions in the history of American government." I'd modify that to say it is the greatest, not one of the greatest.  I mean, what even comes remotely close?

It couldn't be any clearer that although Bush may have believed (like nearly all Americans did) that Hussein had at least some WMD, he knew that Hussein did not constitute an imminent threat to the security of this country, and not being able to make his case for the war with the truth, he and his people decided to manipulate the facts and tell one lie and distortion after another to the American people to get their support for the war.

How successful were Bush and his band of criminals in convincing Americans that America should invade Iraq? Despite the fact that we know Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and no connection with 9/11 or Al Qaeda, a national Gallup poll on March 14-15, 2003, just days before Bush invaded Iraq on March 19, showed that an incredible 78 percent of Americans were in favor of the invasion.  Bush's lies were so successful that the majority of Americans (54 percent) were in favor of invading Iraq as soon as militarily possible even if the United Nations Security Council specifically rejected a resolution (still being sought at the time by the Bush administration, and never given) authorizing the invasion. That's how effective Bush had been in scaring the living daylights out of the American people with his lies that Hussein was about to attack us, or help someone else attack us, with deadly force.

When we're talking about national security and matters of war and peace, American citizens have every right to expect and demand from their president the very highest standard of truthfulness. Instead, Bush and his people, like the lowest of common criminals, gave the American people one fabrication and distortion after another. For Bush to argue, under these circumstances, that he acted in self-defense would be an extremely weak and specious argument that no intelligent jury would ever buy. But as weak as the self-defense argument is here, unfortunately for him it would be the only substantive argument he could even make to the charges against him. What other legal defense would be available to him? Not guilty by reason of insanity? Or since Bush has suggested that he believes he is following God's will, the God defense?

If there is any reader who still has a small question in his or her mind whether Bush acted in self-defense, what I am about to tell you should dispel this small doubt of yours. On January 31, 2003, less than two months before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, he had a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office with British prime minister Tony Blair and six of Bush's and Blair's top aides. Bush's aides who attended the meeting were National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice, and Andrew Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Blair's aides were Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide, and David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser.

In a five-page memo stamped "extremely sensitive" dated January 31, 2003, that summarized the discussion at the meeting (a summary the Bush administration has never challenged), Manning wrote that Bush and Blair expressed their doubts that any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons would ever be found in Iraq, and that there was tension between Bush and Blair over finding some justification for the war that would be acceptable to other nations. Bush was so worried about the failure of the UN inspectors to find hard evidence against Hussein that, unbelievably, he talked about three possible ways, Manning wrote,  to "provoke a confrontation" with Hussein, one of which, Bush said, was to fly "U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq,  [falsely] painted in U.N. colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions and that would justify war.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that? Bush is telling the American people that this nation is in imminent danger of a deadly attack from Hussein so we have to strike first, that we are being forced into war. But behind closed doors, this morally small and characterless man was talking about how to provoke Hussein into a war. The very essence of self-defense is that someone is about to kill you and you strike first only to save your life. The last person in the world whom someone acting in self-defense would try to provoke is the person he's in deathly fear of, someone who is about to kill him. If Bush actually felt America was in imminent danger of great harm from Hussein or those he was associated with, the thought of provoking  Hussein into doing something that would justify going to war against him would never have entered Bush's mind.

Bush's argument of self-defense would easily fail in any murder prosecution against him. Indeed, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, said at the famous July 23, 2002 (before the war), meeting of British prime minister Tony Blair's war cabinet (which was reported on in the aforementioned Downing Street memo) that with respect to a war in Iraq, "self-defense was not a legal basis for military action." So going in, Bush and Blair were aware that the war had nothing at all to do with the "preemptive strike" (self-defense) they were selling to the people of their respective countries, the majority of Americans buying the absurd notion, the majority of British citizens rejecting the obvious fraud out of hand.

Bush could only come to the conclusion that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of this country if his lead intelligence  agency, the CIA, told him so. But we know that not only didn't any CIA document say this, the CIA's 2002 NIE report said the exact opposite. In fact, CIA director George Tenet himself said that at no time before the war did the CIA say that Iraq was an imminent threat to this nation. We "never said," Tenet asserted on February 5, 2004, that "there was an imminent threat" from Iraq. Moreover, the notion is so preposterous on its face that, get this, Bush and his people never even bothered to talk about it. Tenet, in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, acknowledged that "there was never a serious debate that I know of within the [Bush] administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." But if the whole purpose of the war was to preempt Hussein, beat him to the punch, wouldn't Bush and Cheney automatically talk with their people about the fear that Hussein might strike America within the near future? Since that is all they talked about to the American people to scare them into supporting the war, why didn't they talk about it amongst themselves? Because they knew there was no threat. It was all b-s-, moonshine, a lie.

