Part 4 of 4
155 ... any state attorney general in the fifty states ... could bring a murder charge against Bush for any soldiers in that state who lost their lives fighting Bush's war. Bush would not achieve anything by arguing that the subject state had no jurisdiction to prosecute him because in going to war in Iraq he was carrying out his duties as a federal constitutional officer (i.e., president), and hence, under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article VI, cl. 2), he could only be prosecuted, if at all, in a federal court under federal law. But the supremacy clause as well as the facts of this case would offer no legal shelter for Bush. If Bush committed an act that constituted murder under both state and federal law, there would be concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute him, and, in the absence of a federal prosecution, the supremacy clause would not preclude any state court prosecution. The clause would only be applicable if both state and federal authorities wanted to prosecute him at the same time, in which case federal law would prevail and the state court would be without jurisdiction to proceed at that time. Here, if there was a federal prosecution and conviction of Bush for murder under federal law, there would be no pressing need for a state prosecution anyway, though the state could prosecute him after the federal prosecution concluded under the principle of dual sovereignty, which recognizes that the federal government as well as the individual states are separate sovereigns. As the court said in United States v. Davis, "Under this well-established principle, a federal prosecution does not bar [under the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution] a subsequent state prosecution of the same person for the same acts, and a state prosecution does not bar a federal one ... When a single act violates the laws of two sovereigns, the wrongdoer has committed two distinct offenses" (906 F. 2d 829, 832 [1990]; see also, Bartkus v. Illinois, 359 U.S. 121 [1959], and Abbate v. United States, 359 U.S. 187 [1959]).
Let's take the hypothetical situation where the federal government did not want to prosecute Bush, and without a supremacy clause issue, state court proceedings were instituted against him. Could he seek a writ of habeas corpus in a federal court to bar the state prosecution on the ground that he could not be found guilty in a state court for any act of his that took place in the performance of his official duties as a federal officer? Yes. But the writ would be denied unless he could prove in the federal habeas corpus proceeding that as president, he had a "duty to do" the act (i.e., take this nation to war), and that his conduct was "necessary and proper" (In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1, 75-76 [1890]; see also In re McShane's Petition, 235 F. Supp. 262, 271-272 [1964]; In re Waite, 81 F. 359, 365 [1897]; Clifton v. Superior Court, 35 C.A. 3d 654, 658, [1973]; 28 U.S.C. §§'s 2241, 2251). If the facts are as I believe them to be, this he could not possibly do, and the federal court would not issue the writ.
Bush could be expected to make one or more other challenges to the jurisdiction of any state court to prosecute him for murder, including citing the language of Article III, §2, cl. 3 of the U.S. Constitution (and 18 U.S.C. §3238) that when a crime is "not committed within any state" (the killing of American soldiers took place in Iraq), the trial shall take place in a federal court. But here, as indicated in the main text, the crime of conspiracy to commit murder was committed in the states by the overt acts of Bush, Cheney and Rice -- on their misrepresentations on TV, radio, and in print reaching all fifty states, and in the recruitment of soldiers in the states -- taking the nation to war under false pretenses. Once jurisdiction has fastened on the state court to prosecute Bush et al. for the crime of conspiracy to commit murder, killings that were the direct result of that conspiracy would also fall under the jurisdiction of the subject state court. In this regard, state courts can avail themselves, as the federal courts, of the law of nations' principles of jurisdiction (e.g., the "protective" or "effects" principles) to give them extraterritorial jurisdiction.
The leading case for this proposition is the U.S. Supreme Court case of Strassheim v. Daily, 221 U.S. 280, 285 (1910), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Acts outside a [state's] jurisdiction, but intended to produce and producing detrimental effects within it [which would certainly include the deaths in Iraq of the citizens of a state], justify a state in punishing the cause of the harm as if he had been present at the effect, if the state should succeed in getting him within its power." (Any state could do the latter with its prosecution of Bush for conspiracy to commit murder.) See also, Skiriotes v. Florida, 313 U.S 69, 73, 76 (1941), where the conduct of a citizen of Florida on the high seas (outside the territorial jurisdiction of the state of Florida) was held to be within the jurisdiction of Florida's courts where a state interest was involved. But it's not necessary to a state's jurisdiction that the defendant be a citizen of the state. See State v. Bundrant, 546 P. 2d 530, 534-535, 554-556 (1976). Indeed, the state can extend jurisdiction under the effects doctrine even where the conduct adversely affecting the state takes place within the territorial jurisdiction of another country. See State v. Jack, 125 P. 3d 311, 318-322 (2005), where the state was Alaska, and the country Canada. For a discussion of this issue, see Robinson, Paul H., Criminal Law, pp. 102-103, Aspen Publishers, New York, 1997).
