 Vincent Bugliosi
Part 1 (10min 15sec): VINCENT BUGLIOSI: Well, in my book,
The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I set forth an airtight
legal case against George Bush that proves beyond all reasonable doubt
that George Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses, on a
lie, in Iraq, and therefore, under the law, he is guilty of murder for
the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers in Iraq fighting his
war, not your war or my war or America’s war, but his war.
Interestingly
enough, there have been billions of very harsh critical words written
and said about George Bush, none of which he could possibly care less
about. So the words are absolutely meaningless. But up until now, other
than words, no one has done anything at all to George Bush. No
impeachment, no investigation of him.
But this book
here, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, in it, I put
together a case against George Bush that could result—it
absolutely could result in his being prosecuted for first-degree murder
in an American courtroom. I set forth the legal architecture against
him, the overwhelming evidence of his guilt and the jurisdiction to
prosecute him. And I say that if justice means anything at all in
America, and if we’re not going to forget about these 4,000
young American soldiers who are in their cold graves right now as I am
talking to you and who came back from George Bush’s war in a
box or a jar of ashes, I say we have no choice but to bring murder
charges against the son of privilege from Crawford, Texas.
I
may be sounding presumptuous to you right now, Amy and Juan, but
I’m telling you this: I am going after George Bush. I may not
succeed, but I’m not going to be satisfied until I see him in
an American courtroom being prosecuted for first-degree murder.
In
our segment here, I would like to talk about a couple things. You
people are the general, but I’d like to get into some of the
evidence against Bush, and I’d also like to talk about how
he’s conducted himself throughout the entire war: having fun,
smiling, laughing, enjoying himself. And you also might be interested
in the story behind the story. What’s happened with this book
right here, for the first time in my thirty-year career, the national
TV and print media have completely blacked it out. They
haven’t succeeded. The book just came out. It’s
already this Sunday going to be on the New York Times bestseller list,
but it’s all by word of mouth. But those are the three things
I’d like to talk about. But whatever else you want to ask me,
go ahead.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, let’s start
off just by giving us some of the key points in the evidence,
especially in the early days of the war, that you lay out in the book,
from the National Intelligence Estimate, his lying about that, and so
forth?
VINCENT BUGLIOSI: Yeah, OK. OK, now, there
many, many things in the book, but let’s talk about a couple
key pieces of evidence.
In George Bush’s
first speech to the nation on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, Cincinnati,
Ohio, October 7, 2002, he told the nation that Hussein was a great
danger to America either by his attacking us with his weapons of mass
destruction or giving those weapons to some terrorist group to attack
us. And he said this attack could happen, quote, “on any
given day,” meaning the threat was imminent.
Unfortunately
for George Bush—and I don’t know how he could get
around this at his trial—on October the 1st, six days
earlier, the CIA sent George Bush its 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate, a report from sixteen US intelligence
agencies—there’s a strong sound in my ear here,
there’s a big rattling sound here. Anyway, he was sent this
report representing the consensus opinion of all sixteen US
intelligence agencies on the issue of whether Hussein was an imminent
threat to the security of this country. There’s a lot of
noise in my left ear, a constant rattle; if you can get rid of it,
I’d appreciate it. And—well, it’s not
stopping. And on page eight of this ninety-one-page report, page eight,
it clearly and unequivocally says—and, by the way, what
I’m about to tell you, to my knowledge, has never appeared in
any national newspaper or magazine in America; it may have, but to my
knowledge, I’ve never heard this said before in any of the
major magazines or newspapers of America. Page nine—page
eight, ninety-one-page report, clearly and unequivocally says that
Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country,
that he would only be a threat if he feared that America was about to
attack him. In other words, he would only be a threat if he was forced
to fight in self-defense.
So we know—not
“think,” but we know—that when George
Bush told the nation on the evening of October the 7th, 2002,
Cincinnati, Ohio, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security
of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the
exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had
nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to
war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American
soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.