Let's never lose sight of the fact that in the circumstances existing from 9/11 up to Bush's invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, President Clinton -- or Al Gore and John Kerry if they had become president -- would never have invaded Iraq. Civilized people don't do uncivilized things.

For example, we know Bush's father would never have invaded Iraq. When, after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, he had a much better opportunity to invade Iraq than Bush had in 2003, he said no. And on March 14, 2003, just five days before Bush invaded Iraq, former president Clinton said, "I'm for regime change too, but ... we don't invade everybody whose regime we want to change." Only these moral mongrels in the Bush administration could have done what they did, and thousands upon thousands of human beings have died horrible deaths because of it.

What George Bush and his accomplices did is so monumentally base, so extraordinarily wrong, dishonorable, and criminal, that I'm not gifted enough as a writer to describe it. In view of the ghastly, incalculable consequences of their act and the greatness of their sin, it would take a Tolstoy, a Shakespeare, a Hemingway to give people an illuminating glimpse into the darkness of their souls.

But I suspect that a great writer would be trying to give verbal flesh to the fact that Bush and his group had absolutely no regard, no respect for the millions of Americans they knowingly deceived into war. That Bush had no appreciation for, nor sense of responsibility to, the exalted and towering office he occupied, no concern at all about a betrayal of trust unparalleled in the recorded annals of American history.

As indicated, Bush's expected main defense to the murder charge would be that he acted in self-defense. Bush would have to use this argument at his trial since this defense (the Bush doctrine of preemption) was the main argument he used to convince Americans to support his war. "We must do everything we can to disarm this man before he hurts one single American," Bush said at a campaign rally on October 5, 2002. Indeed, in his report to Congress on the first day of the war, March 19, 2003, Bush said the United States was invading Iraq "in the exercise of its inherent right of self-defense." How could he then, at his trial, take the position that he was not speaking the truth when he told the American people and Congress he was acting in self-defense? That the truth was that he was not acting in self-defense. Such a position at his trial would be tantamount to a confession of guilt.

Would that mean that Bush would have the legal burden of proving he acted in self-defense? No. The burden of proof in a criminal trial always remains with the prosecution, and therefore, Bush's prosecutor would have the burden of proving that Bush did not act in self-defense. But the prosecution's burden of proof would only be to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt. I am very confident that a competent prosecutor could do this in a prosecution of Bush for murder, any rational jury concluding that Iraq was a war of choice, not self-defense.

Although self-defense would be the heart of Bush's defense, I can just about guarantee you that among his secondary defenses would be what is called in the criminal law the "character defense," not a defense that normally carries much weight at a criminal trial. Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. would call "character witnesses" to the stand to testify to their good character. The witnesses would say they knew the defendants well and the defendants did not have the traits of character inherent in the murder charge brought against them, i.e., that of being partial to violence (taking us to war), which the prosecutor, I assume, would not allege, and that of being deceptive and dishonest (taking us to war on a lie). I imagine the prosecutor could and would call a number of witnesses to challenge the defense's character witnesses on this latter point.

The essence of the character defense, then, would be that the defendants Bush, Cheney, and Rice simply did not possess the defect and absence of character that would have allowed them to do what the prosecutor alleged they did. Concomitantly, the defense lawyers would undoubtedly also argue, "We're talking about the president of the United States here, the highest constitutional and elected officer in this great land of ours, as well as the vice president of the United States, and the president's national security adviser. On its face, it makes no sense that people of this enormous stature in our society would have done the horrendous things that Mr. [prosecutor's last name] is claiming they did." And if I were the prosecutor in a situation like this, I would say; "Fine. Now let's look at the evidence. And when we look at the evidence, not just some or most of it, but all of it points irresistibly to the conclusion that these three defendants did, indeed, deliberately take this nation into a terrible, terrible war under false pretenses."

THE MATTER OF JURISDICTION AND BUSH AT TRIAL

On the issue of jurisdiction to prosecute Bush, the best venue would be the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., with the prosecutor being the attorney general of the United States through his Department of justice. The statutory authority for prosecuting Bush for conspiracy to commit murder and for first (or second) degree murder would be 18 U.S.C. §§'s 1117 (Conspiracy) and 1111 (Murder).

I can just about tell you what Bush's advisers will tell him if the position I am taking in this book reaches him, if in no other way than by a reporter asking if he has any thoughts about what my book is urging. They will tell him what they have to tell him: that there is no legal merit to my position at all. (Indeed, this is probably what partisan conservative lawyers will tell the media.) And that he should not give it another thought. But I can also almost assure you that in the moments when Bush is alone and not surrounded by his coterie of assistants, he will give it another thought. "This guy who is saying this," he'll think. "He's not some nut off the street. I think he's a fairly well-known former prosecutor. What if there is something to what he is  saying? If there is, I couldn't expect my people to tell me there was." It  will be a disquieting thought, and Bush, though not a knowledgeable person, probably knows about the statute of limitations for crimes, and somewhere down the line he'll ask about the statute of limitations on the case I am proposing, and he'll be told there is no statute of limitations for murder.