It has to be noted that efforts by Bush to have state proceedings against him terminated on the ground that only a federal court would have jurisdiction would only serve to publicize the fact to the nation that a federal prosecutor should step forward to prosecute Bush under federal law, which, as I've indicated, would be the most natural and best venue to bring Bush to justice.
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155 But a necessary element of the corpus delicti of the federal crime of conspiracy is that at least one overt act be committed by one or more members of the conspiracy to further the object of the conspiracy. (Hyde v. United States, 225 U.S. 347, 361-365 [1911]; Federal Judicial Center, Pattern Criminal Jury Instructions, 5.06A).
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156 To repeat, the attorney general in each of these fifty states would have jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for conspiracy to commit murder and murder. There is even a statutory basis for a prosecution of Bush by the states for conspiracy to commit murder. It is found in the well-accepted rule of law that if any part of a crime is committed in a state, that state has jurisdiction to prosecute. A typical state statute would be that in California. Section 778a of the California Penal Code (enacted way back in 1872) reads:
"Whenever a person, with intent to commit a crime, does any act within this state in execution or part execution of that intent, which culminates in the commission of a crime, either within or without [outside] this state, the person is punishable for that crime in this state in the same manner as if the crime had been committed entirely within this state."
Although some states (e.g., California: see People v. Buffum, 40 C. 2d 709, 716 [1953]) hold that the "act" within the state not be "any act," but one that is the legal equivalent of a criminal attempt, it has been noted that only "a small group of states retain" the requirement of an attempt. "The larger group of [state] provisions based on the Model Penal Code [§1.03 (1) (a)] require only that 'an element of the offense' occurs within the state. Conduct can meet this standard without coming so close to substantial completion as a state might require for an attempt" (La Fave, Wayne R; Israel, Jerold H; King, Nancy J., Criminal Procedure, 2d edition, Vol. 4, p. 583, West Group, St. Paul, 1999).
A classic example of this already well-established rule in case law is where the premeditation to commit murder (premeditation being an essential element of first degree murder) is formed in one state, but the murder itself takes place in another. In Lane v. State of Florida, the defendant formed the premeditation in Florida for a murder committed in Alabama. The court held that Florida had jurisdiction to prosecute the defendant for first degree murder in Florida for the Alabama murder (388 So. 2d 1022 [1980]; see also, State v. Harrington, 260 A. 2d 692, 697 [1969]; Conrad v. Alabama, 317 N.E. 789 [1974]; State v. Willoughby, 892 p 2d 1319; and Commonwealth v. Thomas, 189 A. 2d 255, 258-259 [1963]).
Since an overt act is a necessary element of the crime of conspiracy, this fact alone would give the majority of American states jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for the crime of conspiracy to commit murder. Even in the minority states that require that the act committed within the state amount to an attempt (not an attempt to commit the murders in Iraq), there are several reasons why an overt act is a special act that cannot be put in the "any act" category that the California Supreme Court, in the Buffum case, said should really be like an attempt. "A criminal attempt is a step towards a criminal offense [like robbery, burglary, murder, etc.] with specific intent to commit that particular crime," one eminent legal scholar wrote. Virtually all courts demand that the step come reasonably close to the actual commission of the crime. Hence, mere preparation to commit the crime will not suffice. Certainly, if A fires at B to kill him, and misses, this is attempted murder.
How far away from the successful completion of the offense can one go and still be held, by his actions, to have attempted to commit the crime? "It is not practical to prescribe guiding rules for determining this," the court said in People v. Gibson, 94 C.A. 2d 468, 471 (1949). But an example or two will be instructive. In People v. Lanzit, the defendant, intending to kill his wife by dynamiting her place of business, procured someone to make the bomb, went with him to his wife's business, and while getting ready there, was arrested. This was held to be attempted murder (70 C.A. 498,504, 506, [1925]). Two men, having agreed to rob a payroll clerk, went to the bank where the clerk was scheduled to receive his payroll and stationed themselves to rob him but were arrested before the clerk appeared on the scene. The court, in People v. Gormley, 225 N.Y.5. 653 (1927), held this was attempted robbery.
One can be guilty of an attempt without his act having constituted an element of the crime he sought to commit. For instance, robbery is the taking of personal property from the possession of another, by force or fear, with the intent to steal. Note that none of these elements of robbery were present in the Gormley case (not even an intent to steal, since said intent has to be contemporaneous with the act of taking, and there was no taking), yet Gormley was guilty of attempted robbery. But the crime of conspiracy cannot even be committed without an overt act, since the overt act is an element of the crime of conspiracy, thereby elevating it to a special act status.
