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OPENING UP ONE’S EYES

Introduction

 

 

 

THE BOOK YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history—the president of this nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 young American soldiers, to horrible, violent deaths. That, of course, is the most serious consequence of Bush’s monumentally criminal behavior. But let’s not forget that, additionally, thousands upon thousands of people have suffered injuries that have disabled them for life; hundreds of thousands of humans have sustained psychic damage from the war, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people will involuntarily re-create in their mind’s eye, over and over again, what happened to their loved ones. Assuming Bush’s guilt for the sake of argument at this point, if what he did is not the greatest crime ever committed by any public official or private citizen in this nation’s history, then I ask you, what is?

I am fully aware that the charge I have just made is an extremely serious one. But if there is one thing that I take pride in, it is the fact that I never, ever make a charge without offering a substantial amount of support for it. You may ultimately end up not agreeing with me, but you will have to concede that I offered much evidence in support of my position, something that people frequently do not do. How often, for instance, do you see an assertive, declarative caption or headline in a newspaper or magazine article, but when you read the article you find that either there is no support for the headline, or the evidence is very anemic? I don’t do that. That’s not my style.

Before I get into the heart of this book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I want to discuss some preliminary matters in this and the following two chapters. Without your consideration of these matters, I believe that what I am urging—the prosecution of the president of the United States, yes, the president of the United States, for murder—would be much more of a shock to your sensibilities. That inevitable shock is a burden I know I have to overcome. I am very confident, however, that I will be able to do so, and that open-minded people will agree that in this book I set forth the legal architecture that authorizes Bush’s prosecution and, more importantly, I present evidence against Bush that proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that he is guilty of murder.

 

 

If Winston Churchill said something about World War II, and a bum in a Bowery gutter said something quite the opposite, whom would you believe? There’s really only one answer to that question, and it’s not the one that 99 percent of people would reflexively give—Winston Churchill. The only proper answer to the question is, I’d have to hear what they had to say. This is obviously true since we know that just as a wise man can say something foolish, a fool can say something wise. Now, if neither Churchill nor the bum had weighed in on the issue yet and you were asked, “Who is more likely to say something intelligent about the matter?” the obvious answer would be, “Churchill.”

What are we talking about here? We’re talking about the fact that most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what they’ve been told to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see, not what is right in front of them in its pristine condition. The reason I’m going to spend a little time on this phenomenon is that the reader’s opening his eyes to reality is a necessary predicate to his accepting the revolutionary conclusions and recommendations I set forth in this book.

I am not, as the Los Angeles Times said of me, an “American master of common sense.” Indeed, to be perfectly frank with you, I don’t even feel I’m a particularly bright person. But at least in my professional life (I go through my private life blindfolded) I seem to naturally—and not as a result, I believe, of any special intelligence at all—see what’s in front of me completely uninfluenced by the clothing (reputation, hoopla, conventional wisdom, etc.) put on it by others.

Let me give you a few examples of what I am talking about here. It was reported that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the deaths of as many as 300,000 Iraqis. But when he was brought to trial in Baghdad on October 19, 2005, for his many crimes against the Iraqi people, and it was reported in the New York Times what the first crime was that he was going to be prosecuted for, I literally could not believe what I was reading. Obviously, a prosecutor wants to start his case on a strong note, and purportedly Hussein had been guilty, many times over, of murder on a grand scale—for example, the gassing of the Kurds, the killing of great numbers of Shiites following the Persian Gulf War, the torture and murder of thousands of Iraqis in his prisons, and so on. But instead of starting out on a strong note with one of these crimes, the prosecutor was starting out on no note at all. In fact, he was starting out with no crime at all.

I called my wife over to the breakfast table where I was reading the paper and said to her, “You are not going to believe what I’m going to read to you. It is nothing short of unbelievable.” I proceeded to read to her the New York Times article about what the prosecutor was alleging. The article (and subsequent media and investigative sources) said that on July 8, 1982, in Dujail, Iraq, a largely Shiite Muslim town about thirty-five miles north of Baghdad, twelve to fifteen shots were fired at Hussein in an assassination attempt as his motorcade drove out of town after a visit.