What I am saying is that if Bush is guilty of what I believe him to be guilty of, he will never have a future free of the thought entering his mind that some federal prosecutor in the future might decide to prosecute him for murder. For instance, in Chile, murder and kidnapping charges were brought against eighty-nine-year-old former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in December of 2004. The crimes the formerly untouchable general was accused of being responsible for went as far back as 1973, thirty-one years earlier. "Finally, justice," the survivors of the victims exclaimed. Pinochet has since died, ending the prosecution process against him.

Although a federal prosecution (by the U.S. attorney general in Washington, D.C., or any of the ninety-three U.S. attorneys in the ninety-three federal districts throughout the land) against Bush would be the easiest procedure, I also believe that any state attorney general in the fifty states (or any district attorney -- called the state's attorney in cities like Chicago and Miami -- in any county of any state) could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state or county who lost their lives fighting Bush's war. Although the jurisdiction would not be quite as natural, I believe it definitely would exist.  Yes, Bush sent his soldiers to war while he was residing at the White House, and he conspired to commit his grand crime there with Cheney, et al. But a necessary element of the corpus delicti of the federal crime of conspiracy is that at least one overt act be committed by one or more members of the conspiracy to further the object of the conspiracy. It is well accepted in the criminal law that any act at all qualifies as an overt act. For example, if A and B conspire to rob a bank, buying gasoline for the getaway car is enough. If any overt act, then, was committed by Bush, et al. in any of the fifty states, part of Bush's  conspiracy to commit murder is deemed to have taken place in that state, and hence, the subject state would have jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for conspiracy to commit murder, as well as for all murders that resulted from that conspiracy.

Here, the main overt act by Bush (as well as his coconspirators) that would convey jurisdiction to the states would be all the lies and misrepresentations that have been discussed on these pages which he used to take this nation to war. Although most of the lies (overt acts) were made by Bush in Washington, D.C., because of the media, these lies (overt acts) were often contemporaneously carried into the homes of Americans throughout the fifty states. So, for example, it was Bush's face and voice on television, or his voice over radio, that a resident of Fargo, North Dakota, heard in his home in Fargo. And if what  Bush said in Washington, D.C., was the basis for a federal prosecution in the nation's capital, obviously it would likewise be a basis for a state prosecution in North Dakota.

Another overt act by Bush in the fifty states that would give each of them jurisdiction to prosecute him for conspiring to commit murder would be the recruiting of the soldiers in the fifty states by military personnel under his ultimate direction. (The May 1, 2007, map in the front matter of this book is a visual reminder of the loss of life in the Iraq war by soldiers from all fifty states. Today, over one year later, hundreds of other U.S. soldiers have died in the war.) To repeat, the attorney general in each of these fifty states would have jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for conspiracy to commit murder and murder.

It has to be pointed out that even if we were to assume that Bush, for whatever legal reason, could not be prosecuted and convicted in the states for the murders of any of the American soldiers under the law of conspiracy, he nevertheless could be prosecuted and convicted of the separate crime of conspiracy to commit murder since, as we've seen, an integral part of Bush's conspiracy to commit murder was the overt acts committed in the subject states. And unfortunately for Bush, the punishment would be identical in most states to what it would have been if he had been convicted of the murders themselves.  For example, in California, if one is convicted of two or more murders, under Sections 190 and 190.2 (3) of the California Penal Code, the punishment that the jury can impose is either life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or the death penalty. And §182 of the code provides that when two or more people conspire to commit any felony [here, the felony of murder], "they shall be punishable in the same manner and to the same extent as is provided for the punishment of that felony." Only if there were a federal prosecution of Bush and the court ruled he could only be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder, not murder itself, would he not receive the same punishment. Although under § 1111 of the U.S. Code the punishment for murder is life imprisonment or the death penalty, under § 1117, the punishment for conspiracy to commit murder carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

So Bush will have to live, for the rest of his life, while he is enjoying the good life at his ranch in Crawford, with the thought that an aide might tell him that some state attorney general in, say, Illinois, has indicted him for the murder of, for instance, 157 American soldiers from Illinois who died in Bush's war, or that some attorney general in Louisiana has indicted him for the murder of, let's say, 22 soldiers from that state who died fighting Bush's war. If thousands of American people will have nightmares for the rest of their lives over the horrible deaths suffered by their young son (or father, husband, etc.), as I indicated earlier, the least I can do in return 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.

