Hard Evidence Of Bush's Crime Of Iraq
(The True But Sickening Story Of Why We Are Really There)
Main Summary
What really caused the war on Iraq, and why are we there? Who came up with the idea, and when?
After 9/11 and Afghanistan, Bush said we need to attack Iraq because they were about to attack us with a variety of WMD, including nuclear bombs. Then he said Iraq helped al Qaeda in the 9/11 attack. Then he said Iraq was harboring terrorists, and needed to be attacked as part of the war on terrorism.
He later cited many other problems in Iraq that are also the same problems as in a dozen other countries around the world (e.g. brutal leaders or no democracy), but which countries we do not attack.
Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for 9/11, was 800 hundred miles away from the attack on Iraq, in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Bush used no US troops to prevent him from escaping from Tora Bora, and Bush is no longer looking for him (the troop unit assigned that task was moved to Iraq years ago).
There was ample proof before the attack that Iraq had no WMD since 1991, no connection to 9/11, and no terrorists prior to Bush's attack (see below). We have proof that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed in Bush's bombing attack, their country destroyed, and that over 4,100 American soldiers are dead.
The big question is why did Bush attack Iraq?
In 2005 six different well known and highly respected authors (and 2 more in 2008: 8 different authors in all) independently published books on the results of their extensively researched facts about how we got into the Iraq war. Their quoted eye-witnesses provided documented evidence, in minute detail, that Bush et al had manipulated the available intelligence and lied about all of their claims that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US and had WMD that they planned to use against us.
Their facts (see below) document the neocons 1996 initial plan (Clean Break) to conduct an unprovoked attack on Iraq, complete with a phony pretext coverup story that Iraq posed a threat with its non-existent WMD.
And Bush then hiring the lead author of that plan and embracing that plan in 1999 (and hiring the other two authors in 2001), implementing parts of that plan in February, 2001, initiating the coverup pretext propaganda campaign in 2002, and then attacking Iraq in 2003 with absolutely no verified evidence of any imminent threat from them (A Pretext For War, Bamford).
BushCrimes.net connects the dots of Bush et al's actions described in those books with the specific language of criminal law as applied to their actions on Iraq. That simple comparison clearly proves that Bush et al's pre-planning of the unprovoked war in 1999, and that plan's coverup lying campaign, made that lying campaign, the actual attack, and all the killing and destruction a massive horrible crime.
What all of the above 2005 authors, the news media, and Congress did not and have never pointed out is the fact that under US criminal law, any knowing lie or creation of a false impression that causes harm to even one single person is by legal definition felony criminal fraud, and that causing the knowing preplanned unprovoked death of even one single innocent person is, by legal definition, premeditated murder.
One of the more recent authors, Bugliosi, cites strong legal evidence and calls for the charge of first degree murder to be made, investigated, and prosecuted against GW Bush for the murder of the 4,100 Americans murdered in Iraq.
Deliberately lying about the knowingly false need for the attack on Iraq by the same decision makers who ordered the attack causes that war to be both 1) a war crime (Crime Against Peace) and illegal, and, 2) by the Felony Murder Doctrine, all the resulting deaths to be premeditated murder (see Google Wickipedia for above legal definitions).
The harm done was the over 400,000 innocent Iraq civilian dead (mostly women and children) and several hundred thousand more wounded, the 4,100 Americans killed and 30,000 more tragically wounded and inadequately cared for, plus over 390,000 more Americans pschologically wounded, a nation destroyed, and 2 million Iraqis left without jobs or homes and forced to flee the country.
During Bush's initial bombing attack tens of thousands of small Iraqi children were painfully torn apart or crushed in their rooms from flying debris, thousands of babies ripped full of holes or crushed to death while they slept or played, anyone caught outside ripped apart by sharp edged cluster bomb fleshettes raining down indescriminately in residential areas at one per second for 3 straight days and nights.
Tens of thousands of whole extended families -- husbands, wives, children, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and grandparents -- were slaughtered or terminally suffering and dying in collapsing homes: over 400,000 killed all together, and hundreds of thousands more critically wounded with little or no medical help available. Very painfull experiences for them.
News of all of these tragic casualties was censored by Bush. He ordered that these morbid facts were unpatriotic to report, just like pictures of the returning coffins. These negative facts spoiled their desired positive image and public celebrations of their bombing raids (massacre of innocent civilians) (Lancet: Iraqi Dead May Total 800,000, Intl. Herald Tribune, Oct. 11, 2006).
