Must Read: Elizabeth de la Vega Book: US v. Bush

[MissWaverly]

she's a retired prosecutor, here's what she says about Bush and the Iraq War
Page 17

"Thus far, however, in the case of the vastly broad and more devastating Iraq War fraud orchestrated by the CEO of the United States and his management team, the system has failed.
And we are all victims of this fraud. George W. Bush exploited the vulnerability of an
entire populace reeling from September 11, 2001 attacks to manipulate them into supporting
a war based on false pretenses."

Page 19
"The proposition that it is not good political strategy to insist that government officials
obey the law is highly debatable. More important, strategizing in the face of an ongoing
crime is wrong. Ask any legislator whether he would strategize about possible political
fallout before intervening to stop a crime occurring in front of his eyes and the response
would be, "Of Course not." But that is exactly what is happening right now.

So, consider this my 911 call. I'm calling on Democrats and Republicans to do the right thing. And I'm calling on everyone else to do whatever you can to convince Congress to
do the right thing. I am not talking about bringing people to justice in the vengeful
sense that President Bush employs. I am talking about effecting justice. I am talking,
finally, about holding our highest government officials accountable for a complex and calculated program of false pretense, misleading statements, and material omissions-
a criminal betrayal of trust that is strikingly similar to, yet far worse than, the fraud
committed by Enron's top officials."

[IndianaGreen]

1. She was on C-SPAN a few days ago

She uses the strongest evidence, discarding the testimony of witnesses, to show that Bush and Co. should be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office.

[MissWaverly]

2. I was very impressed by her approach

rather than getting bogged down in the argument, what did Bush know and when did he know
it, she's using the fraud approach, the thrust of the Bush cabinet was to push info that
supported their aim to go to war.

[speedoo]

3. Link?

Thanks.

[MissWaverly]

4. well, I copied it from the book

but I will google up a link.

:-)

[MissWaverly]

5. Here's the link about the book

The court presentation is fiction but she has based it all on factual information.

The Indictment
United States v. George W. Bush et al.
by Elizabeth de la Vega

Assistant United States Attorney: Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. We're here today in the case of United States v. George W. Bush et al. In addition to President Bush, the defendants are Vice President Richard B. Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- who's now the Secretary of State, of course -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

It's a one-count proposed indictment: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371. I'll explain the law that applies to the case this afternoon, but I'm going to hand out the indictment now, so you'll have some context for that explanation. Take as long as you need to read it, and then feel free to take your lunch break, but please leave your copy of the indictment with the foreperson. We'll meet back at one o'clock.


http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1129-32.htm

[speedoo]

7. Thanks, K&R.

nt

[speedoo]

6. Here's a video, of a December, 2006 speech by de la Varga.

http://www.justiceforbush.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129

[MissWaverly]

9. I heard an interview with her last week on this

and to hear Bush and crew assessed by a retired prosecutor was fascinating, this is
a must read book.

:-)

[nicknameless]

8. Here's the Amazon.com link

http://www.amazon.com/United-States-George-Bush-al/dp/1583227563/sr=8-1/qid=1171679699/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-1819862-1723046?ie=UTF8&s=books

Her reasoning makes so much sense, we can only hope that Congress will demonstrate even a fraction of that reasoning.

[MissWaverly]

11. she thinks that we the people have to get behind Congress

and kick them through the goal post on this one.

:-)

[nicknameless]

17. Time to sharpen our cleats?

:)

[MissWaverly]

19. it clear, that we need to start writing and calling & faxing

it's the time, we voted for a change, we need a change and it can't be a campaign strategy
to just let the Republicans goof up so we can win in 2008. We need real change now.

[IndianaGreen]

10. United States vs. George W. Bush et al (Democracy Now)

Friday, December 8th, 2006

United States vs. George W. Bush et al: Former Federal Prosecutor Drafts Indictment Against the President

AMY GOODMAN: So, lay out your case. Lay out this indictment.