I say he alone is responsible for all the murders. By that I mean only he had the authority to order the invasion, and he alone had the power to stop the commission of this grand crime. But if he is guilty, there can be no question that he conspired with others to commit this monstrous crime. And the existence of the conspiracy "can be inferred if the evidence reveals that the alleged participants shared 'a common aim or purpose' and 'mutual dependence and assistance existed."' It is obvious that such a common aim or purpose with mutual  dependence and assistance existed between and among Bush and his top aides in taking the nation to war.

Who in Bush's inner circle should be prosecuted for murder with him? Two who definitely should be are Cheney and Rice, coconspirators and aiders and abettors in the murders. I don't know enough about Rumsfeld's culpability, but with the prosecutor's office subpoenaing documents and getting statements and grand jury testimony from key people, that should not be hard to determine. The same holds true for Rove. But since we know he is a person without political morals and was, by Bush's own words, his "architect," the likelihood is that he is deeply implicated in the intentional deception of the  American people. This could be confirmed, if it be the case, by an in-depth investigation. James C. Moore, the author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, opined that Rove was "probably the most powerful unelected person in American history," and said that Rove "sat in on all the big meetings leading up to the  Iraq war and signed off on all major decisions."

And we know that Rove was a member of the White House Iraq Group, a group of White House officials including, among others, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, and chief presidential speech writer Michael Gerson.  The group's mission was to come up with the best way to sell Congress and the American people on the war. We know that virtually all that came out of that group, formed in the summer of 2002, was lies, half-truths, and distortions.

I don't know about Powell, but my sense is that he is innocent, his only sin being weakness.

Although it is my firm belief that the jury would convict Bush, Cheney, and Rice of first degree murder, [13] it could turn out during the pretrial phase that the prosecutor makes a determination that, although he believes he can convince the jury of Bush's, Cheney's, and Rice's guilt, he is not sure he can convince them of it beyond a reasonable doubt, the requirement for a conviction. If so, and if he is seeking the death penalty in one of the thirty-eight states that provide for such penalty, he could be expected to offer life imprisonment to Cheney and Rice (and Rove if the evidence warrants his prosecution) to testify  against Bush.

Not only would someone in their shoes be likely to accept this plea bargain under any circumstances, but it should be particularly easy with these people. Rice, completely complicit with Bush in helping him take this nation to war on a lie, has already sold her soul to George Bush and his administration, so I can't conceive that someone of her character would have the loyalty to risk death for Bush. And Cheney is a sniveling coward who did everything possible to keep out of harm's way in the Vietnam War, so certainly he's not going to risk death for Bush. Rove would probably drop to his knees and start crying like a baby, begging for mercy. What I'm saying is that even people of character aren't usually loyal to each other when their own life is on the line. But these moral weaklings will all probably sing like canaries against each other, since they all appear to be almost amoral individuals who are devoid of any character. If they were willing to lie to the American public about a matter of war and peace that resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people, certainly they'd be willing to tell the truth to save their worthless hides from the gas chamber or electric chair. Indeed, I suspect that the prosecutor's biggest problem won't be to get them to talk to save their lives, but to make sure they don't embroider the truth and start telling lies in an effort to get a better deal from the prosecutor.

Though Bush himself could be expected to sing any aria the prosecutor would ask him to sing against the others, unfortunately for the small man from Crawford, the prosecutor wouldn't be interested in his songs, only those of the other three. You don't give a plea bargain to the stickup man (Bush) in a bank robbery to testify against the driver of the getaway car (Cheney, Rice, Rove). It's the other way around.

Like rodents scurrying away from a sinking ship, I would be very confident that Cheney, Rice, and Rove would make the case against Bush, already very strong, air-tight. They probably could tell us things about Bush that would make our hair curl.

In view of what I've presented on these pages, and with a national poll already showing that the majority of Americans believe that Bush "intentionally misled" the nation into war, I can see no reason, legal or otherwise, why some state or federal prosecutor now or in the future should not bring murder charges against Bush. If justice means anything in America, and if we're not going to forget the thousands of young American soldiers in their graves whom Bush deceived into thinking they were fighting for America against an enemy that had attacked us, and if we want to deter any future president as monstrous as Bush from doing the same horrendous thing, I say we have no choice but to bring murder charges against the son of privilege  from Crawford, Texas.

***

My guess is that Bush, at his trial, would no more want to take the witness stand and be cross-examined than he would want to stare into the noonday sun. But unfortunately for him, if he elected not to take the stand and defend himself against the murder charges against him, despite any instructions given to the jury by the judge, he'd look as guilty as sin to the jury. No sound in any courtroom is as loud as a defendant's silence when he has been accused by the prosecutor and witnesses of murder (or any serious crime), and he doesn't bother to walk those few steps to the witness stand to deny his guilt. The members of the jury know that if they were being charged with murder and they were innocent, it would take a team of wild horses to keep them from shouting their innocence from the highest rooftops.