So any overt act will give jurisdiction in a conspiracy case, whereas that same overt act might not be nearly enough to constitute an attempt to commit a crime such as robbery, arson, or burglary. For example, if A and B conspired to rob C when he arrived home from work, B's making a phone call to C's factory to learn when C's shift ended would definitely constitute an overt act under the law of conspiracy, but would just as definitely not constitute, at that point, an attempted robbery. So an overt act isn't just "any" act. [14] As the court said in a federal case, "A conspiracy may be prosecuted in the district where it was formed, or in any district in which an overt act was committed in furtherance of its objects. The place where the conspiracy was formed is immaterial if at least one of the overt acts alleged and proved took place within the district where the defendant is tried. It is not essential that the defendant ever enter the state or district of trial" (Downing v. United States, 348 F. 2d 594, 598 [1965]; see also, Hyde v. United States, 225 U.S. 347, 361-365 [1911]; 18 U.S.C. §3237[a] .
And we can't forget that just as overt acts aren't "any" acts, the two overt acts in this case giving every state in the Union jurisdiction to prosecute Bush for conspiracy to commit murder weren't "any overt acts" either. Telling lies to the American people to get their support to go to war and recruiting soldiers to fight this war couldn't possibly be more important to Bush and his coconspirators in achieving the object of their conspiracy.
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157 And the existence of the conspiracy "can be inferred if the evidence reveals that the alleged participants shared 'a common aim or purpose' and 'mutual dependence and assistance existed'" (United States v. De Luna, 763 F. 2d 897, 918 [1985], quoting from United States v. Jackson, 696 F. 2d 578, 582-583 [1982]).
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157 Two who definitely should be are Cheney and Rice, coconspirators and aiders and abettors in the murders. It should be noted that an automatic additional count against Bush and his coconspirators in any federal indictment against them would be the federal felony of conspiracy to defraud the United States under 18 USC §371, which provides: "If two or more persons conspire ... to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof [certainly Congress would be such an agency] in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." But obviously, given the enormity of what these people did, they deserve much worse. Only a conviction of murder would be adequate here.
By the way, a felony-murder prosecution against Bush and his coconspirators under 18 U.S.C. §1111 could not take place since the §371 felony is not one of the enumerated felonies set forth in §1111.
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161 He, of course, couldn't come up with any such agency (or member thereof) ... If Bush answered that he received this information from Douglas Feith's rogue unit at the Department of Defense (which already had its own authorized intelligence agency, the DIA), his position would not stand up on cross-examination. As alluded to in an earlier note, unlike any of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies authorized by federal law, Feith's unit was only authorized by a key Iraqi war architect, Paul Wolfowitz (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief deputy), who himself, along with Feith, in my opinion, were likely coconspirators with Bush in taking this nation to war on a lie. Moreover, neither Feith nor any member of his staff had any training or background in intelligence. Additionally, Bush has never even said, in the previous six years, that Feith's group provided him with any document or report that concluded Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country.
Apart from the fact that Feith would be the type of lower-level conspirator the prosecutor might grant immunity from prosecution to testify against Bush, for Bush to assert he relied on the conclusions of Feith's motley, amateur group (assuming for the sake of argument they even told Bush that Hussein was an imminent threat) over the conclusions of sixteen well- established federal intelligence agencies led by the CIA would make Bush not only look ridiculous and implausible to the jury, but worse, it would look like he was relying on his own coconspirators to go to war.
CHAPTER 5: BUSH "COULDN'T POSSIBLY" HAVE BEEN ANY WORSE IN HANDLING THE WAR ON TERRORISM
174 It was widely accepted that killing Bin Laden in the process of attempting to capture him was not to be discouraged. Clinton's national security advisers told the 9/11 Commission that Clinton wanted Bin Laden dead and his legal advisers said that killing Bin Laden would be lawful because the killing of anyone who posed a threat to the country would not constitute an "assassination," the latter being prohibited by earlier presidential executive orders of Presidents Ford and Reagan. In 1976, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905, which provided that "no employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." On December 4, 1981, in his Executive Order 12333, President Reagan even tightened the ban, dropping the word "political" and adding that nobody "acting on behalf of" the United States could assassinate anyone. The 9/11 Commission said that every CIA official whom they interviewed on the matter, including CIA director George J. Tenet, told the commission that Bin Laden could only be lawfully killed if he died in an operation whose objective was to capture him.