Precision bombing was often off by city blocks. And when it was right on, it totally destroyed adjacent residential buildings. Half again (up to 3 times) as many more innocent civilians were indicriminately murdered in 3 days in Iraq than in Darfur over several years. And the international criminal court just issued an arrest warrent for the President of Sudan for causing the mass murder of several hundred thousand people in Darfur.
Vincent Bugliosi just published a new book, The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder. Bugliosi is an ex Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney who prosecuted the Charles Manson case, and won 104 out of 105 felony cases, 21 of them for murder with no losses. Bugliosi had previously written the true crime bestseller Helter Skelter (the Manson case), among others. His legal peers say "Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was". "He's the best". "The quintessential prosecutor".
In his new book he says that the US Attorney General and every state Attorney General and local District Attorney has a very strong first degree murder case against Bush et al for the death of all the soldiers from their juristriction who were killed in Iraq (under the law they each have a legal requirement to either prosecute Bush or face personal charges for Obstruction of Justice).
House Judiciary Hearing Testimony on The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder
Bugliosi's book contains all of his legal logic and compelling criminal evidence for his conclusions. He recently testified (7/25/08) about that logic and evidence in his book before the House Judiciary Comm. public hearing on the "non" impeachment of Bush. Click here to see and hear Bugliosi's 6 min. testimony. Three weeks later the national news media had still not published or spoken any comment about his startling testimony!
Over 4,100 dead American soldiers had had hopes and dreams, and families who cared very much for them. Each one had their own personal life story. 90% of them had believed Bush when he told them they were in Iraq to defend their country against the people who attacked us on 9/11. But they had been deliberately duped by Bush, and now they are dead.
On September 17, 2003, only 6 months after Bush's attack on Iraq for his widely publicized claim that Iraq helped attack us on 9/11, in response to a reporters televised question Bush said "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th". Bush said again in a televised news confrence on September 17, 2003 that Hussein had "nothing" to do with 9/11 (The Prosecution Of GW Bush For Murder, Bugliosi, pg. 138).
The only terrorists in Iraq were the ones Bush created by their understandable hatred of the US over the unprovoked Bush attack and all the needless, massive killing of innocent friends and family and the tremendous destruction it caused. It was only after the US attack on Iraq that the al Qaeda militants showed up in Iraq. In a videotape of bin Laden, broadcasted 10 days after Colin Powell spoke at the UN (pre-war), bin Laden had nothing but contempt for Hussein and publicly branded him as an "infidel" (Hussein was an athiest and bin Laden is a radical Muslim in a "holy" war).
When Bush finally admitted that no such Iraq-9/11 relationship had ever existed, that in essence our troops were not fighting to defend America but rather to carry out a criminal neocon pipe dream he initiated, he did not widely communicate that fact to the soldiers or to America. The soldiers in Iraq still believe that deadly "defending America" fairy tale.
Even after Bush later admitted that the Iraq-9/11 connection was false, with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission confirming that fact, Bush and other right wing neocon ideologists continue to say or imply that Iraq and 9/11 were connected.
Bush didn't bother to say that our soldiers horrible wounds and deaths and the devastating lifelong impact that it had on them and their loved ones was caused by his massive criminal fraud lies about the false need to be in Iraq.
Bush et al need to be fully prosecuted for their worst crime in American history. The hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, common sense, justice, and the criminal facts demand it.
For a few examples of the evidence against Bush et al, see eyewitness comments by Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatlowski, a neutral insider in the Bush/Cheney/Pentagon pro-war propaganda campaign, who said that the propaganda story lines about threats from Iraq that both their secret Pentagon unit, Office of Special Plans (OSP), and the secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG) invented were the same story lines told to the American people by Bush and Cheney in the fall of 2002, and were all "...blatantly false and not based on any intelligence", and that "The Congress was misled, it was lied to".
Two of the co-authors of the neocons's 1996 Clean Break unprovoked Iraq attack plan (see below) were in charge of Kwiatlowski's pro-war propaganda unit, along with Cheney. Also see the CIA's Charlie Allen's pre-war (fall 2002) rock solid intelligence of zero WMD then in Iraq. More detail of these above examples are located three pages below.
On June 6, 2008, the bi-partisan US Senate Intelligence Committee released their final report on Bush's use of the intelligence available to him prior to his initial attack on Iraq. In 2002 it was common knowledge that any such an attack by Bush would kill thousands of innocent Iraqis and at least hundreds of US troops.