Hussein’s security forces later rounded up around 800 residents of Dujail for interrogation. Approximately 400 old people, women, and children were subsequently transferred, in internal exile, for several years to a desert detention center near the Saudi border, and many were released. On May 27, 1984, almost two years later, Hussein signed a document authorizing the prosecution of 148 men (including 20 teenage boys) on the charge of being members of the conspiracy to kill him. He based his decision upon the recommendation of legal advisers who reviewed a 361-page dossier of evidence compiled against the 148. Apparently, 46 of the 148 had already died from physical torture or execution by their interrogators and guards at Abu Ghraib prison, where later, under new and kinder landlords—Americans—we know that many Iraqis continued to be physically abused, some tortured, even killed. The remaining 102 out of the 148 men were eventually convicted and executed for the attempt on Hussein’s life.

Note that if Hussein had intended to kill innocent people in retaliation for the attempt on his life, he would have killed many more people, perhaps the whole town. In fact, in a very telling statement by a man whose brothers were among those convicted by Hussein’s Revolutionary Court for the attempt on his life and executed, and who rejoiced when Hussein was executed, he acknowledged that several other members of his family, after interrogation for the attempted assassination, were released from custody.

Incredibly, then, Hussein was convicted and put to death for executing those who were members of the conspiracy to murder him!! (He was not convicted of any other crime he is believed to have committed.) To repeat, Hussein was killed for killing those who had first tried to kill him.

The bottom line is that it appears Hussein did not commit the crime of murder here, and if this scenario had happened in any other country, including the United States (i.e., there was an attempt on the life of the president or prime minister of a country and the perpetrators were tried, convicted, and sentenced to life or death depending on the law of the country), it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. Yet, remarkably, I never heard anything on radio or TV, or saw anything in any newspaper or magazine, about what I have just said here. There was total silence in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and everywhere else on this issue. Why? Because although I only saw what I was reading in the newspaper, apparently a great many others did not, seeing only what they expected to see as they read the very same words that I did. Since Hussein was a terrible tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and people read that Hussein was being brought to trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity,” they just assumed he was being prosecuted for these atrocities, and what the prosecutor was doing, obviously, had to be proper and correct.

Commenting upon the sentence of death Hussein received, the New York Times said, “Hussein’s horrendous crimes” against the Iraqi people deserved the death sentence. The Los Angeles Times, referring to the many atrocities against his people that Hussein had committed in the past, said that Hussein was sentenced to death “for one of the massacres” of his people, “a crime against humanity.” The reliably silly Christopher Hitchens said, “Hussein was convicted of massacring the inhabitants of a Shiite village, Dujail, in 1982.” (Dujail, in 1982, was a town of some 78,000.)

The trial of Hussein was just another example of people only hearing the music, not the lyrics, of human events.

Another example, this one from the past, concerns the Czech tennis great Ivan Lendl. In the early years of his sterling career, Lendl was a quitter. If things were going well, he’d steamroll over his opponents, but if they weren’t, oftentimes he’d give up. In the finals of one U.S. Open years ago, he was facing Jimmy Conners, who doesn’t know what the term “give up” even means. At some point in the match, Lendl stopped running after balls that were any meaningful distance away from him and lost ingloriously to Conners. What Lendl did angered me. How dare Lendl give up? He’s in the finals of one of the most important tennis tournaments in the world and he wasn’t giving it his all? Even if he didn’t personally care, didn’t he owe it to the millions of people watching the event on TV? And if he didn’t even care about them, didn’t he at least owe it to the great game of tennis?

After the match I went to the courts to play. I was still upset and voiced my displeasure with Lendl to no fewer than four or five of the players at the court who had also seen the match, saying that Lendl should be suspended and barred from playing in any sanctioned tennis tournament for at least a year. None of them knew what I was talking about. They hadn’t noticed anything unusual about Lendl’s performance at all. And the reason, of course, is that these were players who, like me, are willing to crash into a fence to retrieve a ball. And that’s where nothing is at stake other than to satisfy our small mind’s atavistic desire to win. If we will knock ourselves out in a meaningless practice match, obviously when you’re playing Jimmy Conners in the finals of the U.S. Open, you’ll kill yourself to win, right?