If Bush did take the witness stand, the cross-examination of him should consume hundreds of transcript pages. One among many areas of inquiry would certainly be Bush's statement to the nation from Cincinnati on the evening of October 7, 2002, that Hussein and Iraq constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country. We know that on this very same day in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee by CIA director George Tenet (signed for him by the CIA's John McLaughlin, the number two man at the CIA), the CIA said Hussein was not an imminent threat. Bush should obviously be asked if he was aware of this letter. If he said no, he could be asked if the CIA, in its daily morning briefings of him up to that point, had  given him this same position of theirs. If he said yes, then he could be asked why he told the nation on October 7 the exact opposite of what he had been told by the CIA. If he said no, he'd look like an even bigger liar, because he'd be telling the jury that even though he was the CIA's boss, the CIA was telling the Senate Intelligence Committee (which isn't even in Bush's executive branch of government) something extremely important on a matter of war and peace they weren't telling him. No one would believe this.

If he nonetheless stuck to that transparently false line, Tenet and McLaughlin could be called to the stand. Unless they both wanted to commit perjury for the former president who was no longer their boss, they would tell the truth, that they had been advising Bush that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. If they denied doing this, and testified they had been telling him that Hussein was an imminent threat, then they would be admitting that they lied to Congress in their October 7, 2002, letter, a felony under 18 USC §371.

If Bush decided to lie all the way through and deny that the CIA had informed him that Hussein was not an imminent threat, he could be asked, "Then upon what U.S. intelligence agency were you relying  in your speech to the nation on October 7, 2002, when you suggested to everyone that Hussein was an imminent threat?" He, of course, couldn't come up with any such agency (or member thereof) that had said or suggested this. Nor could he come up with any document that said or suggested this. (We know this because if there were such a document, the Bush administration would have made sure that all of us had seen it by now). And this would make him look terrible on the witness stand. "In other words, Mr. Bush, you made this whole thing up yourself about Hussein being an imminent threat?" "No, I didn't make it up. I believed it." "So even though no U.S. intelligence agency told you this, and even though no document said this, you still formed the opinion it was true?" "Correct." "Did you tell the American people on the evening of October 7, 2002, that it was merely your opinion that Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country, and no U.S. intelligence agency agreed with you?" Since Bush didn't tell the nation's people this he would have no choice but to answer, "No." "Why not, sir?" Whatever answer he gave he could be asked, "Since it was going to be the blood of their sons that was going to be shed in far-off Iraq, not your blood or the blood of your children, don't you feel the people of this country, in deciding whether to give their support to you for this war, were entitled to know this?" And so on. 

In the additional way of establishing, on cross-examination, that Bush not only lied to the nation on October 7, 2002 (as well as the many times thereafter that he told the nation Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country), but that he had no sense at all that he was acting in self-defense when he invaded Iraq, he could be asked, "Mr. Bush, you have said, and I quote you, that in deciding whether or not to go to war in Iraq, 'I'll be making up my mind based upon the latest intelligence.' Was that a true statement?" Bush would have no choice but to say; "Yes." "Just for purposes of clarification, when you said 'intelligence' you were referring to U.S. Intelligence agencies, like the CIA, whose job it was to furnish you with the best and latest intelligence they had gathered on the issue of whether Hussein was a threat to the security of this country; is that correct?" "Yes, of course." "Now, you have a reputation for not liking to read long reports, including intelligence reports. Is that a reputation you feel you have earned?" Bush could be expected to say words to the effect, "Well, it's partially true. The job of president is a busy one, you know, and I like to get to the heart of a problem as quickly as I can." "So as I've read, you prefer to read summaries of these long reports, is that true?" "Yes, but if the report is important enough, I'll read the whole  report." "Would you agree that the war in Iraq, for good or for bad, has defined your presidency more than any other single issue?" (Bush would have to say yes to this, unless he wanted to sound foolish and say his position on stem cell research or global warming or immigration was more important.) "With this in mind, would you agree that the National Intelligence Estimate report of 2002 that was delivered to your office on October 1, 2002, just ten days before Congress voted on the resolution authorizing you to go to war in Iraq, and that set forth the consensus of all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies on the issues of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and whether Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of this country, would be important enough for you to read?" Bush would be compelled to say yes. How could he say no? "Did you, in fact, read this ninety-one-page report?" If he said yes, as you will soon see, he would be committing legal suicide. My guess is that Bush, trying to walk between raindrops throughout the cross-examination, would smell a rat and say no. "But I take it you at least read the five-page summary of this report?" If he said no, he'd sound like a terrible liar to the jury, or like the most irresponsible American president in history.

