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Bush Indictment for Dummies
 Visit the Bush Impeachment Archives Building  Forward this page to your congressman Watch the TV ad that electrified Vermont  Preface to Excerpts: The evidence for the prosecution of George Bush for American soldiers' deaths in Iraq, under state law, is more concise than ever thanks to Vincent Buglioi's book, which has become a topic for discussion across the nation. - A president has no immunity once he is out of office. He is just like everyone else. A federal pardon would have no jurisdiction over state or local prosecutions. - Weapons of mass destruction are a side issue. Pakistan, the former Soviet republics, China, and many other countries possess them, and we aren't invading them. The real issue is whether Saddam was an imminent threat to the security of the United States, and whether he had a connection to 9/11. He was not, and he did not, and Bush knew it at the time he was telling the opposite to the American people. The classified report in which 16 US intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam was not an imminent threat was scrubbed of that conclusion, and presented to Congress. The right-wing talking point that Congress was "looking at the same intelligence" is flatly false. Congress, and the American people, were given a doctored version of the singular most important document in assessing the threat. - Saddam was not an imminent threat because he was not a suicidal jihadi, but a rational, though brutal, dictator who wanted to live. He knew that attacking the US with WMD, or providing them to someone who would, would be suicide. He was found inside a spider hole begging "Don't shoot." He was so paranoid he slept in different bed every night. He had two different food tasters to guard against being poisoned. - Jurisdiction for a state is established by the "effects" doctrine, a well-known part of the law which says if a state is affected by a crime which happens somewhere else; like Iraq, that state has jurisdiction. - George Bush firmly linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein in the minds of many of the soldiers who signed up to go to Iraq. At the main gate of every military base in Iraq is a photo or image of the Twin Towers. EXCERPTS FROM "THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER" BY VINCENT BUGLIOSI Sections: - Saddam Was NOT an Imminent Threat - Bush Claimed Saddam WAS an Imminent, Immediate Threat - The Drive to Link Iraq and 9/11 - Bush Used Thoroughly Discredited Information on WMD to Make the Case for War - Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix Said Iraq Was Cooperating When We Invaded - Bush Changes Ultimatum for Avoidance of War - The Drive to Link Saddam with 9/11 Was Successful. - Ignored Warnings of 9/11 - Bin Laden at Tora Bora - A Note on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident Saddam Was NOT an Imminent Threat • 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. (Note: Hundreds of weapons inspectors were crawling about Iraq on the eve of war, in the most thorough inspections regime in history. - Editor) • On October 15, 2001, 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 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." • The classified 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 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 unclassified version of this report given to Congress just before the war vote, called the "White Paper," the White House, after the words "for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives" in the original NIE report, inserted these words that were not in the report: "including potentially against the U.S. homeland." • 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, 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 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. • 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." • 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 ... " (Editor's note: In other words, a conclusion by 16 US intelligence agencies that Iraq would attack us only if we attacked first, was completely deleted from the report given to Congress and the American people.) Bush Claimed Saddam Was an Imminent, Immediate Threat • 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." • On the evening of October 7, 2002, when he spoke from Cincinnati, Ohio, at the Museum Center, 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." • The classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate issued by the CIA to the Bush administration and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 1, 2002, gave Bush notice, prior to the 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. • 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." • The Los Angeles Times, which interviewed five senior officials from BND (German intelligence services,) 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." • A CONCLUSION: 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 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. (Editor's note: "State of mind" is an element in the crime of murder.) The Drive to Link Iraq and 9/11 • 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." • 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.) • 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. • 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." • 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."
• 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? • 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. • 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. • 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." • 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. • 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. • 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. (Editor's note: A favorite talking point among Bush defenders is the presence of a "terrorist training camp" at Salman Pak, which included the fuselage of a Boing 707, allegedly to train hijackers. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq." The facility was discussed in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress to assert that the facility was a terrorist training camp. A DIA analyst told the Committee, "The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." PBS Frontline - who originally carried many of the allegations of Iraqi defectors - similarly noted that "U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques." In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed. Also, Salman Pak was under constant aeriel surveillance between 1995 and 2000.) Bush Used Thoroughly Discredited Information on WMD to Make the Case for War • 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. 