Friday, December 8th, 2006
United States vs. George W. Bush et al: Former Federal Prosecutor Drafts Indictment Against the President
AMY GOODMAN: So, lay out your case. Lay out this indictment.
ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Okay. Well, first of all, in order to understand the case, you have to understand the law. And a conspiracy to defraud the United States is in Title 18, United States Code, Section 371. It’s a statute that’s been around for over a hundred years. It was charged against people in the Watergate era and also Iran-Contra. And what it means is basically taking concerted action to use deceit or what’s called “trickery” to interfere with any branch of government or an agency. And, of course, Congress is a branch of government.
So, the case, as I lay out in the -- it’s a hypothetical indictment, of course. But the case really starts with the actions of the administration right after 9/11 and proceeds with how they used the fear that was engendered by 9/11, and they actually aggravated that fear. And then they started off, as we all recall, with sort of generally false assertions that had no basis in fact, such as that Iraq was a grave and gathering danger, when at the time the National Intelligence Estimate said no such thing.
And when those types of generalized false statements were not persuasive by the summer of 2002, they started with the White House Iraq Group, and then they became more specific, and they used a combination of half-truths. We have the story of Vice President Cheney recurringly saying that we know that there are chemical weapons, because Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told us, while, in fact, that was a half-truth, because the other half of the story was that he also had told us that they were destroyed. We have Condoleezza Rice saying these aluminum tubes are only suitable for nuclear weapon centrifuges. Well, at that time, there are at least 14 reports available to the administration which showed that that was at least dubious and actually controverted by our nuclear experts.
We have Rumsfeld saying we know where the weapons of mass destruction are, north, south, east and west of Tikrit, somewhat. Well, that was what we would call in the law, and it’s really kind of a common sense thing, a statement made with reckless disregard for the truth, because the law actually prohibits people who are in a position of authority, who are trying to persuade people either to do something, to buy something -- it applies to investment fraud or the executive branch -- from making statements without actually having any basis in fact. And I don't think people actually realized that. It’s sort of an intuitive thing, but I don't think people realized that the law actually prohibits that, as well.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/08/158219December 1, 2006
Indicting Bush
by Elizabeth de la Vega and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch This is the first "indictment" of the president, the vice president, and their colleagues for defrauding us into war in Iraq. I put that "indict" in quotes because what follows, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes clear in her new book United States v. George W. Bush et al., is "not an actual indictment." It can't be, of course; but consider it the second best thing.
De la Vega has, in her career as a prosecutor, prepared numerous fraud indictments and, as she argued in the first excerpt from her book posted earlier this week, "A Fraud Worse than Enron," what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their senior officials committed was a crime, not just in the colloquial sense of the word, but in the legal sense too (and not a victimless crime either). While their crime was of a magnitude that puts even Enron, no less run-of-the-mill fraud cases, to shame, it also has all the elements of a typical, small-time scam.
De la Vega's "hypothetical indictment" of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell that you are about to read remains, unfortunately, in the realm of fantasy. But only for now. Until our world comes more fully to grips with the criminal nature of the Bush administration's acts, you can at least turn to the full de la Vega book. A special project, produced in conjunction with Seven Stories Press, a wonderful independent publisher, it's officially published on December 1st (but available now).
You won't want to miss it. It's superbly done and – though I hesitate to say it, given the nature of the subject matter – genuinely enjoyable to read because De la Vega turns out to be as skilled a writer as she is a prosecutor, and applies both her talents to the book. So check out the indictment, read the first day of grand jury testimony, and in the meantime get the investigative ball rolling by purchasing the book at Amazon.com. After all, the excerpts can only give you a taste of the full case De la Vega makes. This book should be the political stocking-stuffer of the Holiday season. ~ Tom
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=10091