The Committee came to exactly the same conclusion as the above mentioned authors. That every single claimed threat about the dangers Bush et al had said were posed by Iraq to the US was false: it had been manufactured, twisted, spun pro-war, and presented to the public by all the top Bush people as part of a gigantic phony pretext propaganda campaign designed to obtain fraudulent approval to attack Iraq.
They emphatically said that "In making the case for war, the (Bush) administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent."
They further said that all contrary true facts were deliberately ignored, ridiculed, classified, or denied by Bush. In other words, everything Bush told us about why we needed to attack Iraq was a deliberate orchestrated lie (first told over a year in advance of the attack), just as most Americans already suspected.
The real impetus behind that war was the long held and widely publicized neo-conservative (neocon) anti-Iraq ideology adopted by Bush in 1999, along with their 1996 Clean Break plan for an unprovoked attack against Iraq; together with Bush hiring its three neo-con authors into the top pro-war policy positions in the government within weeks after taking office.
Interestingly, that 1996 neo-con plan included specific details to have the attacking country issue a phony pretext for public consumption that Iraq was an imminent threat with its non-existent WMD. That phony pretext in the Clean Break plan is exactly the same as the pro-war propaganda campaign described by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the above mentioned authors, and is the primary subject of this web site.
The second dictionary definition of "lie" is "to create a false impression." The definition of political spin control is "attempting to manipulate the way an event is interpreted by others". Cheney and Bush as quoted about Iraq were not "spinning", they were deliberately creating a false impression about the danger from Iraq: in other words, lying.
"The courts have consistently held that A false pretense (impression) may consist in any act, word, or symbol calculated and intended to deceive. It may be made either expressly or by implication" (Bugliosi, pg 137).
Bush insidiously formed, led, and enabled a small cult of neocon political fanatics and extreme right wing conservatives, using the religious overtones of Good vs Evil, to take over the policy apparatus of the entire American government. They emptied both the US treasury and military capacity and used both of them to commit pre-planned extreme neocon terrorism against the Iraqi people. But to do so they first had to brainwash the public through their monumental lying campaign to sell the war.
There was no intelligence failure. The problem was Bush's deliberate political manipulation of the available Iraq intelligence to create all of his false impressions about Iraq. If you feel that Bush & Cheney ever created a false impression in your mind about Iraq, then they have lied to you by definition and have committed felony criminal fraud in the process.
The biggest uninvestigated and unreported news story in the past 60 years is that: 1) both the unprovoked Iraq war and its phony WMD cover-up lies were planned years before 9/11 by Bush, 2) both of these actions were major horrifying crimes under US law; totally ignored by all of those sworn to prosecute lawbreakers, and 3) the 1996 neocon's Clean Break plan, Bush's 1999 adoption of that plan, and his hiring of its three co-authors into the nation's highest war policy positions (together with Cheney and Wolfowitz) are the key reasons we are in the Iraq war.
HERE IS THE COMPELLING EVIDENCE OF THOSE TRAGIC FACTS, AND THE REAL MOTIVATION BEHIND THE IRAQ WAR:
In 1996 three American neocons prepared a mid-east geo-political conquest plan for Israel called Clean Break. This plan, by its lead author Richard Perle, called for an unprovoked attack against Iraq and Syria (later revised to just Iraq). Any unprovoked attack on another country is by International Treaty a war crime. Israel did not pursue this plan, but Perle presented this same plan to Bush a few years later. The other two authors were Douglas Feith and David Wurmser.
That Clean Break plan had four major elements: 1) Adopt a foreign policy of preemptive attacks, 2) Get the US out of the Israeli peace negotiations (to free the hand of Israel), 3) Initiate an unprovoked attack against Iraq to remove Hussein, and 4) Have the President of the attacking country deliberately lie to the public that there was a false threat of a WMD attack from Iraq to cover up that lack of provocation (examples of these phony pretext lies for the Israeli President's press releases were included by Perle in his report to the president). (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 258-265).
In 1999 candidate Bush hired the neocons Richard Perle as his mid-east foreign policy advisor and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz (the architect of the Iraq war) as his foreign policy advisors. Together they revised the original Clean Break plan to now focus an unprovoked attack on Bush's preferred target; Iraq. Within weeks after taking office, Bush named Perle as Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense (War) Policy board, one of the highest positions in the Pentagon. Perle then packed that board with fellow neocons.