My tennis colleagues simply didn’t see what happened in the Conners-Lendl match. They saw what they expected to see. The next day not one of the accounts of the match I read in the newspapers mentioned Lendl’s sorry and inexcusable performance, and there was no mention of his having sustained any injury during the match that would have caused it. I was happy to read, in an edition of Sports Illustrated a month or so later, that tennis greats Pancho Segura and Bobby Riggs, who were courtside during the match, were disgusted by Lendl’s performance. (It should be mentioned that during the middle and latter parts of Lendl’s career, he developed into one of the grittiest, most tenacious and competitive players on the tour, always persevering till the bitter end.)

Just within the past decade or so, this tendency of mine to see what is in front of me in its pristine condition—which certainly is not unique to me—has caused me to hold beliefs at odds with the vast majority of Americans. One example is the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson. Before my book on the case, Outrage, came out, the widespread belief was the one set forth by Newsweek in its September 30, 1996, issue: “It is accepted wisdom now that prosecutors lost the criminal trial virtually the day the predominately African-American jury was sworn in.” In other words, as pundit after pundit said or implied, the not guilty verdict was solely the fault of the terrible jury, certainly not that of the prosecution. For example, Jeffrey Toobin, who covered the trial for the New Yorker, said, “It is difficult to imagine how else Marcia Clark [who was, per Toobin, “at times brilliant”] might have tried her case. There appears to have been no one thing the prosecution could have done . . . that would have changed the result in this case. The result, it now seems, was preordained.” Influencing all of this was the implied assumption that since the two lead prosecutors were chosen out of a large staff to try this high-profile case, and since they seemed to be intelligent and articulate, they must have been competent. But the reality, taking place right in front of everyone’s eyes, was that they could hardly have been more incompetent.

In my book Outrage, I point out with example after example after example that, as bad as the jury was, the prosecution was even worse, their incompetence being almost unprecedented. Newsday wrote: “Is everybody in America wrong but Bugliosi? Well, he makes a darned conclusive argument that this is so.” The New York Times said, “Bugliosi puts the blame where it belongs.” The Los Angeles Times said, “No one who reads Outrage will ever again believe that the most publicized acquittal in the history of American jurisprudence was solely the result of juror prejudice or the machinations of unscrupulous defense attorneys. The D.A. and the prosecutors have been called before the bar of justice.”

Consider one more example. When Paula Jones’s lawsuit against President Bill Clinton reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 and Clinton asked the court to postpone the civil trial to the end of his term, virtually the entire country, including the major liberal newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, opposed Clinton’s request, invoking the mantra “No one is above the law.” (But Clinton wasn’t asking that he be given immunity from the civil lawsuit. All he asked for was a routine continuance.) And when the court eventually denied Clinton’s request and ruled that Clinton had to go to trial during his term, again, virtually the entire country agreed with the court’s opinion. As an article in the New Yorker noted, the Supreme Court opinion “drew wide praise for reflecting the bedrock American principle that no one is above the law.” Papers throughout the land applauded the court’s decision. Just two among many examples. Los Angeles Times: “A unanimous Supreme Court has ruled, correctly, that a president has no constitutional claim to temporary immunity.” New York Daily News: “When all is said and done, history will remember that the court held that the president is first and foremost a United States citizen, subject to the law like everyone else.”

Many papers lamented the decision, saying it was unfortunate and would harm the presidency, but said that the court had nonetheless ruled correctly. This sense that the ruling was unfortunate but the court was nevertheless correct was a view articulated by a great many, including lawyers, law professors, and columnists. Just three examples. An editorial in the National Law Journal said that the Supreme Court’s decision “holds dangers for the U.S. presidency and for the U.S. political system itself” but concluded that the “court’s ruling” in the case “makes legal sense.” Walter Shapiro, political columnist for USA Today, wrote that what the court’s ruling portended for the president “should make us all feel a little embarrassed to be Americans” and “no president deserves the humiliation of this lawsuit.” But, he added, “I have no quarrel with the Supreme Court decision. The principle that no one, not even a sitting president, should be above the law is embedded in our legal system.” Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe also bought into this nonsense. In the September 1997 edition of George magazine, after “lamenting” the fact that the president might be forced to trial by the court’s decision, he added that he nonetheless “agrees with the court’s ultimate conclusion. . . . It is a basic axiom of our government that no one is above the law, not even the president, and it follows that no special privileges should attach to whomever holds that august office.”