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175 On August 20, 1998, Clinton's CIA did launch sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles on an Afghan camp where Bin Laden was believed to be ... A missile strike in 1999 against a desert camp in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was supposed to be was called off at the last moment because predator cameras seemed to show the presence of officials from the United Arab Emirates (considered to be an ally of America) visiting the camp. Another strike in Kandahar in 1999 was called off because of the fear of civilian casualties and the lack of confidence in the accuracy of intelligence.
In 2000, Clinton visited Pakistan and urged its government to use its influence with the neighboring Afghanistan government of the Taliban to expel Bin Laden from their country, but the 9/11 Commission said, "The Pakistani position was that their government had to support the Taliban [most of whose members received their religious training at schools in Pakistan], and that the only way forward was to engage them and try to moderate their behavior."
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179 Although Ms. Rice spoke very vaguely about the Bush administration having worked prior to 9/11 on a "comprehensive strategy" to destroy the Al Qaeda network ... There is no evidence that the Bush administration did anything other than disregard the findings of an earlier report on February 15, 2001, from a federal commission headed up by former U.S. senators Gary Hart (Democrat) and Warren Rudman (Republican) concluding that "mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious and growing concern." The commission, formed during the presidency of Bill Clinton, recommended that a national homeland security agency be created. But it was Democrats in Congress who later urged the creation of such an agency (the cosponsors of the proposed legislation were Senators Joe Lieberman and Max Cleland), with the Bush administration opposing it for months until it reversed itself and backed the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with a cabinet-level director in charge of the new department.
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180 "In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no." It has to be added that despite Tenet's testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, later, in his 2007 book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet said that "a few weeks after the August 6" memo was delivered to Bush he flew to Texas to "make sure the President stayed current on events" -- presumably referring to the terrorist threats, although he curiously makes no mention at all of what he told the president in this regard.
It is difficult to reconcile the fact that in 2004 Tenet testified under oath that he did not see or talk to Bush during the month of August of 2001, yet in his book three years later (when one would expect his memory to be worse, not better) he said he did meet with Bush in August. Some time after Tenet's embarrassing (to Bush and himself) testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the CIA said that their records showed that Tenet met with Bush twice in August of 2001: once at Bush's ranch on August 17 (about two weeks after the August 6 memo) and once in Washington, D.C., on August 31, but did not say that the meetings concerned the August 6 memo.
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181 ... Bush told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that before 9/11, "I didn't feel that sense of urgency ... I was not on point." Secretary of State Powell, the ever-loyal public servant, tried to help Bush by telling the 9/11 Commission: "We wanted to move beyond the rollback policy of containment, criminal prosecution, and limited retaliation for specific terrorist attacks. We wanted to destroy Al Qaeda." But Secretary Powell, if you all felt Al Qaeda was that serious a threat, why did all of you move at such an elephantine pace? If the type of fear of Al Qaeda that you suggest existed, shouldn't the pace have been more reminiscent of that of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics of 1936? Doesn't the pace you took betray your true state of mind of being largely" oblivious to the threat?
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191 Moore asked, "Was he thinking, 'I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Which one of them screwed me?'" But wait. There perhaps is another good reason for Bush staying in that classroom as long as the second-graders kept reading. We know that Bush has been incredibly audacious and impervious to reason as he has destroyed everything in his path. The story the children were reading was about a young girl's pet goat that eats everything in its path. How can we blame Bush for not wanting to know how this story ended? He may have identified with this goat.
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197 You don't give anyone any credit for something he had no choice but to do. This phenomenon of people failing to grasp that credit requires a choice has rarely been exemplified more than in the godlike glorification and deafening praise heaped upon Rudy Giuliani for his performance on 9/11. Over and over he was called "the hero of 9/11." Encomiums such as he was "Babe Ruth, John Wayne, and the Beatles all rolled into one" and was "America's Winston Churchill" were common. No one, obviously, could be expected to be more fair to Giuliani than Giuliani himself, a notorious self-promoter. But when I read Giuliani's own testimony before the 9/11 Commission and his own book, Leadership, to find out just what he did on 9/11 other than what any other competent mayor would have done that singled him out, I found absolutely nothing at all. And if anyone can read what Giuliani himself said he did after the two planes crashed into the Twin Towers that was special in any way at all, they are much better linguistic archaeologists than I.
Another example out of literally thousands of this phenomenon, this one from a few years back. Mills Lane was the referee in the June 28, 1997, Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield heavyweight championship fight. After Tyson, who gave new meaning to the term "hungry fighter," bit Holyfield's left ear in the third round, causing Holyfield to leap in pain across the ring, a minute later he actually bit off a chunk of Holyfield's right ear, Lane naturally disqualified Tyson. But overnight, Lane became a media sensation. "He's a hero," the sports editor of the Los Angeles Times gushed. Tributes to Lane came in from around the country; he was the cover story in USA Today; and Jay Leno, Larry King Live, and Good Morning America, among many others, wanted him on their show. But what had Lane done that was so "heroic" that any other rational referee would not have done? Are we to believe that other referees would have waited until Tyson approached Holyfield with a jar of mustard and ketchup before finally stepping in?