Bush's revised Clean Break plan contained the same preplanned criminal cover-up: the phony WMD attack threat from Iraq. Under US law telling deliberate lies to create a false threat that would (and did) cause harm to others is, by legal definition, felony criminal fraud.
This Bush revised plan carefully followed the neocon ideology as outlined in Google, under neo-conservative ideology, and as described above as elements in the Clean Break plan. You can also find Clean Break in Google, as well as Project for the New American Century; the neocon political master plan, including the names of all the top neocons in the country advocating an unprovoked war crime attack on Iraq (which list ironically includes both the immediate past and current head of the World Bank).
In late January of 2001, in his very first National Security meeting (only 10 days after he took office, and 7 months before 9/11), president Bush formally adopted the first two Clean Break provisions as national policy and made it clear that he wanted to attack Iraq on an unprovoked basis, as witnessed by Colin Powell and Paul O'Neil. Days later he officially implemented both provisions. A few weeks later he hired all three of Clean Break's authors and Wolfowitz into the top four war policy positions in the government: along with Cheney and Rice, the neocons were now in charge.
Why did this happen? There are several possibilities. As a candidate for president Bush hired Rice because she used to work for his father, and he got to know her then. She then introduced him to Wolofowitz, who in turn introduced Bush to Perle and his neocon attack plan against Iraq.
Whether it was Bush's sense of his father's unfinished business against Hussein in Iraq, Saddam's attempt on Bush Sr's life, or just Bush Jr's own overwhelming macho desire of wanting to be a historic "decision" maker that caused him to tightly embrace the neocon's criminal hard line toward Iraq and adopt the Clean Break plan in 1999. In any event, GW Bush was impatiently ready to invade Iraq before he ever became president. He was just waiting for the right excuse, and 9/11 became his Christmas in September!
In 2002 Bush and Card formed several different groups of necons to develop the Clean Break pro-war propaganda for public consumption, including the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and the Pentagon's OSP. WHIG included all the top propagandists in the GOP, plus Rice, Libby, M. Gerson, and Hadley, and met weekly out of Cheney's office with Karl Rove as its Chair (see the long list of false impression incidents below).
Collectively their creations of false impressions about the need for war perpetrated felony criminal fraud upon the American people. (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 160-74, 283-331, 317-331, 367-377, Hubris, Isikoff & Corn, pgs. 27-65, 208-22, Greatest Story Ever Sold, Rich, pgs. 184-198, 217, and Hoodwinked, Prados, pgs. 185-95).
In the spring of 2002, now retired middle-east expert Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, with 22 years of experience, had been assigned to work in the Pentagon's secret Intelligence unit; Office of Special Plans (OSP, under Clean Break's co-authors Feith and Wurmser, and Cheney). In this capacity she had direct personal knowledge of the Clean Break phony pretext propaganda campaign being developed by Bush and Cheney to promote the Iraq war.
This Pentagon unit had been tasked, among other things, to find evidence of links between Iraq and 9/11. But it was essentially a pro-war propaganda operation. It was designed to produce (invent) "intelligence" to offset the fact that the CIA had found no such link, and to develop (invent) other pro-war arguments.
Kwiatkowski said "It wasn't intelligence, it was propaganda. They were the spin enforcers. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating (inventing) a propaganda story line (false impression), which is the same story (about the many phony threats from Iraq) we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002."
She went on to say "The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them, because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President's office were critical in this propaganda effort - to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for preemptive war...The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum, that is a subversion of the Constitution. A preemptive war based on what we knew (the intelligence we had at the time) was not a pressing need and is not what this country stands for." (A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 290-317). More such evidence can be found below in Eye-witnessed Evidence (Topic Listing above).
Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson was one of the 77 senators who voted in favor of the war, based upon the information he was told by George Tenet and Dick Cheney. "We now know (January, 2004) after the fact and on the basis of [CIA chief weapons inspector] Dr. [David] Kay's testimony today in the Senate Armed services Committee, that the information (from Tenet and Cheney) was false (a false impression); and not only that there were not weapons of mass destruction chemical and biological but there was no fleet of UAVs, (unmanned aerial vehicles), nor was there any capability of putting UAVs on ships and transporting them to the Atlantic coast and launching them at U.S. cities on the eastern seaboard... The degree of specificity I was given a year and a half ago, prior to my vote, was not only inaccurate; it was patently false."(A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 329-30)
As per the Clean Break plan WHIG and the OSP developed and packaged all the intentionally false impressions and fraudulent stories we heard about, including the deliberate lie that Iraq was connected to 9/11, and the numerous detailed imminent threats they falsely claimed Iraq posed for America, using its nonexistent WMD, as plotted three years before in Bush's revised Clean Break plan. Their fraudulent lies followed a tragic pattern of practice by Bush.
