The other day, State Attorney Dennis Ward loaned me his copy of the Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by Vincent Bugliosi, which I began reading last night, the day before Memorial Day, when America commemorates its war dead.
Also yesterday I received an email containing photos of the New York City Memorial Day air show over the city and the Statue of Liberty, to which I replied: “Impressive. When I was a boy, I would have loved to see something like this. Would have brought my plastic model airplanes to life, for a while. Older, more jaundiced, it brings up for me mixed feelings, thanks to Vietnam, Iran Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan.”
To which the sender replied: ”I hear you Sloan. But its about the beauty of NYC which is my home and the boys in uniform who serve which you have to separate from the politics. Have a good weekend.”
I was sick as dog yesterday, preparing unawares, I suppose, to write write this post today.
Two things jumped out at me as I read the first 56 pages of Bugliosi’s courageous book. Courageous, because he was not afraid to tell it like he saw it, and be branded a traitor.
The first thing that jumped out was his unearthing of the charges against Saddam Hussein brought by his own country against him, charges on which he was ultimately convicted and executed. What he was charged with was finding and putting to trial over one hundred Iraqis who had plotted to assassinate him. After being convicted in an Iraqi court, they were sentenced to die and were executed. That was the only crime he was charged with doing. He was not charged with mass murder of the Kurds or his own people. He was charged with doing what any American president and American law enforcement and courts would have done, if an assassination attempt on the president had been unearthed and thwarted and the conspirators caught. Begliosi says in his book that what Saddam Hussein seemed most interested in leading up to the American invasion was completing his fourth novel, about political intrigue and treason in that region.
The second thing that jumped out at me in the first 56 pages was that President George W. Bush apparently never suffered mental, emotional or spiritual agony over the deaths and wounding and emotional trauma suffered by American troops in Iraq, and by their families and friends. To the contrary, Bugliosi convincingly proves just the opposite with quotes out of Bush’s own mouth, that he and his wife were wife having a ball, the time of their lives throughout his presidency.
Bugliosi’s kindest view in the first 56 pages of George W. Bush and his Vietnam draft-dodger crew is they perhaps hoped to use Iraq to establish a model democracy for the Middle East, which would be contagious and take over the region. While making making a pretty good argument that this may have been their goal, Bugliosi points out that it’s not America’s business to invade countries that are not threatening America, to force them to have a democracy form of government.
The rest of what I’ve read so far in Bugliosi’s book is mostly rehash of what I’ve read or seen on TV before. Yet somehow, I suspect as I read further, I will have some more things jump out at me that I have not seen before. Like Bugliosi, I seem not to have filters that enable me not to see what is staring me right in the face, even if I don’t want it staring me right in the face.
Bugliosi is not exactly a lightweight. The brief author bio at the end of the book says he started his legal career in the Los Angeles, California District Attorney’s office, where he prosecuted and won 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. The most noteworthy was the Charles Manson murder trial, about which Bugliosi wrote Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true crime book in publishing history. The legal and literary credits only start there, in the author bio. For more information, go to www.prosecutionofbush.com.
I have long felt Bush was guilty of treason and the murder and maiming of thousands of American troops, and many more thousands of Iraqis. As facts proved, there were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no imminent treat Iraq posed toward America.
911 was clearly bait, a trap set by Osama bin Laden. When Bush and his Vietnam draft-dodger cronies cooked the books good enough to persuade Congress to go to war against Hussein, they gave Osama precisely what he wanted: a Middle Eastern nation in which to fight America on Islamic ground, in a rugged desert clime, using weapons (suicide bombers) against which the mightiest military force in modern history had no defense. Thus did George W. Bush and his buddies give aid and lend comfort to the enemy (Osama bin Laden).
Today is Memorial Day, when Americans commemorate our war dead. Let us do it with our eyes wide open. Let us do it knowing not one American soldier’s death or wounding in Iraq was in service to or to defend America. It was, as Bugilosi says in his book, in service to and to defend the personal agendas of George W. Bush and his cronies.
Sloan Bashinsky, American citizen