Indeed, people are so crazy that one doesn't even have to do anything to be denominated a hero. After fifty-two Americans were captured in 1979 at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a group of militant Iranian university students, held hostage for 444 days, and released on January 20, 1981, these American hostages were treated like heroes everywhere in America, actually being given a ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway in lower Manhattan. But for what? No one ever said.
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198 Not giving a speech saying he was going to go after the terrorists? Actually, Bush did fail in one not insignificant way With the nation in shock and mourning from the tremendous tragedy and the first foreign attack ever on our soil, obviously Bush should have addressed the nation in depth within no more than a few days of 9/11. His speaking on television for around one minute outside the Sarasota classroom certainly didn't qualify. Neither did the two or three-minute "speech" he gave to the nation on the evening of 9/11. It was so short that the Los Angeles Times properly felt it didn't even rise to the dignity of a speech or an address, calling it only a "brief statement." While the nation waited to hear a formal and substantive address from its commander-in-chief about 9/11, Bush, for all intents and purposes, hid out. There was no major speech from him to the nation on September the 12th, or 13th, or 14th. Nor on the 15th, or even the 16th, or 17th. September 18th came and went and Bush was a no-show. Same for the 19th. Finally, finally, on the evening of September 20th, almost ten days after the tragedy (a third of a month later), Bush addressed the nation. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, acting as a normal president would, addressed the nation by radio (no TV then) on the evening of December 9, 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor. (Roosevelt's famous description of December 7, 1941, as "a date which will live in infamy" was delivered by him in a brief statement to Congress the previous day)
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201 So saying that Gore and the Democrats wouldn't have responded to 9/11 ... This, of course, is ridiculous. Although Clinton, after the car bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August of 1998 that killed 224 people, 12 of whom were Americans, didn't invade Afghanistan (where the leadership of Al Qaeda, who were believed to be behind the bombings, were), that's because you don't invade a foreign country when terrorists from that country kill Americans in foreign capitals. The 9/11 Commission said that "both civilian and military officials of the Defense Department state flatly that neither Congress or the American public would have supported large-scale military operations in Afghanistan before the shock of 9/11." Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission that prior to 9/11 "no one counseled an all-out war against Afghanistan of the kind that we did after 9/11 ... [It] was not recommended."
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210 Relatives of the victims in the room applauded Clarke. Even though it is not subject to dispute that 9/11 happened because, by definition, Bush's FBI and CIA did not detect the Al Qaeda conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11, Bush not only failed to apologize to the nation or the victims' survivors, he demonstrated his total lack of leadership by refusing to fire or even criticize those in these agencies who, like Bush, let this nation down. As in private life, to stimulate excellence, good performances have to be rewarded and gross negligence and incompetence punished. How did President John F. Kennedy respond to the CIA's botched handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961? He called the director of the CIA, Allen W. Dulles, and two of his chief assistants -- Lieutenant General Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director of Plans who was the chief architect behind the invasion -- each of whom Kennedy was friendly with and respected, into his office and told them: "Under the British system I would have to go. But under our system, I'm afraid it's got to be you." After allowing a decent passage of time, Kennedy accepted the resignations of Dulles and Bissell, and Cabell retired. But you see, Kennedy was a leader and real president. Bush is neither. CIA director George Tenet did resign (on June 3, 2004, nearly three years after 9/11, due to mounting criticism of his performance), but there wasn't the slightest intimation from anyone that Bush asked or even wanted him to.
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211 ... although the 9/11 bipartisan commission consisted of distinguished people, they were all political insiders and seemed reluctant or incapable of asking the necessary, tough questions. People like Democrat Richard Ben Veniste, a lawyer, give the impression that their main goal is to make sure they don't do anything that will prevent their appointment to the next commission. They growl just loud enough (you know, things like, "just answer the question") to be acceptable to the Democrats. I shouldn't be too harsh on Ben-Veniste. If he's a typical lawyer, he simply is incapable of asking penetrating, cross-examination questions.