There is no way to know for sure the precise direction the cross-examination on this point would go. However, just as not even Houdini could pull a rabbit out of a hat when there was no rabbit in the hat, a witness cannot go somewhere when he has nowhere to go. And in this case, I can conceive of no answers by Bush that would extricate him from the most incriminating of inferences by the jury. And whatever his answers were, at some point (either to reemphasize or in the first instance) the prosecutor would approach Bush and say, "Mr. Bush, I show you People's exhibit number -, the ninety-one-page report sent to your office on October 1, 2002, which represents the conclusions of sixteen U.S. Intelligence agencies on Iraq's alleged  weapons of mass destruction, and the danger, if any, that Hussein posed to America. Pages 5 through 9 contain the summary of the report, called 'Key judgments.' Turning to page 8, I want to read to you the most important of the Key judgments. (The prosecutor reads the report's judgment that Hussein would only attack the United States if he feared we were about to attack his country first, i.e., that he was only a danger to us in self-defense.) Mr. Bush, would you tell this jury if you read these same words when the report was sent to you, or had someone else read them to you or summarize their essence for you?"  If Bush said no to all these questions he could be asked: "So even though you were the president of the United States, you never bothered to read even a summary of this extremely important report, were not informed of it by your national security adviser Condoleezza Rice [14] or anyone else, and had absolutely no idea that the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies under your command all agreed that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to this country; is that correct, sir?" If Bush answered yes, no one would believe him.

If he said that he did read the key judgment on page 8, the next question would be, "Mr. Bush, the report clearly and explicitly says that Hussein would not attempt an attack upon the United States unless he 'feared an attack' by us on his country that 'threatened the survival' of his regime and he thought the attack by us was 'imminent.' I ask you, sir. Being in possession of this information from sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, the very people you admit you relied upon in making your decision on whether to go to war, how could you possibly tell the American people just six days later in Cincinnati the exact opposite -- that unless we stopped Hussein first, he constituted a great and urgent danger to our nation? How could you do this, sir? Please tell the jury."

In a similar vein on the issue of Hussein being an alleged imminent threat to the security of this country, the prosecutor could jump ahead from Bush's Cincinnati speech in October of 2002 to the invasion in March of 2003. "Mr. Bush, at the time you ordered this nation's military forces to invade Iraq on March 19, 2003, did you believe that Saddam Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country?" If he said yes, again he could be asked what U.S. intelligence agency or member thereof or document did he rely on that said or suggested this. And he of course could not name any such agency, member thereof, or document. (The line of questioning from  hat point would establish that this "belief" of Bush that Hussein was an imminent threat only came from him and his coconspirators.) If he said no to this question, this would be tantamount to his pleading guilty to the 4,000 murders, since if a defendant kills another without being in imminent fear of imminent death or great bodily harm, the legal defense of self defense necessarily falls. And self-defense is the only real, substantive defense  Bush could possibly raise to the murder charges against him.

If Bush, as part of his "no" answer, said, "I never said Hussein was an 'imminent' threat," he could be asked if he thought the words he did use (e.g., Hussein constituted "a threat of unique urgency," he could act "on any given day," "Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes," etc.) were the equivalent of imminent. If he said no, his ludicrous position would make him look like a terrible liar to the jury.

Bush could also be asked, "Mr. Bush, you have always said that you didn't want to go to war, that war was a last resort, is that correct?" "Yes." "If this is so, when Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, testified before the United Nations on March 7, 2003, that he and his inspectors were being given complete cooperation by Hussein and they were "able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq," and thus far they couldn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but requested a few more months to confirm their tentative findings, why, sir, did you proceed to refuse this request, boot Blix and his people out of Iraq, and proceed to war in less than two weeks?"

Another line of inquiry: "Mr. Bush, since, on September the 17th, 2003, you acknowledged, but only in response to a lawyer's questions, that there was 'no evidence' that Saddam Hussein was involved in the  September 11, 2001, attacks, why did you thereafter continue to strongly suggest that he was?" Bush would have no choice but to say he did not, whereupon he and the jury could have their attention directed to the screen (or a chart) in the courtroom where all of such  tatements were set forth. "For instance, Mr. Bush, on February 24,  2006, in a speech you gave to the American Legion, you said, while talking about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, 'We're taking the fight to those that attacked us.' If you weren't suggesting by these words  that Iraq was involved in 9/11, then what were you talking about?" Whatever answer he gave, he could be asked, "But don't you agree that millions of Americans hearing these words of yours could naturally believe that you were saying that Hussein was involved in 9/11?"

Also, "Mr. Bush, you have already testified that you believed Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country, and that's why you invaded Iraq. In other words, you wanted to strike him before he attacked, or helped someone else attack America, is that correct?" "Yes." "But if you actually believed this, sir, and had this fear, why in the world did you propose, at your January 31, 2003, meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Oval Office that America and Britain should try to provoke Hussein into a war?" Bush couldn't admit doing his because if he did that would be tantamount to his admitting that he did not believe that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country. But if he denied making any such proposal, Blair and his three aides who attended the meeting, including David Manning who wrote the memo quoting Bush on provoking Hussein, could be called to the witness stand. What is the likelihood that they would be willing to commit perjury and say Bush never proposed any such thing. Not only don't I believe they would, but if Manning did, he could be asked why he wrote his false memo saying that Bush did.