But
it gets worse. October 4th, three days after the October 1st classified
top-secret report, Bush and his people had the CIA issue an
unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report, so
that this report could be issued to the American people and to
Congress. And this report came to be known as the “White
Paper.” And in this White Paper, the conclusion of US
intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of
this country was completely deleted from the White Paper. Every single
one of these all-important words were taken out. And the question that
I have is, how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George
Bush and his people be? And yet, up to this point,
unbelievably—and there’s no other word for
it—he’s gotten by with all of this.
I’ll
touch upon another piece of evidence. January 31st,
2005—2003—by the way, you’ve all heard of
the Downing Street memo, got a lot of attention. If I prosecuted Bush,
that would be a very insignificant part of the case, because
it’s ambiguous. This is the Manning memo that seems to have
gone over the head of everyone. It’s a hundred times more
important than the Downing Street memo. January 31st, 2003, George Bush
and Prime Minister Tony Blair met in the Oval Office with six of their
top aides, including Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser
for Bush, and Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser, David
Manning. Now, two months later, they go to war, because they say
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and they had to go in there and
disarm Hussein and these weapons of mass destruction.
Part 2 (9min 11sec)
After
the meeting, Manning prepares a five-page memo stamped
“extremely sensitive,” in which he summarizes what
was said at the meeting. And Manning writes that Bush and Blair
expressed their doubts that any weapons of mass destruction would ever
be found in Iraq, although two months later they went there because
they said they had the weapons and we had to disarm them. But it gets
much, much, much worse. Manning wrote that Bush was so worried, so
upset, over the failure of the UN inspectors to find weapons of mass
destruction, that he talked about three ways to, quote,
“provoke a confrontation with Hussein,” one of
which, Bush said, was to, quote, “fly U2 aircraft,
reconnaissance aircraft, over Iraq, falsely painted in United Nations
colors,” and Bush said if Hussein fires upon them, this will
be a breach of UN resolutions and justify war.
So
here we have George Bush telling the American people, telling the
world, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this
country, so we had to strike first in self-defense, but behind closed
doors, this very small man was talking about how to provoke Hussein
into a war. The very last person in the world that someone acting in
self-defense would try to provoke is a person who he’s in
deathly fear of, the person who’s about to kill him. If
George Bush actually believed that Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, which was the main reason he went to war, the very thought
of provoking Hussein into a war obviously would never, ever, ever have
entered his mind.
Now, I don’t know if
you’re aware, but what I just told you is extremely powerful
evidence of George Bush’s guilt. I was on the radio with
Dennis Miller a couple days ago in LA, and I told him about the Manning
memo, and I said, “Now, Dennis, you’re representing
George Bush. You’re his defense attorney. After you hear
Manning testify to the Manning memo on the witness stand, other than
trying to hide beneath the counsel table, what would your response
be?” And Dennis is very quick, very smart. He gave a good
answer: he said, “I would call for a recess.” There
is no answer to the Manning memo.
AMY GOODMAN: And
that’s what we have to do for just one minute. Vincent
Bugliosi is our guest, the renowned attorney, the man who put Charles
Manson behind bars, has written a book, a new book called The
Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. We’ll be back with
him in a minute.
[break]
AMY
GOODMAN: Our guest is the renowned prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. He has
written the new book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. He
is laying out his case. You begin your book, Vincent Bugliosi, by just
telling us the stories of young soldiers who have died, more than 4,000
now. What about Iraqi civilians? How do they weigh into your case as
you build it against the President?
VINCENT
BUGLIOSI: Well, that’s not going to prove
guilt—guilty or not guilty—but if he’s
convicted of first-degree murder by an American jury and it gets into
the penalty phase and the prosecutor seeks the death penalty, all of
this evidence of how Bush responded to this horror in Iraq could be
introduced in aggravation, just like the defense can offer evidence in
mitigation.
One of the underlying emotions behind
this whole thing that prompted me to do this book—well, the
main thing is that he took this nation to war under false pretenses.