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225 We also all know that Iraq had no terrorists before Bush invaded it. The only one ... Abu Nidal (real name, Sabri al-Banna) was a Palestinian terrorist who, in the 1970s through the 1990s, headed up a small terrorist group that floated throughout the Mideast, including Syria, Libya, and Iraq, although Iraq after harboring and supporting Nidal, expelled him in 1983. Nidal is believed to have been behind the deaths of three hundred people in twenty countries. Before his death in Baghdad in August of 2002 he was reported to be in poor health, and the circumstances surrounding his death have been questioned by some. Iraqi authorities claim that Nidal had entered Iraq illegally, and when he was discovered by Iraqi officials he committed suicide by shooting himself.
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226 They were free to pursue any lifestyle or religion they wanted -- Muslim, Christian, gay ... As a representative sample of the stark difference between prewar Iraq and now, under Hussein Baghdad was a city where sexual freedom flourished. No more. In fact, in 2005 the grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite religious figure in Iraq, issued a decree (since lifted) calling for all gay men and lesbians to be killed in the "worst, most severe way." A Baghdad gay told the New York Times in December of 2007: "The way things were before was so much better than where we are now." Gays in today's Iraq are forced to hide their sexual orientation and practice their lifestyle in great secrecy.
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228 Slightly more than that do not even want us in their country, viewing us not as liberators but as invaders and occupiers. If Bush had any sense, he would have taken the advice of his father, who in his 1998 book, A World Transformed, coauthored with Brent Scowcroft, explained why he didn't seek to oust Saddam Hussein from power after his anti-Iraq coalition forced Hussein's military forces out of Kuwait. "Trying to eliminate Saddam [by] extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq," he wrote, "would have incurred incalculable human and political costs ... Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
It wasn't just his father. On May 25, 2007, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report in which it cited previously classified documents showing that two months before Bush invaded Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies twice presciently warned the Bush administration of the extreme difficulty of establishing a democracy in Iraq after removing Hussein from power. They predicted that Al Qaeda would exploit the inevitable instability in Iraq to increase its operations and influence. But when you're hell-bent on going to war, as Bush was, you don't take anyone's advice, including that of your own father.
Although all but the flag-waving right wing agree that the situation in Iraq has disintegrated to the point where the war has become hopeless, and our role has essentially been reduced to trying to protect Iraqi people from the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia, and trying to protect each of these groups from each other, Bush desperately clings to the "stay the course" plan. Why? Can it be that Bush knows if he leaves Iraq now, this will be an open admission that the war that completely defined his presidency was an abysmal failure, one that will consign him to the trash heap of history for all time? Indeed, this might happen whatever he does. But if he leaves now, he knows it is certain to happen.
He also knows that if he keeps us in Iraq to the bitter end of his presidency (which he has said he will do, telling author Bob Woodward that he would continue the war even if the only ones supporting him were "my wife and Barney," his dog), maybe, just maybe, he can salvage something, anything at all, for his ignominious legacy. Or that maybe his successor, burdened with the disaster Bush left him or her with, will, like Nixon in Vietnam, start to share the blame. [15]
In the meantime, young American soldiers continue to die violent deaths in Iraq in a senseless war that has already been lost. And although arguments can be made for our gradual, as opposed to immediate, withdrawal, this very slow withdrawal, resulting in a continuation of the war, may be an intentional sacrifice of American lives and blood by Bush for no other reason than to help him, in his mind, diminish the blame directed toward him. Although I obviously do not know this to be true, I believe it to be a real possibility only because I believe this man is, or is close to being, a human monster.
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28 Out of the blood and debris of the Iraq war, how many young Bin Ladens will we eventually have to deal with down the line, whom Bush created ... What I've said here is just common sense, but indeed, there's an interesting historical precedent for this phenomenon. Bin Laden himself was one of many young Muslim volunteers to go to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join in a jihad (holy war or struggle) against the Soviet Union invaders of Afghanistan (supported, as it happens, by the United States). After the Afghan-Soviet War in the late 1980s, Bin Laden formed his Al Qaeda network to start jihads elsewhere, culminating in 9/11.
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229 The report said, "We judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment." Against this incontrovertible evidence of gross, shamefully reckless incompetence, what is the favorite argument that Bush and his people trumpet to convince nonbelievers that they have been effective in combating terrorism? That Al Qaeda hasn't struck again on our shores since 2001. But doesn't that presuppose that they have tried since then and have been successfully repelled? If so, where is the evidence? And it certainly can't be that they haven't tried because of the high state of our homeland security, which virtually everyone agrees is alarmingly poor. Remarkably, right-wing columnists like Charles Krauthammer started making the argument of "no further attacks" since 9/11 just two years later! Indeed, Karl Rove, in early May of 2003, just over a year and a half after 9/11, was crowing to the public: "The country has not been hit since 9/11." But under that flabby reasoning, inasmuch as prior to September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda hadn't struck in America since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which would include seven years of the Clinton presidency, I guess w should give Clinton credit for repelling them for seven years.