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA: Okay. Well, first of all, in order to understand the case, you have to understand the law. And a conspiracy to defraud the United States is in Title 18, United States Code, Section 371. It’s a statute that’s been around for over a hundred years. It was charged against people in the Watergate era and also Iran-Contra. And what it means is basically taking concerted action to use deceit or what’s called “trickery” to interfere with any branch of government or an agency. And, of course, Congress is a branch of government.

So, the case, as I lay out in the -- it’s a hypothetical indictment, of course. But the case really starts with the actions of the administration right after 9/11 and proceeds with how they used the fear that was engendered by 9/11, and they actually aggravated that fear. And then they started off, as we all recall, with sort of generally false assertions that had no basis in fact, such as that Iraq was a grave and gathering danger, when at the time the National Intelligence Estimate said no such thing.

And when those types of generalized false statements were not persuasive by the summer of 2002, they started with the White House Iraq Group, and then they became more specific, and they used a combination of half-truths. We have the story of Vice President Cheney recurringly saying that we know that there are chemical weapons, because Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told us, while, in fact, that was a half-truth, because the other half of the story was that he also had told us that they were destroyed. We have Condoleezza Rice saying these aluminum tubes are only suitable for nuclear weapon centrifuges. Well, at that time, there are at least 14 reports available to the administration which showed that that was at least dubious and actually controverted by our nuclear experts.

We have Rumsfeld saying we know where the weapons of mass destruction are, north, south, east and west of Tikrit, somewhat. Well, that was what we would call in the law, and it’s really kind of a common sense thing, a statement made with reckless disregard for the truth, because the law actually prohibits people who are in a position of authority, who are trying to persuade people either to do something, to buy something -- it applies to investment fraud or the executive branch -- from making statements without actually having any basis in fact. And I don't think people actually realized that. It’s sort of an intuitive thing, but I don't think people realized that the law actually prohibits that, as well.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/08/158219

December 1, 2006

Indicting Bush

by Elizabeth de la Vega and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch

This is the first "indictment" of the president, the vice president, and their colleagues for defrauding us into war in Iraq. I put that "indict" in quotes because what follows, as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega makes clear in her new book United States v. George W. Bush et al., is "not an actual indictment." It can't be, of course; but consider it the second best thing.

De la Vega has, in her career as a prosecutor, prepared numerous fraud indictments and, as she argued in the first excerpt from her book posted earlier this week, "A Fraud Worse than Enron," what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their senior officials committed was a crime, not just in the colloquial sense of the word, but in the legal sense too (and not a victimless crime either). While their crime was of a magnitude that puts even Enron, no less run-of-the-mill fraud cases, to shame, it also has all the elements of a typical, small-time scam.

De la Vega's "hypothetical indictment" of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell that you are about to read remains, unfortunately, in the realm of fantasy. But only for now. Until our world comes more fully to grips with the criminal nature of the Bush administration's acts, you can at least turn to the full de la Vega book. A special project, produced in conjunction with Seven Stories Press, a wonderful independent publisher, it's officially published on December 1st (but available now).

You won't want to miss it. It's superbly done and – though I hesitate to say it, given the nature of the subject matter – genuinely enjoyable to read because De la Vega turns out to be as skilled a writer as she is a prosecutor, and applies both her talents to the book. So check out the indictment, read the first day of grand jury testimony, and in the meantime get the investigative ball rolling by purchasing the book at Amazon.com. After all, the excerpts can only give you a taste of the full case De la Vega makes. This book should be the political stocking-stuffer of the Holiday season. ~ Tom

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=10091

[MissWaverly]

12. she says that it is particularly heinous to take

advantage of someone when they are vulnerable like America was after 9-11.

[MissWaverly]

13. Here's an article she wrote for The Nation

So what do citizens do? First, they must insist that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence complete Phase II of its investigation, which was to be an analysis of whether the Administration manipulated or misrepresented prewar intelligence. The focus of Phase II was to determine whether the Administration misrepresented the information it received about Iraq from intelligence agencies. Second, we need to convince Congress to demand that the Justice Department appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Administration's deceptions about the war, using the same mechanism that led to the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame. (As it happens, Congressman Jerrold Nadler and others have recently written to Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. pointing out that the Plame leak is just the "tip of the iceberg" and asking that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war.)