The case I made in my book No Island of Sanity (the only book ever written on the Supreme Court decision) for the proposition that the Supreme Court should have granted President Clinton’s request to postpone the Jones trial until the end of his term was such that not only did the reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post agree with No Island (in direct conflict with the position others in their paper had taken earlier), but to my knowledge not one conservative scholar who has read the book disagreed.¹ In the Jones case, the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, displayed staggering judicial incompetence that people brighter than I never saw.

The court’s unanimous decision in the Paula Jones case (if 50 million people say a foolish thing, it’s still a foolish thing) was not only devoid of all common sense, but violated the court’s own fundamental legal principles. Whenever the court, any court in the land, is confronted with a situation where a valid private interest is in conflict with a valid public interest—in this case, Paula Jones’s interest in having her case brought to trial immediately (i.e., during the president’s term), and the right of the nation’s citizens to have a full-time president, one that can carry out his duties running the country without the enormous distraction of a private lawsuit—the court must, as it had been doing (I cite many cases in No Island) for over two centuries, balance the interests to see which interest is the most important and should prevail. For whatever reason, the court strangely, one could almost say mysteriously, did not balance the interests in the Paula Jones case. If it had, what conceivable argument under the moon could possibly be made for the proposition that Paula Jones’s individual right to proceed to trial, right in the middle of the president’s term, outweighed and was more important than the right of 270 million Americans to have their president be undiverted and undistracted in the performance of his duties? Whether we like a particular president or not, he works every day on national and international issues that affect all of our lives.

The reader should know that under the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act of 1940, even during peacetime, a buck private going through basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, whose principal challenge is to learn how to assemble and disassemble an M-16 rifle, is legally entitled to a postponement of any civil action against him to the end of his active duty so that he can devote all his energy and attention to his duties. But the president of the United States, who has the most important and demanding job on earth, is not? What previously recognized form of logic would allow this?

I wrote in No Island (at a point in time when the case was scheduled to be tried in Little Rock, Arkansas, and before it was settled out of court by Clinton) that “I can easily foresee the trial igniting such a vast and deafening media explosion by the world press, and the situation getting so out of hand because of sensational allegations and new and damaging revelations that the president has to respond to, that he might become more than substantially distracted by the lawsuit. Rather, he will be . . . consumed by his political survival.” Reviewing No Island in USA Today, Tony Mauro wrote: “Six days before Monica Lewinsky became a household name, famed Los Angeles lawyer Vincent Bugliosi turned in a book manuscript that foresaw it all.” Again, I’m not the brightest person in the world, but a two-year-old should have been able to see the terribly dangerous situation and precedent the court was establishing by its decision in the Jones case, and all lawyers should have seen the court was simply wrong in the ruling, which violated a well-known and universally accepted principle of constitutional law. I view the Supreme Court, in the Jones case, like a driver who causes a massive accident on the freeway, and then drives on, looking at the pileup in the rearview mirror.

In a syndicated column, social historian Gary Wills, in referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v. Clinton, wrote: “Vincent Bugliosi was right.” He didn’t say, “Those who disagreed at the time with the Supreme Court’s decision were right” because there did not appear to be any “those.” I say this not to boast, but to make a larger point. In this book, I will be asking the reader to give the lie to Thoreau’s dictum that “it is very difficult to see what is right in front of one’s eyes.” This will be particularly true when I set forth the legal basis and the evidence that support my contention that President Bush should be prosecuted, in an American courtroom, for first degree murder arising out of his war in Iraq.

How the above is all relevant is that if any reader finds it intellectually incongruous, and therefore difficult to accept, that a president of the United States could actually do what I strongly believe George Bush did in leading this nation to war, because, well, one would simply never expect (i.e., seeing what you expect to see) a president of the United States to do such a thing, I say you will be falling into the same unthinking trap that so many humans do. You have to disabuse yourself of any preconceived notion you may have that just because George Bush is the president of the United States he is simply incapable of engaging in conduct that smacks of great criminality. Because if you take that position, a position that has no foundation in logic, you’re not going to be receptive to the evidence I set forth in this book, nor to the commonsense inferences I draw from that evidence.

For those who want America to one day be the great nation it once was, it can hardly do this if it doesn’t take the first step of bringing those responsible for the war in Iraq to justice.