The CIA is part of the executive branch, and reports directly to the President. The President is therefore directly responsible for all of its intelligence activities and its reports. Tenent briefed Bush every morning, in private, one-on-one, with no records kept of their talks. Tenent's duty was to tell the president of all the new material intelligence that he is aware of. If new information came in that he knew was contrary to Bush's desires, Tenant's job was to inform the president of it and then to let Bush decide what to do with that data.
CIA Director Tenet was a career bureaucrat and had an intense desire to please Bush, and Bush had a mental obsession to attack Iraq and to keep any facts contrary to his argument for going to war from becoming public. Consequently Tenet became intimidated and co-opted by Bush regarding the intelligence that Tenet would officially report out of the CIA. Bush's heavy handed influence on Intelligence services to report only pro-war stories led to Tenet's deliberate cover-up of the best intelligence feat of the war effort.
The CIA's Charlie Allen had sent 30 American relatives of Iraqi WMD scientists to Iraq to find out from them the current status of their WMD programs. They were all acting independently of one another. Unanimously, they all reported back in September, 2002 (months before the attack) that all of Iraq's WMD programs had been ended by 1991 and that all of their WMD had been destroyed!
Allen's report went to Tenet and his deputy, McLaughlin, but Tenet ended Allen's project, ignored the facts of his report, and dutifully reported those facts privately only to Bush (this author was in Air Force Intelligence, and can verify that Allen's intelligence was more solid and better corroberated than any other available). Bush made no public announcement of this new hard and critical intelligence of no WMD in Iraq, and made no move to cease his preparation for a knowingly criminal unprovoked war.
All of Allen's findings were fully confirmed: in 1995 by the CIA's intelligence debriefing of Hussein's son-in-law, Kamal, in exile in Jordan (well known but completely disregarded by Bush), and after the war by the facts on the ground (State of War, Risen, pgs. 23-37, 84-107, A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 19-20), and as reported in September, 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group (CIA & DIA) (see Google) .
Three weeks after Tenet read the solid well corroborated Allen report of zero WMD in Iraq (no production and no inventories = no threat from Iraq) and privately reported it to Bush, Bush (at Rove's suggestion) launched an urgent propaganda effort to convince an unbelieving Congress that Iraq was a major imminent security threat. He sent the co-opted Tenet to appear in a secret session before the Senate intelligence committee to convince them.
Tenet dutifully told them the Bush induced lie that the CIA's most recent intelligence concluded that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear program, estimated there were 550 sites where WMD were currently stored, and its assessment was that Iraq had developed UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that could deliver both biological and chemical agents, perhaps to the U.S. mainland.
He and Cheney had told much the same phony baloney story to the four congressional leaders earlier that same day, using photos to make their case; with the unlearned Cheney providing his own evil interpretation of the raw and blurry photos showing what he said were Iraqi nuclear weapons sites. Tenet did not correct him. Looking at them, Sen. Daschle (a former photo analyst in the Air Force) said the fuzzy photo images could have been anything. But those fuzzy unknown, misrepresented images became the excuse basis for murdering over 400,000 innocent Iraqis. (Hubris, Isikoff & Corn, pgs. 21-32).
The Iraq war was not only the worst crime in American history, but it was also the first time in our history that a small group of fanatical politicians at the top of an administration preplanned the creation of a national propaganda campaign of false and misleading information as a phony pretext for war.
Six books in particular provide a detailed documentation of how this came about month by month, together with the actions and words of all the cast of characters involved. The books are: A Pretext For War by James Bamford, State of War by James Risen, The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, Hubris by Isikodd & Corn, Hood-Winked by John Prados, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Frank Rich.
These books collectively tell the hundreds of stories about how Bush's neocons preplanned, years before the war, and then implemented a pro-war propaganda attack on the American public that could not stand the light of day or truth. Bush's lethal creation of false impressions that, while legal in an election, became horrible crimes when hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and hundreds of $billions were at stake.