Also, "Mr. Bush, you're aware that as late as 2006, polls showed that 90 percent of our soldiers in Iraq mistakenly believed that Hussein and Iraq were involved in 9/11. Since, as you yourself have said, these young American soldiers were bravely giving up their lives in combat to fight for America and the security of their loved ones back home, don't you think it would have been the decent thing for you to do to make sure these young Americans were informed that Hussein was not involved in 9/11?" If he said no, jurors would be fighting over who got to pull the switch on him in the electric chair. If he said yes, he would then obviously be asked, "Did you, then, see to it that American soldiers in Iraq were informed that Hussein was not involved in 9/11?" Bush's answer would have to be no. "Would you tell this jury why you did not do so, sir?" 

I would be more than happy, if requested, 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. I believe the cross-examination would be such that they'd have to carry the arrogant son of privilege off the stand on a stretcher.

***

If, in the unlikely event that some court, for whatever reason, held that a president could not be prosecuted for murder for taking his country to war on a lie, then, for the future, Congress should enact legislation making it a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a president to do so. There could even be a provision that if the lie could be shown to be "reasonably necessary" to protect the immediate safety of this country, then the law would not apply.

What about the inevitable argument that such a law would be bad because it would inhibit our future presidents in the performance of their duties, making them fearful to act? Horse feathers. This argument is not a sound one. (If it were, I guess we should also amend the U.S. Constitution and never impeach a president again either, since, to avoid being impeached for his misconduct, convicted, and removed from office, he would be inhibited in the performance of his daily duties as president.) Such a law would only be inhibiting to those who intended to lie to take us to war. But what American president would want to do such an extremely immoral and criminal thing? 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.  And if one were to come along in the future, yes, we do want to inhibit him.

Moreover, no president acting in good faith, who acts in error, would have to worry. In the first place, it would be obvious to everyone in the know that he had acted in good faith, whereas with Bush, it is so very obvious that he did not. Therefore, there would never be a prosecution of such a well-intentioned president in the first place. But even if, perchance, there were, not only would he be likely to prove his innocence (which would not even be his legal burden but one he would be happy to assume), but how in the world would the prosecution be able to prove to a jury beyond all reasonable doubt that this  president lied to take us to war when he did not?

All good Americans should want to deter any future president from doing what Bush did. To not be in favor of this is the equivalent of saying that whatever a president does in matters of war and peace, even if he tells a monstrous lie to take us to war, a lie that only serves his self-interest, and even if 10 million Americans die because of it -- nothing should be done to him or about it. This is not a position that any self-respecting person would want to utter in public.

***

I hope that at some time in the near future a courageous U.S. attorney general, U.S. attorney, state attorney general, or district attorney in America who is committed to the rule of law and who has dedicated his career to enforcing the law fairly against all who, big or small, violate it, will hear the cries for justice from the graves of the thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children who had their lives violently cut short because of the lies of a man who smiled through it all. And that, with a sense of uncompromising righteousness, he will take the ample case I have laid out in this book before an American jury to let them decide whether George W. Bush is guilty or not guilty of murder, and if so, what his punishment should be. 

Even if this doesn't happen and what I have said in this book receives all the attention of a new fly in the forest, I do know that someone had to say what is written on the pages of this book.

_______________

[1] Even assuming, at this point, that Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in the Iraq war, under federal law he could only be prosecuted for the deaths of the 4,000 American soldiers killed in the war. No American court would have jurisdiction to prosecute him for the one hundred and some thousand Iraqi deaths since these victims not only were not Americans, but they were killed in a foreign nation, Iraq. Despite their nationality, if they had been killed here in the States, there would of course be jurisdiction.

[2] Indeed, Bush himself, ironically, would be the last person who would quarrel with the proposition that being guilty of mass murder (even one murder, by his lights) calls for the death penalty as opposed to life imprisonment. As governor of Texas,  Bush had the highest execution rate of any governor in American history. He was a very strong proponent of the death penalty who even laughingly mocked a condemned young woman who begged him to spare her life ("Please don't kill me," Bush mimicked her in a magazine interview with journalist Tucker Carlson), and even refused to commute the sentence of death down to life imprisonment for a young man who was mentally retarded (although as president he set aside the entire prison sentence of his friend Lewis "Scooter" Libby), and had a broad smile on his face when he announced in his second presidential debate with Al Gore that his state, Texas, was about to execute three convicted murderers.