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. • 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. • 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. 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. • 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." [Rice] 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? • Stephen Hadley, Rice's number one deputy, 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. 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? • 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." • 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. (Editor's note: Another talking point among Bush defenders is the discovery of degraded sarin gas shells from before the first Gulf War (1991) found mixed in with old conventional weapons. Sarin has a shelf-life of 5 years. Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Senator Rick Santorum said in 2006: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." A Senior Defense Department official pointed out to Fox News that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions. "This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war." If anything, scattered rounds of rotting sarin which Reagan gave to Saddam in his tilt against Iran should serve to remind people that Saddam was once a close ally of the United States. Why suddenly the mad-man who would set the world on fire and himself along with it? But more importantly, as Bugliosi reminds over and over, the presence of WMD is not the key issue in any prosecution of George W. Bush. Many countries have similar weapons. The issue is what Saddam intended to do with them, if he had them, and if he was crazy enough to attack the United States. On this, the conclusion of 16 US intelligence agencies was a clear "no.") Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix Said Iraq Was Cooperating When We Invaded • 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." • 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." (Editor's note: Yes you heard right. Blix told Bush that in a few months he would know with 100% certainty whether or not Saddam had any WMD programs in place. Bush could not wait that few months before sending soldiers to die.) • 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. • 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. 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, he was talking about how to provoke Hussein into a war. • CONCLUSION: 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." Bush Changes Ultimatum for Avoidance of War (Note from editor: One of the key principles of statesmanship in a face-off between countries is the idea of giving your opponent a face-saving way of having him do what you want, the classic example of which is JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy withdrew some irrelevant US missiles from Turkey to secure Kruschev's capitulation in withdrawing Russian missiles from Cuba. A public ultimatum such as Bush issued to Saddam, "Get out in 48 hours or there is war" is a recipe for war, not its avoidance. Had Bush really wanted Saddam to leave, an exit would have been arranged through a back-door channel offering Saddam asylum in Syria or some other country. Bush's bluster and bravado is evidence itself that he wanted nothing but war, and only war.) • 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. • 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. • 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." • 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 Drive to Link Saddam with 9/11 Was Successful. • 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." • 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." • 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. • 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. • 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. • 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. Ignored Warnings of 9/11 • The 9/11 Commission report said that "the intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil." On June 28, Clarke wrote Rice that Al Qaeda activity suggesting an imminent attack "had reached a crescendo ... A series of new reports continue to convince me and [intelligence] analysts at [the Department of] State, CIA, D.I.A. [Defense Intelligence Agency] and NSA [National Security Agency] that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July." One Al Qaeda intelligence report, he said, warned that something "very, very, very, very" big was about to happen. A CIA report on June 30 was captioned "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks," and said they were expected in the near term and to have "dramatic consequences of catastrophic proportions." The CIA director, George Tenet, although a Bush friend and apologist, nevertheless acknowledged to the 9/11 Commission that "the system was blinking red" and could not "get any worse." Also, throughout this whole period, Tenet met daily with Bush in the morning at the Oval Office whenever Bush was in Washington. According to the commission's 9/11 report, the PDB (President's Daily Brief) turned over by Tenet showed that "there were more than forty" reports "related to Bin Laden" furnished to Bush by Tenet or one of his deputies during these morning briefings from Bush's first day in office, January 20, 2001, to September 10, 2001, the day before 9/11. • On August 6, 2001, a little over one month before 9/11, Bush, on a five-week-long summer vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, was briefed by a CIA official on a one-and-a-half page top secret memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The memo referred to U.S. intelligence on Al Qaeda back to 1997, cited evidence of active Al Qaeda cells in the United States, and said with respect to them that the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijacking [of planes] or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York ... Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America.' The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full- field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Laden-related." The significance of the August 6 memo (included in the thirty-sixth of forty PDBs) was that it was the very first one that dealt with a terrorist attack in the United States. Also, what was striking was the memo's specificity -- the reference to Al Qaeda preparing to possibly hijack a plane or planes, their surveillance of federal buildings in New York City, even the reference, in an indirect context, to the World Trade Center. Obviously there was only one thing for Bush to have done. What any normal president would have done. Cut short his precious five-week vacation, fly back to Washington, and immediately call a meeting of all his intelligence and military advisers to ascertain what specifically was being done by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense on the Al Qaeda threat, discuss the hijacking issue in detail, and map out a stepped-up strategy to meet the threat, including, automatically, the increasing of airport security. And perhaps also call a meeting of his cabinet to get every top official and his department involved at least to the extent of offering immediate advice and suggestions. The point is not that if Bush had responded immediately the disaster would have been averted. There is no way to know this. We can only know that he should have made an effort to respond instead of just ignoring these warnings of 9/11. • With respect to the critical August 6 report or memo, which was actually requested by Bush, Rice first told the 9/11 Commission that it "did not warn of attacks inside the United States," despite the fact that the very title of the memo was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Rice then tried to explain what she meant by saying that the August 6 memo "was not a threat report" because "there was nothing in this memo as to the time, place, how or where" of the attack. "No specifics," she said. In other words, folks, unless the Bush administration knew the exact day and time of day that Al Qaeda was going to attack, and the exact city, and the exact building or buildings in that city, there was nothing the Bush administration could or even should have done. Further translation: "If Al Qaeda didn't announce that they were going to hijack four planes on 9/11, two of which would fly into the north and south World Trade Center towers in New York City at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, we can't be criticized for doing nothing at all to prevent 9/11." • Right at the beginning of the Bush administration, incoming Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to relaunch a Predator drone being used by the CIA under Clinton's authorization to track the movements of Bin Laden. And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz shut down a disinformation program created by the Clinton administration to create dissent within the Taliban, which was giving a sanctuary to Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. • On September 10, 2001, just one day before 9/11, Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He asked for increased funds for sixty-eight programs in his Department of Justice, not one of which directly involved counterterrorism. Even worse, he rejected a request by the FBI for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents. He also proposed a $65 million cut (from $109 million to $44 million) in grants to the states and local authorities to increase their counterterrorism preparedness. Bin Laden at Tora Bora • In December of 2001, just a few months after 9/11, the American military learned that Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, a dense mountain range in southeastern Afghanistan. By the way, not only was Bin Laden there, but for the Bush lovers who say we don't know for sure that he was, that is irrelevant. I personally saw on television Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld say at a TV press conference that they had located Bin Laden in Tora Bora and he was trapped there. So even if he wasn't there (and subsequent evidence has confirmed that he was), the Bush administration cannot use this as an excuse for their absolutely incredible conduct. That conduct has to be viewed from the state of mind we know they had, which was the belief that Bin Laden was at Tora Bora. And what was that conduct? Instead of sending thousands of American soldiers to go into the mountain range to capture or kill Bin Laden, Bush did not send one single American soldier. He only dispatched forty American Special Forces soldiers there to coordinate the bombing, by U.S. B-52 bombers, of caves and areas in the mountain where Bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was believed to be. • The job of capturing Bin Laden was given to three anti Taliban Afghan warlords and their men. Haji Mohammed Zaman, one of the warlords, in disbelief and frustration told the assembled press who had converged on Tora Bora: "If America wants to capture Osama, why aren't they trying?" A top aide to Zaman said: "I don't think the United States wants to capture Osama. We know where he is, we tell them and they do nothing. So they are not as serious as they say they are." • The Bush administration, embarrassed by its having allowed Bin Laden to escape, came up with the preposterous excuse that they didn't pursue Bin Laden at Tora Bora because they wanted to minimize American casualties and they also wanted to prevent the war in Afghanistan from being viewed by the world as an "American war." But why shouldn't it be an American war? Weren't Americans the only victims of 9/11? So the ballsy, brave Bush didn't feel that going after someone who had murdered 3,000 Americans was really, after all, a good idea (and he got a 90 percent approval rating and was re-elected precisely because he said he would). Instead, we should let the Afghan warlords and Pakistani military (mostly Muslims, who at least religiously and culturally were not antagonistic to Bin Laden), whose people were not murdered by Bin Laden, go after him. • In 2005, August Hanning, the head of German intelligence, confirmed this, saying his agency had learned that Bin Laden had been able to elude capture at Tora Bora by paying "a lot of money" to the very same militias of the Afghan warlords to whom the United States had delegated (outsourced) the task of capturing him, and they allowed his safe passage into Pakistan. • Reported in USA Today and never denied by the Bush administration: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment, Iraq." So way back in 2002, going after Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, was more important than going after Bin Laden, who was responsible for the catastrophe. And Bush is the one