These three actions can be called for simultaneously. Obviously we face a GOP-dominated House and Senate, but the same outrage that led the public to demand action against corporate law-breakers should be harnessed behind an outcry against government law-breakers. As we now know, it was not a failure of intelligence that led us to war. It was a deliberate distortion of intelligence by the Bush Administration. But it is a failure of courage, on the part of Congress (with notable exceptions) and the mainstream media, that seems to have left us helpless to address this crime. Speaking as a former federal prosecutor, I offer the following legal analysis to encourage people to press their representatives to act.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051114/delavega

[MissWaverly]

14. Here's more of her work, this time on Plame outing

We now have sufficient information to frame the Final Jeopardy! question. This is it:

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?

The answer is obvious: No. Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.


Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the L.A. Times, Salon, and Mother Jones. She writes regularly for TomDispatch.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=76008

[Gregorian]

15. I was impressed with her frequent reference to PNAC.

Her talk on cspan reinforced the fact that there are qualified people, such as herself, working hard to break this administration open.

By the way, she mentioned in passing a certain sentiment of thanks for having not been jailed yet. Kind of sad.

I bet it's one of the better books on the crimes this admin has committed.

I fully respect her.

[MissWaverly]

16. Yes, people like her give us hope

we hear so much of the David Broder's of this world, Bush is going to have a comeback,
how many times have we heard a variation of this? The question should not be how
popular he is, but is the country on the right course/wrong course, is this legal
or criminal and if it is not right, what is being done to rectify the situation.

I too, admire her for standing up, we need more like her.

[nicknameless]

18. .

:kick:

[Tellurian]

20. Yes, I've been saying this all along..It's FRAUD!

The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution in a way that any major changes to it have to be done by a unanimous Congressional Vote. Bush got his unanimous vote through the IRW Vote, which was a fraud perpetrated on not only Congress, but the People and the World.

Thus, it can be argued, the changes to the Constitution done by Bush should be declared null and void. He and his should be prosecuted for Crimes against our country to the fullest extent of the Law!

Alberto Gonzales should spend the rest of his natural life sequestered in the deepest snake pit at an undisclosed location.

[MissWaverly]

21. You are correct and not only that

he busted down the door of the White House by fraud, look at Florida, the hill staffers
who rioted to stop the recount and the intervention of our supreme court.

[nicknameless]

23. Rethugs don't have a grassroots movement; they have "astroturf".

And they don't have people protesting on behalf of democracy; they have employees masquerading as patriots, as seen here.
The Florida "Brooks Brothers riot" in 2000:

[MissWaverly]

24. yes, a hostile takeover disguised as a democratic election

ah, yes, I remember now.

:-)

[Tellurian]

25. IOW...called a Bloodless Coup! nm

[MissWaverly]

26. yes, that is best way to describe it, a coup

[MissWaverly]

22. here's her summary on the illegal wiretapping

We do, however, have a remarkably consistent track record on this matter, which should tell us something. We know that none of the administration's conduct with regard to Congress and the National Security Agency domestic spying program has been undertaken in good faith. Indeed, the second phase of this odyssey, from December 2005 when the secret program was revealed, to the present, begins with the same phrase as the first: Unbeknownst to the American people and Congress…

Unbeknownst to the American people and Congress, during 2006, while everyone else -- naively thinking we lived in a democracy -– engaged in this ongoing faux debate, earnestly trying to divine what the administration was actually doing, discussing the pros and cons of the nearly laughable arguments they were making in support of whatever it was, and in good faith attempting to craft amendments to FISA that would accommodate the unique requirements of whatever it was that no one knew, the Bush administration was acting entirely on its own as if neither the public, nor Congress even existed.
We may still be stumbling around in the dark, struggling to get a grip on what the administration is doing, but we are getting nearer to the destination; this, then, is decidedly not a good time for Congress to be slip-slidin' away. On the contrary, wouldn't this be a good time to reach for a subpoena?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=159661