In Bush's two terms as Texas governor, he signed death warrants for an incredible 152 out of 153 executions against convicted murderers, the majority of whom only killed one single person. The only death sentence Bush commuted was for one of the many murders that mass murderer Henry Lucas had been convicted of. Bush was informed that Lucas had falsely confessed to this particular murder and was innocent, his conviction being improper. So in 152 out of 152 cases, Bush refused to show mercy even once, finding that not one of the 152 convicted killers should receive life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Bush's perfect 100 percent execution rate is highly uncommon even for the most conservative law-and-order  governors.

[3] The Iraqi soldiers during the brief war, and the insurgents since then, were "innocent" of Bush's crime of murder because they only killed American soldiers to repel an invader -- what the Americans represented to them -- or in self-defense, in neither situation possessing the requisite criminal intent to be guilty of murder. They certainly did not kill American soldiers because they were knowingly carrying out the object of a criminal conspiracy in Washington, D.C., hatched by Bush, Cheney, et al.

[4] The report was released on July 9, 2004. After a twelve-month inquiry, the committee concluded what the 9/11 Commission had; namely, that there was no evidence that Hussein and Iraq had any relationship with Al Qaeda, and there was no evidence that Hussein and Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.

[5] What we will be examining in this book -- how the Bush administration used (misused) the intelligence it came to possess -- was not examined by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004, because the Republican majority on the committee  overruled the effort by the Democratic minority to do so. As this book went to press, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was scheduled to finally release its report on whether the Bush administration misused its intelligence in the lead-up to war. (The report will be classified and will not be immediately released to the American public.) But we can already just about know certain things. The report will be a mixed one because of intense quarreling by Republicans and Democrats on the Committee, particularly since there's a presidential election in the coming months. And the hedges in the report will do the most plush Long Island estate proud. Further, when it comes to assigning personal culpability (never criminal) to individuals, nothing ever comes out of these congressional committees but pablum, thinned and pasteurized at that.

My guess is that, for the most part. the report will say that when members of the Bush administration made certain assertions, there was or was not evidence that allowed them to do so. In any event, since virtually all the inferences I have drawn in this book are based on established facts, no Senate report can change these facts.

[6] And when Bush, just six days later, told the American people in his speech from Cincinnati that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, the opposite of what the CIA and fifteen other U.S. intelligence agencies had told him six days earlier, this alone, and all by itself (though there is so much more), is virtually conclusive evidence that Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses. It also destroys his expected defense to any murder charge brought against him that in  going to war in Iraq he acted in self-defense.

[7] Curveball and his fabrications were sufficiently important to the Bush administration in its argument for war to warrant having an entire book written about him by Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin titled Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War.

[8] After seven years of UN inspections, Hussein threw all UN inspectors out of Iraq in 1998.

[9] During those months before the war. which started on March 19, 2003, Bush and his people were so eager for war that they almost seemed offended by Iraqi efforts to avoid it. To take just one example, when, in early March 2003, Iraq started to destroy the above-referenced conventional missiles of theirs that the UN had ruled to be illegal, unbelievably, the Bush White House called the destruction of these missiles by Iraq "the mother of all distractions," i.e., "We want to go to war. Quit distracting us by proving the war is unnecessary."  In other words, that which should have been viewed as good news was looked upon as bad news by Bush and his gang in their rush to war.

[10] One has every reason to believe Chirac -- that his position was not the result of France being pacifist or anti-American. After all, when it was clear to France and the world that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, and Afghanistan was protecting Bin Laden, Americans seem to forget that France sent thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan to help us in our war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But obviously, Iraq, for all the reasons already alluded to in this book, was an entirely different matter. Most Americans, unable to see the difference, didn't agree, and an April 2003 national poll showed only a 12 percent approval rating for Chirac.

[11] I said earlier that Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses, which were the lies he told the American public about Hussein being an imminent threat and being involved in 9/11. For those who believe that there is no lie or false pretense  unless the defendant states it expressly, this is not the law. Indeed, even conduct will suffice. As the courts have consistently held, "A false pretense may consist in any act, word, or symbol calculated and intended to deceive. It may be made either expressly, or by implication." 

[12] An example, for instance, of Cheney lying just as terribly as Bush in an appearance on Meet the Press on September 14, 2003, which was long before Al Qaeda jihadists started going to Iraq to fight the "American infidels," Cheney said, "If we're successful in Iraq, then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the ... geographical base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

[13] In all states, it would then be up to the jury to decide what the appropriate punishment should be for the convicted defendants. Depending on the state, the punishment would range from life imprisonment with the possibility of parole, to life  without the possibility of parole and the death penalty. 

[14] At this point, people like Rice might be testifying for the prosecution as part of a plea bargain, and if so, she could be expected to testify (if Bush maintained that he personally did not read the summary) that she informed Bush fully of the highlights of the report. As indicated earlier, Rice has said, "I read the National Intelligence Estimate cover to cover a couple of times."

Go to Next Page