Prosecute Bush: Part II

Though I am responding to a poster on the ABC News comments site, to someone who has obviously not bothered to read the book before commenting, hopefully a more thoughtful reader will benefit.

This poster started his reply by quoting from a White House press release. Below I use his quote and respond by using Bush's own words:

He quoted: "He never said wait till an imminent threat, he said we can't wait"

In his October 7, 2002 speech, (from Cincinnati, Ohio, Bush's first address to the nation on the Iraq threat):

"If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?...Iraq can decide on any given day to provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group...The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terrorist network...Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun-- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

If you read Bugliosi's book, he explains how these and numerous other statements constitute legal proof that he did not have to use those specific words. If he had meant anything other than "imminent" he could have chosen to use "in the future" or even "in the near future", instead of "Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack in as little as forty-five minutes".

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Bush's premeditation lies in the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate (October 1, 2007), released to the Administration just six days before his speech to the nation in Cincinnati. A sanitized, unclassified version with numerous deletions, known as the White Paper, was released on October 4, 2007, by the Bush Administration:

That classified estimate (subsequently declassified in 2004) did include opinions that Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) could exist, but footnotes in the document clarify these as just that -- guesses, opinions, hunches. One example: "Although we have little specific information on Iraq'a CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons..."

But, in the White Paper, these footnoted qualifications were deleted and the most significant statement in the NIE was totally excised:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorit attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqui involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war. Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable." [emphasis added]

In other words Baghdad, according to our intelligence agencies, had no intention of provoking a war, and the White House knew it before scaring the begeezus out of all of us.

The poster also quoted numerous statements in the Congressional Authorization and claim that this exonerates Bush of premeditiation and responsibility.

Again, if you read the legal arguments, you would understand the distinction. I can't lay out the entire case in a few words, but Bugliosi writes:

"The answer [to the poster's citations of Authorization] is that the congressional authorization is not a defense to the crime of murder... But even if the argument were made that Congress represents all Americans, consent is not a defense to the crime of murder... Consent, though a defense in some crimes (e.g. rape, theft), is not a defense to the crime of murder. Further, it is boilerplate law that fraud vitiates consent. So, the consent that Congress gave Bush is nullified by the deliberate misrepresentations he made to Congress in inducing it to give him its consent."

Bugliosi deals with this issue extensively throughout the book

Finally, the poster quoted:

"ALSO.... do you know that by Saddam's continued no fly zone violations he directly ignored the 1991 Peace treaty. He went on to ignore 13 UN resolutions!
There was also 350 tonnes of yellow cake totally processable for WMDs discovered in Iraq. So please tell me again how President Bush is a murderer when he had all of the above validation?"

Do you seriously want to argue that violations of UN Resolutions and the presence of unprocessed yellow cake, justifies launching an unprovoked attack upon a country that has resulted in more than 4,000 American lives lost, literally (since the Bush Administration still refuses to estimate civilian casualties), tens of thousands of dead and maimed Innocent Iraqi citizens, the loss of more than $1,000,000,000,000 in American treasure (that's trillion, my brother!), and the hatred and loss of trust throughout the world?

Apparently, you have already decided (funny how that sort of matches our "Decider-in-Chief", who rarely reads a newspaper and has his 100-page memos summarized into a paragraph), so I'll speak through you in hopes that an iquisitve, open-minded reader will stop just posting opinions, read, my original post and TAKE THE ACTIONS suggested to bring this criminal to justice.