Incident after incident of critical but false information were pressed on the public as evidence for war that were all known to be wrong and told so to the White House before they went public; yet continued to be quoted and acted upon long after the truth became public, and most remained uncorrected by Bush until after the attack.
These incidents included: mobile biological labs (nonexistent), source; a mentally ill Iraqi defector ("Curveball"); aluminum "uranium centrifuge" tubes (for multi-tube artillery rockets), which Cheney claimed on Meet The Press were for Iraqi nuclear weapons "with absolute certainty". Even after the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publicly said the tubes could not possibly be used for nuclear purposes, Bush told Britain's Blair and the press to ignore the IAEA because he, Bush, personally knew better.
These incidents also included: the reported Iraq attempt to purchase Uranium yellowcake from Niger included in Bush's State of the Union address, which was later admitted to be a pre-known forgery (possibly covertly instigated by Cheney when desperate for some (any!) WMD evidence), and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) claimed to be a threat to bombing Israel and the US.
But, according to the un-asked US Air force Intelligence, they were just observation drones with only a 300 mile range and no capacity for carrying any bombs, and were consequently no threat. Bush knew in advance that both claims were bogus, but used them anyway.
Plus all sorts of wild tales about Iraqi WMD from Amad Chalabi, a convicted bank embezzler ($200 million in Jordan), con artist, and would-be President of new Iraq, strongly backed by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and paid $millions per month by them and who was later caught stealing from the US. Chalabi's phony "intelligence" (with the Pentagon money he created false customized "facts" and sources on request) continued to be used for propaganda by WHIG long after being discredited by US intelligence agencies.
In addition, one of the biggest lies of all: that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. The CIA had repeatedly said there was no evidence of any such connection; including in a response to a road show given by Wurmser at the CIA office advocating just such a connection, which assertion was refuted by the CIA. Wurmser then added one slide showing that the CIA was not cooperating in their pro-war propaganda, and then gave his revised presentation to Libby and others at the White House.
Tenet was then called in and read the riot act by Libby, after which the Assistant Director of the CIA John McLaughlin immediately wrote a report to Cheney falsely saying that the CIA had long standing intelligence of such Iraq/al Qaeda cooperation going back a decade earlier (al Qaeda had not begun to organize until about 5 years earlier, but why bother with the truth when a lie sounds so much more impressive?): so much for independent intelligence with no political pressure. For the real truth about the al-Qaeda/Iraq non-connection, see Hood-Winked, Prados, pgs. 236-255.
The IAEA, State Department, Department of Energy, and David Albright, a specialist on Iraqi WMD, all flatly stated that the rocket launcher aluminum tubes were not related to nuclear applications. After all their statements and a week before the actual attack, Cheney said publicly on Meet The Press (relative to the tubes), "I believe Saddam Hussein has reconstituted nuclear weapons".
Six months later on another TV program, and well after his and Bush's murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, Cheney was asked about his prior false aluminum tube claims for the urgency of attacking Iraq. Cheney said he had "misspoken".
The vice president of an attacking country deliberately created a false impression in order to gain fraudulent approval for his and Bush's pre-planned unprovoked attack that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, in the name of the American people, and then after they were all dead says he "mispoke!". Is that a simple "never mind?"
The blown apart and crushed Iraqis and their families certainly did not think so. There are US laws that cover such gross criminal conduct. The relevant evidence is there for anyone interested to review. Why are those laws not being enforced? Why is no one in authority or the news media speaking out? (Ask them)
Just three days before Cheney's comments about reconstituted nuclear weapons (and before the attack), Albright's agency, The Institute for Science and International Security, posed the key question that followed from Bush's refusal to face the scientific facts about the rocket tubes: "A critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war." (Hood-Winked, Prados, pgs. 93-104)
Having already made the decision to attack Iraq back in 1999, Bush pressured the intelligence community to produce the views he wanted, made it clear he did not want any dissent, quickly exaggerated what he did get before it was disowned, and completely ignored and suppressed any truthful facts because they were contrary to his extensive pro-war marketing campaign, and to the 1999 revised objectives of Clean Break.
Bush may respond to the accusation and evidence that he lied about there being an immediate threat from Iraq by saying that he was simply accentuating serious possibilities of that to safeguard America. Political spin in other words. In an August 26, 2002 speech Cheney said (tubes again) "There is no doubt he (Saddam) is amassing [WMDs] to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." No evidence or source was cited. (The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Rich, pg. 58).
