The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

I found this book riveting--but at times was so upset I had to put it down in an effort to calm down. I think Mr. Bugliosi pulls no punches, and I glory in him.

This was a well written book and would open anyone's eyes. BUT, I don't think anyone would have the guts to do anything about it.

The book is provocative, but clearly lays out the case for the prosecution of this President. The end notes are as interesting to read as the text itself. After reading the book you'll have a hard time deciding if you are more outraged at the current administration or the people who still defend it.

Bugliosi's detractors will have a hard time discounting the evidence against Bush in this book. The argument is strong, the facts verified, the evidence damning. Don't read it before bed, you won't be able to get to sleep.

Bugliosi knows evil, but even he has underestimated George Bush and the small company of sequestered advisors who made him do it. But he has also underestimated the pervasiveness of the evil--call it "prideful ignorance"--that he's so eager to prosecute.

The devastation to our own country in terms of our own troops--their irreversible injuries and psychological damage; the ravaging of the women, children and civilians of Iraq (the term "suicide bomber" was unknown there until we created a reason for it, after which the mere shouting of the term caused thousands of Iraq citizens on their way to Mosque to leap off a bridge to their deaths); the bankrupting of America spiritually, morally, and economically--all to apprehend a homeless hoodlum in a hole (whose intelligence at least stood up alongside our own leader's)--all because of lies, lies, and more lies. No 9/11 and Iraq connection, no Saddam and 9/11 relation, no tolerance of informed advisors with a different POV (Richard Clarke), no greeting of these American White Knights as heroic rescuers and saviors, no cheap oil--still people want to believe, and this administration and its sycophants (who try to call themselves "mavericks") will exploit that naive, sadly misplaced trust, even proclaiming Mission Accomplished where there is none. No one will mention the obvious--the expense of the Iraq invasion (funded by Chinese loans) and its connection with the collapse of our economy. And just as the loan sharks couldn't help but perpetuate the myth that everyone could afford a $500,000 home, the new-moneyed powers of the Eastern world were convinced that American consumerism would continue to repay in huge sums of interest the money they decided to throw at America's banks who passed it on to the mortgage lenders who passed it on to the consumers.

Dante was right about usurers in the Cantos of the Inferno, and so was Ezra Pound in his own great Cantos (though he was deluded to think that one religion or group of people had a monopoly on usury). But Russ Feingold, Obama and Jimmy Carter (unlike Hillary, Biden and Kerry and many other normally thoughtful individuals) did not vote to support our leader's mandate to engage in this vain and hideous act of transgression, an imperial will proven again and again throughout history to be wrong. It doesn't matter how false the testimony of our leader: the act in itself was transparently corrupt from the beginning and would not have been supported by any person of integrity (a winnable war against hatred?). For that reason, Bugliosi overstates his case.

The American people deserved what they got, doubly so after the 2004 election. We can only hope they demand better this time around. Rather than persecute a scapegoat (as bad as the money and energy wasted on Saddam), far better they do some soul-searching, however unflattering the results. Our capitalistic system run amok, our consumer culture, and our educational institutions (when did hot-button issues, hardened positions, and ideologies and religious affiliations replace the Socratic principles of learning?) are what failed us. To prosecute a pusillanimous president is tantamount to elevating Saddam, a two-bit thug, to the role of the Anti-Christ. As Young Goodman Brown discovered, it's not necessary to leave Salem to locate Satanic revelry; as Flannery O'Connor's characters soon learn, "good and pious" Americans make serial killers look like saints by comparison; as Faulkner's fallen klan of a grand chivalric order discover, their pure, undefiled, exalted and separatist order was tragically flawed from the outset, an achromatic world removed from the prismatic colors that are our nation's strength.

We don't need a prosecution or a surrender. A confession would be a first step.

The legal framework for the prosecution is set up by Bugliosi in Chapter 4. He begins by citing numerous journalists and other public figures critical of the president for "'false selling of' and 'railroading us into' the Iraq war," then marvels that virtually none of these critics goes on to advocate any legal punishment whatsoever--as if the president had merely dissembled about the weather. For the crime of intentionally misleading the nation into war--and thus knowingly "bringing about" the wrongful deaths of Americans--Bugliosi shows that after January 20, 2009, Bush can be and should be prosecuted for murder. The author then discusses the legal terminology for what constitutes first degree and second degree murder, and why the former applies to the president and his active coconspirators.

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Brian Wright
Copyright 2008