Prosecuting the president

Vincent Bugliosi is no left-leaning softie or fringe conspiracy theorist, and he does not take facts lightly.

As an LA County prosecutor with a flawless homicide conviction rate, Bugliosi put Charles Manson and his followers on Death Row for the infamous 1969 slayings of actress Sharon Tate and six others.

Of nine nonfiction books — including “Helter Skelter,” the story of the Manson case and the biggest-selling true-crime book of all time — it is his 1.5 million-word, 10,000-source tome affirming the findings of the Warren Commission and dissecting at length the varied alternate theories that the 73-year-old Bugliosi considers his greatest work. (“Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” is currently being made into a miniseries for HBO by Tom Hanks.)
Like much of today’s music and culture, computers are foreign to him, in part because Bugliosi associates the machines with “the country going down the tubes.” He keeps up a seven-day work week, doing all his research in libraries and with the help of a secretary, who also types up his handwritten manuscripts for publication. 

Last Sunday afternoon in the living room of his clean and comfortable West Pasadena home — meticulously decorated by his wife of 51 years, Gail — Bugliosi lamented the decline of traditional values: “You’re watching a movie and all of a sudden there’s someone sitting on a toilet,” he said, recalling a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film “Eyes Wide Shut.” “What’s happening to this country?”

Bugliosi also never imagined the presidency of George W. Bush — the subject of his latest book — a man he believes, for intentionally fabricating intelligence to mislead the nation into war with Iraq, should be put on trial in an American courtroom. The charge: first-degree murder.

“I’ll leave it up to a jury as to the punishment, but it could be the death penalty,” said Bugliosi. “Manson is evil. I’m not saying Bush is evil — he doesn’t want to kill people. But he’s a despicable human being who doesn’t care if people die. And he’s an extremely arrogant person. He’s cold-hearted and couldn’t care less about other people’s suffering.”

Impeachment isn’t enough
The anger that courses through his book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” which outlines evidence to be used in such a case by any prosecutor in a jurisdiction that was home to a soldier who died in Iraq, was also evident Friday during his testimony at a US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on Executive Power and its Constitutional Limitations.
Billed by many progressives as the first official discussion of impeachment (although use of that word was restricted, it came up dozens of time) in a congressional committee, the hearing provoked no official steps toward impeachment proceedings or public censure.

Although he had no comment Monday on Bugliosi’s testimony or the hearing itself — a broad-ranging six-hour discussion of current and historic executive branch infringements on legislative authority — Pasadena Democratic Congressman and Judiciary Committee member Adam Schiff used his time to denounce both the administration’s secretive surveillance tactics and very public flouting of congressional subpoenas, ultimately making “an open call to this Congress to form a Church Committee to conduct an investigation into any of the encroachments upon the Constitution.” The original Church Committee was formed following the Watergate scandal to investigate illegal intelligence-gathering activities.

But Bugliosi will not be satisfied with any committee, or even impeachment hearings. The price he wants Bush to pay for the violent deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqi civilians — life behind bars or a death sentence — can only be meted out by a jury.

While Bugliosi offers a mountain of evidence that Bush deliberately misled Congress and the public in his determination to wage a brutal and unnecessary war, at the crux of his argument are discrepancies between the classified and unclassified versions of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq.

The classified version of that CIA-authored report differs greatly from a subsequent unclassified version sent to Congress — the White Paper, as it came to be known — after facts were changed or heavily redacted by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet.

Issued one week before Congress authorized the invasion, the Oct. 4 White Paper declared that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was developing nuclear weapons, describing that nation as an imminent threat to ours.

The Oct. 1 classified version of the document, promoted by Bush as the main evidence for going to war before it was declassified in April 2004, tells a completely different story, writes Bugliosi — one in which none of 16 different intelligence operations concluded that Iraq posed an imminent threat, and a fact seldom, if ever, fully reported by mainstream media outlets, he said.

“Where did they get the guts to do this, the incredible audacity to take the all-important conclusion out? They had the guts because no one gives a damn and the weak liberal media will let them get by with murder,” said Bugliosi, still exasperated by his own findings.

Criminal intent
More insidiously, elements from the classified document that were not ignored were either changed or completely made up by the time they reached the White Paper, according to
the book.

The phrase “we have little specific information” regarding Iraqi chemical weapons was changed to “Saddam probably has”; conjecture was played off as fact when the phrase “we judge” was dropped from “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs”; and to one line about the use of deadly weapons the White Paper added the words “including potentially against the US homeland.”

Dissenting opinions about the Iraqi threat were discarded for the White Paper, including a State Department Intelligence Research Bureau finding that Iraq was not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons — changed for Congress and the public to read that “all intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons.”

Bugliosi argues at the core of his book that Bush and his administration fabricated any notion of Iraq being an imminent threat, as they also did by falsely connecting Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda in repeated speeches. This evidence convinces Bugliosi beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush was acting with criminal intent to start an unnecessary, deadly conflict.

“What could possibly be worse and more criminal than the Bush administration keeping all these important conclusions from Congress and the American people? The terrible reality is that the Bush administration has gotten away with thousands of murders,” Bugliosi told Congress.