That speech was reported nationally, and if Bush had not approved of it or disagreed with it, he could have easily issued an immediate retraction and halted his preparation for war. Bush did none of the above. There was no ambiguity or qualifiers in Cheney's statement: it was a pure lie. It became Bush's lie equally as well. There are dozens of evidenced examples of other such lies or creations of false impressons in different parts of this site.
On September 9, 2002 at Camp David with a visiting Tony Blair, Bush held a news conference. He said that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had just issued a "new" report that Iraq was just "six months away" from producing a nuclear weapon. He then said "I don't know what more evidence we need" (of the nuclear threat from Iraq). With that data he and Blair went on to solidify agreement for a regime change in Iraq.
NBC News took the trouble to contact the IAEA, which said that Bush was (knowingly) citing a 1998 report which was assessing Iraq's capabilities pre 1991. The IAEA went on to point out that since 1990 UN weapons inspectors had destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons sites, and there was no new nuclear weapons program in Iraq. Bush did not retract his prior statement of creating a false impression of a near term nuclear threat from Iraq. (The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Rich, pg. 65)
The truthful facts of the matter are that there were only two actual hard intelligence sources regarding Iraqi WMD post 1990: one from Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995 (he was shot by Saddam when he later returned) with several carloads full of documents clearly showing that all WMD had been destroyed by 1991, all which documents were then reviewed by the CIA (A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 19-20).
The other was the CIA's Charlie Allen's report (30 different sources) with the same exact unanimous findings that he gave to Tenet in late September, 2002 (both were 100% verified after the attack, see references below). All the other intelligence quoted by Bush et al was simply invented, or knowingly wrong but deliberately uncorrected, and all of it intentionally misused to create the false impression of an urgent need to attack Iraq.
Intelligence is the final product of collection, collation, evaluation, analysis, and dissemination. Until information is professionally evaluated, sourced, and confirmed reliable it should not be counted upon for any judicial process, reasonable grounds, or strategic and tactical planning. Raw intelligence is simply unrefined information, and has no role in decision making. But that raw data was exactly what was gathered, cherry-picked, twisted, and propagandized to the public by Bush and Cheney whenever it suited their agenda.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), published by the CIA, normally takes several months to prepare. But Bush, never concerned about documenting his decisions, had never requested one on Iraq until it was forced upon him by congress. Then only two weeks was spent on it. As the estimate is classified, a 25 page "White Paper" condensation of it was prepared in October, 2002 for the public. Tenent, the chief editor of the NIE, quite predictably did not include Charlie Allen's critical new intelligence of no WMD in pre-war Iraq in either version.
When the two were compared it became clear that the all important qualifiers of conclusions in the NIE had been removed for the White Paper version. That and various other revisions caused classified ambiguity and caveats to turn into public certainty of fact. But even after the propagandized changes, it still did not make any solid case for attacking Iraq. To fully understand how Bush "cooked the intelligence books" to make his case, it is necessary to read this paper together with its analysis. Both copies are found in Hood-Winked by John Prados, pgs. 32-93.
PLEASE NOTE THIS KEY FACT: After the intentionally slow corrections to false information given to the public, on the day of Bush's pre-planned terrorist attack on Iraq there was not one single piece of verified hard intelligence evidence to support any threat from Iraq, especially not any WMD. And certainly nothing that justified an unprovoked attack on Iraq: no photos, no eyewitnesses, and no physical evidence. Which fact was exactly what many people in the CIA and the military had been saying all along, to no avail.
All of these creations of false impressions (lies) had been sold to the public and congress, and remained uncorrected, until after war approval had been obtained, or after the attack, when it was too late to stop the war. Bush's true Clean Break mission had been accomplished. The country and congress had been duped with a phony pretext for war.
Felony Criminal Fraud has been committed, and Murder has been both premeditated and executed. Those criminal facts and their hard documented evidence have been well known to readers of the several cited books and this website published over the past several years. The criminals have yet to be either investigated or prosecuted, and still congress and the news media have yet to inform the American public of these well documented criminal facts.
In March, 2003, after the fraudulent congressional briefings and their subsequent unwitting approval, Bush ordered the attack on Iraq knowing full well that he had committed felony criminal fraud to start this phony war that he knew would kill at least thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. Bush would try to argue their deaths were just collateral damage, to be expected in any war.
