Evidence in Support of Impeachment
Ilene Proctor
www.virtualcitizens.com
2007-02-06

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/Evidence_in_Support_of_Impeachment

Former Federal Prosecutor Drafts Indictment against the President

Ever wonder what a criminal case against the President of the United States would look like?  You need look no further than U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al., (Seven Stories Press 2006) the book that prof. Chalmers Johnson calls “A tour de force; more powerful than The 9/11 Report.”

In United States v. George W. Bush et. al., former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty-one years of experience and her passion for justice to the most important case of her career.  The defendants are George W Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.  The crime is tricking the nation into war, in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Just as she did when she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in San Jose, California, Ms. de la Vega spent months investigating, analyzing and organizing the evidence, researched the law, and she drafted an indictment.  The text is her presentment of the entire case to a grand jury.  While the indictment and grand jury proceedings are hypothetical, the facts are tragically real: over 3,000 American soldiers dead, over 50,000 disabled, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, millions of Iraqis homeless and a cost of $350 billion and counting – moving toward $2 trillion.

In U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al., de la Vega, who has tried federal cases of every description, ranging from armed robbery to complex white collar fraud, explains U.S. law in simple language.  The case, she tells the grand jury, is governed by Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States.  The statute has been used in thousands of cases, including those against executive officials who defrauded Congress during the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals.

Seeing Fraud 

And what is a conspiracy to defraud the United States?  In the context of the Bush Administration’s scorched-earth campaign, as Karl Rove said, to make it “difficult for anyone in Congress” to vote against the Joint Resolution PL 107-40, mislabeled the Authorization to Use Military Force, the conspiracy was a concerted action to deceive Congress and the American people by using the same fraud techniques prosecuted in courtrooms around the country.

The legal question Elizabeth de la Vega asks is this: Did Bush and company use the same techniques as those of Enron’s Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, accountants at Arthur Andersen, and fraudsters everywhere – false pretenses, half-truths, deliberate omissions – in order to deceive Congress and the American public about the need to go to war against Iraq?

Her answer to that question becomes Bush’s worst living nightmare.  Once the grand jury is equipped with the legal rules that apply, de la Vega, with prosecutorial precision honed by twenty-plus years of practice, lays out the facts –just the facts.

Using this imaginative Grand Jury approach, Elizabeth de la Vega, as retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern (briefer to G. H. W. Bush) puts it,

“gives us a front-row seat for the evidence of violent crimes by high officials of the Bush Administration.  Her lively style and sense of humor pierce the all-too-familiar melancholy and make for a fascinating read.”

In the end, through U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al., de la Vega demonstrates that legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the pre-war invasion (you give Congress the intelligence you want, not the intelligence you have) fraud carried out by George W. Bush.   

As de la Vega so ably shows, however, when the Enron fraud was revealed, G. W. Bush was – like everyone else in the country – outraged.  So outraged, that he was happy to sign the Corporate Corruption Bill on July 30, 2002 and announce to the entire country that, thenceforth, CEOs would have to be honest, forthright and completely truthful with the public.

Indeed, the evidence that you, as grand juror in the case of U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al, will read, shows that on the same day that Bush demanded corporate accountability and railed against tricking the public, he and his senior advisers were enmeshed in defrauding the nation into committing the ultimate crime, aggressive war.  

In legal terms, the evidence shows that President Bush and his advisers had notice and direct knowledge that their representations were overt falsities (e.g. Rumsfeld claiming that we know where the weapons are), and in some instances, disproved by information that was available.  Consistently, Bush and aides knowingly conveyed false impressions, concealed important information, made deliberate misrepresentations, and professed certainty in support of false reports like “Nigerian yellow cake.”  Such acts constitute a textbook definition of criminal fraud.

Even worse, as de la Vega illustrates, the entire deceitful campaign was deliberately devised to take advantage of a populace that was prepped for obedience by September 11.  With neo-cons harping about the need to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam since the 1990s, under Bush, the White House Iraq Group had long begun fabricating a story that melded September 11, the specter of an Iraqi nuclear attack against American cities, and clandestine efforts of terrorists releasing smallpox, with the face of Hussein (while conveniently forgetting that he was one of Rumsfeld’s best customers).  Props were collected -- anthrax vials, artist’s drawings of trucks, and undated photos showing unidentifiable buildings where something ominous might be happening.  Scripts were being scribbled: power phrases like, “Axis of Evil,” "Grave and gathering danger" and "We can't afford to let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud," were concocted, designed to inflame and misinform.  Mission Accomplished.

It was a bravura performance by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and many supporting cast members.  With the help of a media machine drunk on access to power or absolutely ignorant of all American history – especially Middle East policy since the 1950s, Americans were terrified into hysteria.  The results were horrific:  because of Bush's fiction and mass hypnosis, the people of the United States allowed him to bomb civilians 8,000 miles away from Washington for the "crime" of living under the creation of the United States, Saddam Hussein.

United States v. George W. Bush et al. is not like any other book about the Bush administration. Written entirely without pretension, and with a deep love for the United States Constitution, it is a call to action.  As Ray McGovern says,

“Give this book to friends who cannot get their heads around the notion that our president lied us into an unnecessary war.  But alert them to the possibility that they may be moved to act more responsibly than the frightened Germans of the 1930s and the apathetic neighbors of Kitty Genovese.  For it will be clear that we are all in this together.”

A must read for everyone who cares about the rule of law in the United States.  Faced with an ongoing crime as horrendous as the president’s fraud, de La Vega argues, we must not simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.

***

Elizabeth de la Vega attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  A former federal prosecutor for 21 years, her pieces have appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon, among others.  She writes regularly for Tomdispatch. See an introduction to United States v. George W. Bush et al. at:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583227563

Ilene Proctor
www.virtualcitizens.com