But throughout this hell on earth that George Bush created, the
evidence is very, very clear that with over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men,
women and children and babies and 4,000 American soldiers dying
horrible violent deaths and hundreds of thousands of their survivors
crying out hysterically and having no way to cope with the unspeakable
horror of it all and having nightmares over what happened, George
Bush—the evidence is very, very clear—smiled
through it all. In fact, you look at a photograph of Bush and six or
seven other people—they’re all
smiling—who has the biggest smile on his face? George Bush.
The
evidence is very clear that while young American soldiers, who never
even had a chance to live out their dreams, were being blown to pieces
by roadside bombs in Iraq, George Bush was having fun and living life,
enjoying life to the very fullest. I’m talking about running,
bicycling, joking with friends, slapping backs, dancing and swiveling
his hips like Elvis to blaring music, eating his hot dogs and blueberry
pies, almost always seeming to be in the very best of good spirits.
And
you don’t have to take my word for this. I have the
photographs in the book and everything. But you don’t have to
take my word for this. George Bush himself has had no hesitancy in
saying things like this, and as I quote George Bush, I want you to
think of two things: number one, the incredible horror and savagery and
mutilation of bodies and beheadings and the sea of blood and the
screams going on at the time he’s making this remark, and try
to think, if you can, of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ, Nixon,
during their respective wars, saying things like this. Here’s
George Bush right in the middle of all this horror: “Laura
and I are having the time of our lives. It’s going to be a
great—it’s going to be a perfect day. I’m
in a great mood.” As recently as December 2007,
“I’m feeling pretty good about life."
Now,
Amy and Juan, even if George Bush was only guilty of making an innocent
mistake in taking this nation to war—not murder, as I firmly
believe—with all of the death and the horror and the
suffering he has caused, what type of a monstrous individual is it who
could literally be happy with his life? And that’s part of
the emotional underpinning for this book.
JUAN
GONZALEZ: Well, Vincent Bugliosi, the other main line of evidence that
you present in the book is his repeated attempts to connect Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaeda and to the attacks of 9/11. Could you summarize
those arguments?
VINCENT BUGLIOSI: Yeah, very, very
quickly. He tried to convince the American people that Hussein was
involved in 9/11. Now, right after 9/11, a poll of the American people,
open-ended poll, showed that only three percent of the American public
believed that Hussein and Iraq were involved in 9/11. And yet, within
months, that number went up to 70 percent of the American people
thought Hussein was involved in 9/11. Now, if it wasn’t
George Bush and his people who were responsible for it, then who was
it? You? I? Danny DeVito?
Part 3 (6min 9sec)
Here’s
what he did. Here’s what he did. He’d
constantly—because what he was doing, he was trying to
convince the American people of Hussein’s involvement in 9/11
by unmistakable innuendo and implication. And under the law,
that’s the same thing as doing it expressly. One way he did
it, he constantly talked about Hussein being an imminent threat to the
security of this country, and in the same speech, sometimes the same
breath, he kept talking about 9/11. Well, here’s the American
people, not accustomed to a president who’s taking them to
war under false pretenses, that thought’s not even entering
their mind, they’re not parsing his words. They hear 9/11,
and they hear Hussein being an imminent threat, and they came to the
conclusion that Hussein must have been involved with al-Qaeda in 9/11.
And
then he just flat out lied, by suggesting—by asserting that
Hussein and al-Qaeda had terrorist connections. He’d say
things like this: when you’re talking about the war on
terror, you cannot distinguish between al-Qaeda and Hussein. He said
that Hussein was training al-Qaeda in bomb making and the use of
poisons and deadly gases. Now, the average American infers from
that—I mean, it’s not too much of a leap of
logic—that if Hussein and al-Qaeda have these terrorist
connections and Hussein is training al-Qaeda, that Hussein must have
been involved with al-Qaeda in 9/11. That was what he did by
implication.