He and other witnesses were asked to refrain, as if under some stodgy rule inherited from Britain’s House of Lords, from making accusations specific to the president in addition to saying the word “impeach.”

“All Americans should be absolutely outraged over what the Bush administration has done. How dare they do what they’ve done? How dare they?” concluded Bugliosi, bringing an overflow Capitol Building crowd to applaud.

Northern California peace activist Cindy Sheehan, who has publicly challenged Bush since her son died in Iraq and has been campaigning against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to further the impeachment cause, was ejected from the audience at the urging of congressional Republicans for saying “Thank you, Vince,” to Bugliosi after his testimony.

Also during the event, Ohio Democratic Congressman and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — who has introduced articles of impeachment against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — and others testified that Bush could be censured or impeached for manipulating pre-war intelligence and for violating the Constitution for illegal domestic surveillance and torture tactics, as well as ordering executive branch officials not to cooperate with Congress.

Bush adviser Karl Rove has flouted a subpoena to testify before the Judiciary Committee, citing executive privilege. Former White House Counsel Harriet Myers and Chief of Staff Josh Bolten have been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to testify, but Attorney General Michael Mukasey — himself facing threats of a congressional contempt citation for withholding information from the CIA leak investigation involving former CIA agent Valerie Plame — has refused to enforce those orders.

“Some of this [constitutionally unsound] conduct has taken place very much in the open, as when the administration ignores the plain language of a statute that when the Congress finds someone in contempt of Congress, that matter shall be brought before the grand jury — not may, not might, but shall,” said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor.

‘It’s personal’
That an intense moral outrage against the Bush administration surrounds the deliberate logic of Bugliosi’s book is immediately clear: The inside front and back covers contain photographs of Americans killed in Iraq; and a glossy photo section inside juxtaposes images of the dead, wounded and grieving with photos of Bush — quoted throughout the book as “feeling pretty good about life,” having “perfect days,” and a “great year” — smiling and laughing.

“With every other murder I’ve prosecuted, including Charles Manson, it was not personal,” said Bugliosi. “I’ll tell you why it’s personal with this guy George Bush. It’s not personal against Rice or Cheney — but, again, I’d seek the death penalty against both of them; they deserve to die. It’s personal because, to sum it up, as young American kids, 18-, 19-year-old kids who never had a chance to live out their dreams, are being blown to pieces by roadside bombs in Iraq, George Bush — the evidence is overwhelming! — is having a lot of fun, enjoying life to the very utmost. … With all the death, horror and suffering he has caused, what type of a monstrous individual could be happy with his life?”

But why would anyone perpetrate such a crime? Bugliosi says Bush’s motive is unclear, but also unnecessary to establish in a murder trial.

“Motive is not synonymous with [criminal] intent. But whatever his motive was, it was not good,” he said. Some people say oil, politics, maybe even a Bush family drama. A motive that has emerged from conservative Republicans was to establish democracy in Iraq so it would spread throughout the Middle East.

“When a president takes the nation to war, he’s supposed to get the informed consent of the American people because it’s the blood of their children that’s being shed. … If you stipulate that really was his motive, you also stipulate the he lied to the American people,” said Bugliosi.

At the hearing last week, several Republican congressmen branded the discussion as a ridiculous exercise, repeating that the Bush administration had committed no crimes.

Although Bugliosi spares Congress any guilt for authorizing the war — “fraud negates consent,” he explained — he describes Republican loyalists who defend Bush at every turn as also morally bereft.
“Since Bush is a conservative Republican and so are they, anything he does — anything at all, including murder — is fine with them, just fine with them. They don’t care. These people don’t love America. They say they do, but they love the Republican Party more than they love America,” said Bugliosi, who supported Sen. John McCain’s run for president in 2000. “[Bush] has committed an incalculable crime of incredible magnitude, and everyone’s trying to protect him!”

See no evil
Even outside of the Washington Beltway, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” —although No. 4 on the LA Times and No. 9 on The New York Times best-seller lists last week — has faced something of a mainstream media blackout. Not only has the book received limited coverage in daily newspaper book review sections, but Bugliosi has also not been invited to make any major network or cable television appearances, and according to a recent New York Times report ABC Radio has refused to accept an advertisement for the book.

Unlike the Hanks’ “Reclaiming History” project for HBO, an independent film producer working to turn the Bush book into a documentary was unable to find funding in the US (turning instead to Canada) and has so far been unable to find an American distributor.

Bugliosi said he’s sent the book to the attorneys general of each state, but isn’t surprised that none have contacted him — yet.

“If this were not something very real I would not have done it. There’s probably not a high probability — but there’s a substantial possibility — that Bush is going to end up in an American courtroom,” he said. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet down in Chile — 33 years later they brought murder charges. [For Bush] it could be some law student right now,” he said.

At minimum, writes Bugliosi in the book, “If thousands of American people will have nightmares for the rest of their lives over the horrible deaths suffered by their young son … the least I can do in return is put the thought in Bush’s mind for the rest of his life that he may someday be held accountable in a criminal courtroom.”

Bugliosi recently discussed “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” during a forum in West Los Angeles. C-SPAN2 filmed the event and will broadcast it at 6 a.m. and noon (Pacific Standard Time) on Sunday.