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229 They've called Democrats "quitters" and people who want to "cut and run" because they want to end our disastrous war in Iraq ... The essence of Bush's current main argument for continuing his war in Iraq is captured in this statement of his on September 11, 2006: "Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad." But this is pure claptrap. Our terrorist enemy, everyone knows, is Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda. No one questions the fact that not just Bin Laden, but the strength and heart of his organization is presently residing in the tribal and lawless badlands of northwestern Pakistan, a rugged and dense mountain range with jagged peaks hard by the Afghanistan border. So even if we succeeded in routing a group called Al Qaeda in Iraq (a very small part of the insurgency, but an effective one that was led by Zarqawi before his death in 2006, and which, although it has sworn allegiance to Bin Laden and he has spoken in support of the group, is not believed to be an official part of Bin Laden's terrorist network), this obviously would have little, if any, effect on Bin Laden's plans nor his ability to conduct further terrorist attacks on American soil from his safe haven in Pakistan -- a haven that Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf either doesn't want to, or can't by himself end.
CHAPTER 6: AMERICA, UP OR DOWN?
244 I know it has been inculcated in us that America is the greatest nation in the world. One of the cliches that Americans unconsciously embrace is that Americans are free, that we have freedom in America. We utter it without thinking. But when you stop and think about it for a moment, the cliche lacks merit, not because it is untrue, but because of what it implies -- that the people of other nations are not free. After all, if we're just one of a hundred nations that are free, what is there to brag about or even mention? Aren't the people of Great Britain as free as we are? What about Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and a great number of other nations? Aren't they also as free as we are? Maybe I'm wrong, but I think they are. And I doubt very much that these nations try to distinguish themselves from other nations with this cliche. There are some nations in the world (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Cuba, North Korea, etc.) where the people are not free, but aren't they in the decided minority?
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Notes:
[1] These were zones established by the United States, Britain, and France after the 1991 Persian Gulf War in which Iraqi aircraft were forbidden to fly. The purpose of the zones was to assist humanitarian efforts by the three countries to counter Hussein's repression of the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in southern Iraq, who had risen up against Hussein following the war.
[2] Although the possibility of a prosecution of Bush for torture will not be examined in this book, if it could be shown that Bush authorized the torture of Iraq and Afghanistan war detainees and prisoners that we know took place at Abu Ghraib and at Guantanamo respectively, under 18 U.S.C. §2340-2340A (the War Crimes Act of 1996), he could be prosecuted for the torture. If convicted, he could be imprisoned for "not more than 20 years.'" If death resulted from the torture, he could be punished by "death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life." For a comprehensive discussion of this whole issue of a prosecution of Bush for torture under the War Crimes Act, see Elizabeth Holtzman's article "Torture and Accountability'" in the July 18, 2005, issue of the Nation.
[3] Although 105 nations of the world signed the ICC treaty, the United States refused. The only other nations that refused were Israel and distinguished exemplars of freedom and democracy like the People's Republic of China, Iraq, Qatar, Libya, and Yemen.
[4] Section 31 of the California Penal Code -- which prohibits the encouragement of children under fourteen, and lunatics or idiots, to commit a crime; or bringing about, by fraud [trickery] or force, the drunkenness of another to commit a crime; or threatening or compelling another to commit a crime -- cannot be interpreted to read that the innocent agent rule only applies if the agent is tricked into committing a crime. Indeed, in the sole allusion in §31 to trickery, only the use of trickery to get one drunk, not to trick him into committing a crime (which is a separate, though related matter) is mentioned.
[5] No one questions, when there is no time to secure congressional authorization, the power and discretion of the president to repel an invasion or suppress an insurrection. "The power need not rest on any specific provision of the Constitution; as a necessary concomitant of sovereignty itself the inherent right of national self-defense gives the President full power to defend the country against sudden attack with whatever means are at his disposal as Commander-in-Chief'" (Notes; "Congress, the President and the Power to Commit Forces to Combat,'" 81 Harvard Law Review, pp. 1771, 1778 [1968]). Perhaps the first acknowledgment of this appeared in James Madison's notes at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on August 17, 1787. He wrote: "Mr. M [Madison] and Mr. Gerry moved to insert 'declare,' striking out 'make' war, leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks'" (The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, pp. 318-319, edited by Max Farrand, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1911).
[6] It should be noted parenthetically that perhaps the best definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors" yet was that of Supreme Court Justice Story, who wrote in 1833 in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States that the crime had to be one "in violation of [the president's] public trust and duties.'"