But by implication, in the law, he
can’t take the witness stand and say, “Well, I
never said it.” No, you didn’t say it directly, but
you said it indirectly. Let’s see how far he would get in
front of a competent prosecutor by saying, “I never expressly
said it.” He said it by unmistakable implication. As late as
August of 2006, over 90 percent of the troops in Iraq thought that it
was payback time, that Hussein was involved in 9/11 and they were
getting even for the American public for what Hussein and Iraq did to
9/11.
Wherever you look—and I’ve
got so much more evidence in this book. The evidence is overwhelming
that this guy is guilty. And if we get a competent prosecutor,
he’s going to end up getting convicted of first- degree
murder. And by the way, by the way, within a very short period of time,
perhaps a week, I’m going to be reaching out to the
prosecutors of America—there’s close to a thousand
out there—looking for a courageous prosecutor, a state
attorney general, a DA—I don’t have any clout
anymore. I’ve got the clout of an emaciated moth.
I’m not in law enforcement. But I’m going to be
reaching out to prosecutors who do have clout, who do have the
authority, to go against George Bush. I’m sending them a copy
of my book with a cover letter telling them to read the book, and if
they agree with me that the evidence of Bush’s guilt is clear
and they feel that they have jurisdiction—and I’ve
spent hundreds of hours at the law library establishing this
all-important point of jurisdiction—then I’m going
to tell them to proceed forward, and I’m going to offer my
help in any way that they see fit, which could range all the way from
being a consultant to being appointed a special prosecutor.
I
want to tell you just one little interesting story. There’s a
lawyer back East. I spoke to him two days ago. He said,
“Vince, I’m your biggest fan. I’m selling
this book to everyone. I had a bet with Ralph Nader. Nader said,
‘This book will never get out; they’re going to
black it out.’” And he said, “No,
it’s going to become a bestseller.” It has become a
bestseller now, so he won the bet with Nader. I don’t know
how much they bet. In any event, he said, “Vince, I live in a
county, and no citizen of this county has died so far in this war. But
if a citizen of this county dies, I’m telling you, Vince,
I’m going to run for district attorney. And if I become
district attorney, I’m going to go after George Bush,
I’m going to prosecute him.” You can extrapolate
that to thousands of prosecutors around this country and maybe some law
student who is hearing me talk right now and says, “You know,
when I get out, I’m going to become a DA or state attorney
general, and I’m going to go after George Bush.”
You’ve
got to realize, there’s no statute of limitations for the
crime of murder. So this could very well happen. At this stage of my
life, I cannot engage in fanciful reveries. This is a very real thing
that we’re talking about here. I’ve established
jurisdiction on a federal and state level for the prosecution of Bush
for two crimes: conspiracy to commit murder and murder. On a federal
level, we’re really only talking about the Attorney General
in Washington, D.C., operating through his Department of Justice. But
on a state level, I’ve established jurisdiction for the
attorney general in each of the fifty states, plus the hundreds of
district attorneys in counties within those states, to prosecute George
Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers from their state or
county who died fighting his war in Iraq. And with all those
prosecutors—
AMY GOODMAN: Vincent
Bugliosi—
VINCENT BUGLIOSI: Yes.
AMY
GOODMAN: You have thirty seconds, and if you were the man who was
trying this case and you were told you now have thirty seconds to sum
up before the jury, what would those last words be?
VINCENT
BUGLIOSI: Oh, that’s an impossible situation, except to say
that the evidence is overwhelming that George Bush took this nation to
war on a lie, under false pretenses, and therefore, under the law,
he’s guilty of murder. And if justice means anything in
America, I want you to come back with a verdict of guilty. If
we’re going to become a great nation again, we cannot become
a great nation—we used to be—we cannot become a
great nation unless we take the first step of bringing those
responsible for the war in Iraq to justice.
AMY
GOODMAN: Vincent Bugliosi, we want to thank you for being with us. His
book is called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Vincent
Bugliosi himself has tried twenty-one murder cases; he’s
gotten a conviction in every one.
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