whom the morons in the media, with graduate degrees in nitwitolgy, continued to praise for his "tough," "steadfast," and "resolute" stand against terrorism. It's enough to make the cat cry. • It has to be added that the incomprehensible and virtually psychotic posture of the Bush administration to let Bin Laden, who was responsible for 9/11, go free, yet engage in a terribly costly and long war against Iraq, which had no connection with 9/11, continues, believe it or not, to this very day. While the Bush administration persists in carrying on the bloody fight in Iraq, it has pledged to Pakistan that it will honor Pakistan's territorial sovereignty and not cross the border of Afghanistan to pursue Bin Laden into Pakistan, where we know he is presently headquartered. So we wouldn't pursue the mastermind of 9/11 at Tora Bora, nor will we do so in Pakistan, even though no invasion would be involved since Pakistan is our ally. But we were very willing to invade Iraq and fight a monstrous war there. And remember, this was all over 9/11, and not only was Iraq completely innocent of 9/11, but like the United States, it was a sworn enemy of the very group, Al Qaeda, that was responsible for 9/11, which made Iraq a natural ally of ours against Al Qaeda. How can the conduct of Bush make any sense to a rational person? • A man is seated with his wife at a restaurant table. An armed killer enters the restaurant, shoots and kills the wife, then flees. The man, who everyone would automatically assume would pursue the killer since it was his wife who was killed, and since, it turns out, he was fully armed to do so, decides not to. He tells a stranger at a nearby table that he would appreciate it if he would pursue the killer, which the third party does. That's exactly what Bush did in the Afghanistan war. Three thousand Americans were murdered, Bush vowed to go after the perpetrators, but instead asked the Northern Alliance, which never lost one of its members during 9/11, to in effect "get even" with the 9/11 killers for us. • As indicated previously in this book, to this day we don't know for sure why Bush started his war in far-off Iraq. But going after Hussein in Iraq when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan or Pakistan recalls the vaudevillian skit where a man is on his knees searching for something at night beneath a lamppost. When a passerby asks him what he's looking for, he tells him it's his car keys. "When did you lose them?" the passerby asks. "About five minutes ago when I was walking down the block," he says, pointing some distance away to the darkness. "So why are you looking for them here?" the passerby asks. "Because there's better lighting here," the man says. So instead of Bush giving Bin Laden a bullet or noose for killing 3,000 Americans, he gave Bin Laden the best birthday present imaginable by invading Iraq, fulfilling Bin Laden's wildest dream that there be an abundant supply of virulently anti-American terrorists for years to come. • We also all know that Iraq had no terrorists before Bush invaded it. The only one we know of who was in Iraq was Abu Mousab al Zarqawi. But not only were his ties to Bin Laden shaky and tenuous, if they existed at all, more importantly, he had no ties or relationship with Hussein. Moreover, he operated in Kurdish territory, which was outside the control of Hussein. • Bush's war, then, has turned a completely nonterrorist nation into a nation with many terrorists in it, Iraq serving as a magnet for Islamic terrorists from other nations to join the native Iraqi insurgents in a fight against an America they both hate. So Bush created terrorism in Iraq, with thousands upon thousands of innocent, everyday Iraqis targeted by suicide bombers paying the ultimate price by losing their lives in markets, restaurants, mosques, etc. Bush's invasion of Iraq, we all know, thrust Iraq into a bloody, rudderless chaos, a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites where American soldiers, caught in the middle of the carnage and crossfire, are being killed by members of both groups, the very people, ironically, Bush said he wanted to liberate. • With no end in sight for the war, and the worst atrocities imaginable still being routinely perpetrated, and the once bustling, safe and open metropolis of Baghdad being reduced to a city of high concrete walls and military checkpoints to help keep the Sunni and Shiite death squads out and the murders down, America is not only starting to show signs, with the help of the mindless media, of settling for fewer dead bodies, but of pronouncing the whole disastrous adventure a success. In other words, instead of the absolutely horrible and intolerable situation in today's Iraq being viewed as terrible but better than it once was, it is viewed as good because it's not as bad as it once was. Terrible is good, black is white, up is down. The insanity continues, and the bodies keep being buried, and Bush keeps smiling. • Clearly, America is a nation that has lost its way. But although I don't know why, I have a sense that we can one day again be a nation that causes people around the world to look up to (as they always did, and still yearn to), not down on. Maybe I am a victim of the very kind of propaganda I've decried and attacked other people for being duped by in this book. But I just feel that there is still something special about America. That the greatness we once knew and lived by, and the qualities of leadership, fairness, and moral authority that made us the great nation we were, have not died like the rest of the past, but they are still miraculously stored and continue to inhere in the nation's metaphorical soil to be used as protoplasm for its revival. A Note from the editor on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident The theory that the Gulf of Tonkin was a staged attack by LBJ is often used as a sort of defense for Bush using deception to draw us into war. But evidence now shows that LBJ was truly confused over the nature of the attack on the USS Maddox. In addition the escalation of ground troops into Vietnam did not begin until 6 months later. Is there a precedent or close comparison to the orchesrated, prolonged, carefully deliberated drive to decieve us into a long, costly, and disasterous war like Iraq? No. None. See "The Prosecution..." End Note Number 101. The book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," can be purchased HERE. Forward this page to your congressman CONTACT FOR COMMENTS ON THIS WEBSITE: Ralph Lopez ralphlopez2002@hotmail.com |