[7] Corpus delicti is not, as many lay people believe, the dead body in a homicide case, but rather the body or elements of the crime.
[8] And even this authorization would have been vitiated if obtained by false representations made to the United Nations by the Bush administration, which occurred in this case (e.g., in Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003). Moreover, an American court prosecuting Bush for murder where he had gotten a UN resolution authorizing war could be expected to say, in effect, "Although the United Nations can authorize war, it cannot authorize murder. There is no statutory defense to murder in the criminal codes of this state (e.g., Arizona, Vermont, California) called 'the United Nation's defense."' So even UN approval would not, per se, insulate Bush from criminal responsibility. But as indicated, this discussion is moot since the United Nations never gave its approval for Bush to go to war.
[9] It should be noted that when Bush went to war, the United Nations had not declared that Iraq was in violation of the new round of inspections commencing in November of 2002 and continuing right up to almost the eve of war.
[10] In October of 2005, the New York Times learned the contents of a then classified 2001 report by a historian for the National Security Agency (NSA), the nation's top-secret eavesdropping and code-breaking agency. The historian, Robert J. Hallyok, wrote in his report that during this second incident, NSA officers had misinterpreted North Vietnamese intercepts, making an apparently honest mistake in concluding that there had been an attack. However, after months studying documents in the NSA archives, Hanyok further concluded that midlevel agency officials at NSA discovered the errors very shortly thereafter but covered the errors up and doctored documents so as to provide evidence of an actual attack. Hanyok's report also concluded that neither President Johnson and his advisers nor even top NSA and defense department officials knew of the deception.
If Hanyok is correct, this inexcusable deception played a part in Congress ultimately signing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized war with North Vietnam. Indeed, the first paragraph of the Resolution reads: "Whereas naval units of the Communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the United Nations and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels lawfully present in international waters ... " So the deception could not have been more serious, although, as indicated, no one disputes the first attack on the Maddox, which alone could have contributed substantially to the resolution. Edwin E. Moise of Clemson University, a longtime student of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, said he was "surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at NSA. But I get surprised a lot."
On November 30, 2005, the NSA released the classified report, and it confirmed the accuracy of the October New York Times article. In the report, Hanyok says the NSA's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers to lead them to believe that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on August 4. 1964. Hanyok said that 90 percent of the NSA's intercepts of North Vietnamese communications regarding the alleged August 4 attack were never passed on to policy makers. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack had happened. So a conscious effort ensued to demonstrate that an attack occurred.'"
[11] Courts normally hold it is a defense to all crimes except homicide. However, where, if true, the lives of millions of Americans were at stake, if other requirements were met I imagine a court would say that committing a homicide was justifiable.
[12] The hypothetical the ALI presents as a justification for saying it would be "a mistake to erect imminence as an absolute requirement" is the following: "If A and B have driven in Xs car to a remote mountain location for a month's stay and B learns that A plans to kill him near the end of the stay, B would be justified in escaping with Xs car although the threatened harm will not occur for three weeks."
[13] Could it be "read into" §1117 that for Bush to even be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, he had to conspire to commit murders that were to take place "within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States," on the rationale that such language is a part of the murder statute, §1111? No. That language, in §1111 (b), is not a part of the definition of murder under §1111(a). Indeed, it is in a separate paragraph following the definition of murder. Moreover, that language does not deal with the issue of whether there was a murder, but whether the federal authorities have the jurisdiction to prosecute it. As the court said in United States v. Young, the federal definition of murder "is found exclusively in section 1111(a) ... Section 1111(b), by contrast, is not a definitional section at all. Instead it sets forth penalties for murder under §18 U.S.C. §1111 and creates a jurisdictional requirement for such [murder] count" (248 F. 3d 274-275 [2001]; see also, U.S. v. Tuck. Chong, 123 F.Supp. 2d 563, 566 [1999]).
[14] In a sense, comparing an overt act in a conspiracy with an act constituting a criminal attempt is like comparing apples with oranges. The two don't lend themselves to comparison if for no other reason than that although there can be acts constituting a criminal attempt to commit every other crime on the books (such as attempted arson, or rape, burglary, murder, extortion, theft, etc.), I've never even heard of an attempted conspiracy, and am under the impression that no such crime exists.
[15] Remarkably, Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose specialty is distorting history in his cinematic reveries (e.g., in his film, JFK, on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, other than having the city, date, and victim of the assassination correct, his movie was one continuous lie), actually went further when he suggested in his movie Born on the Fourth of July that Nixon, not LBJ, was the one most responsible for the Vietnam War.