But that cannot be the case when preplanned willful and deliberate criminal fraud lies were the only basis for approving and starting this preplanned unprovoked war to begin with. Bush felt these lies were necessary because the truth would have prevented his war. So he created a fictitious threat that he ensured most people would actually believe; which they did.
But, without a real threat the war remained totally unprovoked, and a war crime in the eyes of the world. Then the massive number of deaths caused by that war become premeditated murder (see Google for detailed definitions of criminal fraud, murder, and war crimes, and note that in this war Bush's criminal actions were both willful and deliberate, planned years in advance). By his criminal actions Bush, by legal definition, deliberately committed premeditated murder.
Given his long standing plans to commit a war crime by an unprovoked attack on Iraq, Bush decided to repudiate the U.S. agreement to the International War Crimes Tribunal to avoid his own later prosecution, which he did on May 6, 2002 (the criminal changing the law to protect himself). His subsequent attack on Iraq remained a war crime by law for virtually all the countries in the world, all of which had already agreed to the language of the Tribunal. That attack was a "Crime Against Peace", a war crime, according to the rest of the world. The facts of his premeditated murder charges remain in effect, however.
Bush's attack killed 400,000 to 800,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, 75% of them women and children (Lancet: Iraqi Dead May Total 800,000, Intl. Herald Tribune, Oct. 11, 2006). It also eventually killed over 4,100 American GIs, and caused the suicide death of over 14,000 more, and growing at 5,000 more each year (see detail below, and Google for Iraq veterans suicides).
ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE (from Google's Wikipedia):
"In the United States, a (any) person who learns of the crime (any violation of US criminal law) and gives some form of assistance before the crime is committed is known as an "accessory before the fact". A (any) person who learns of the crime after it is committed and helps the criminal to conceal it (from the law or from the public), or aids the criminal in escaping, or simply fails to report the crime (to the law or to the public), is known as an "accessory after the fact"."
"Common law traditionally considers an accessory just as guilty as the principal(s) in a crime, and subject to the same penalties. Separate and lesser punishments exist by statute in many jurisdictions." Note: Criminal Fraud is a felony, and Premeditated Murder is a capital crime and a felony (Congresspersons & Staff, News Media Editors & Staff, and Attorneys General & Staff, please take note). People in the public eye have no legal defense against criminal accusations, except to openly discuss the criminal facts: which facts are the last things they want to publicize.
Bush et al means: Bush, Perle, Feith, Wurmser, Wolfowitz, Rice, Hadley, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Card, Tenent, McLaughlin, Rove, Libby, Hughes, Matalin, Gerson, JR Wilkinson, and Calio, etc. While Bush and Cheney may only be reachable via impeachment, the rest of Bush et al are all government or ex-government empoyees and clearly fall under the juristriction of the US AG and Congress.
In short, if you are the news media, once you learn that Bush et al has committed a documented crime (have read this site down to this note) you must immediately release (cease concealing, and publish) the facts to the public and/or report it to the US Attorney General, or you are just as guilty as the criminals; Bush et al. If you are in congress, your oath of office requires you to both notify the AG and immediately hold public hearings under oath to investigate the criminal charges, or else risk facing personal accessory charges of criminal fraud and murder for helping to conceal Bush et al's crimes.
Up until now there has effectively been a collective criminal coverup of Bush's crimes by both political parties, congress, and the news media; each for their own private reasons. Since no one is talking, and virtually everyone is concealing the truth, no one seems to feel at risk of prosecution for being an accessory to the crimes.
But all it would take for this silent mutual agreement to fall apart at the seams, and bring hundreds of accessories after the fact into criminal court, is one single editor, reporter, prosecuter, or congressperson with some (any!) integrity and a few guts to come forward into a nationwide spotlight with the true investigated criminal facts about Bush et al's crimes.
And then have their story immediately picked up by other national news media to the point where it is front page news all over the country (unfortunately Kucinich had only part of the Iraq criminal facts in his impeachment articles).
Then justice will finally come into play for all those who chose to wait, watch, and conceal instead of acting responsibly, and doing their professional job and legal duty to investigate and disclose. For future investigative reference, records of who in the news media, US attorney general's office, and congress was sent, by mail, information regarding the facts and referenced evidence of Bush et al's crimes, and when, are maintained by this author.
In the interim this site now has several hundreds of visitors each month and is growing exponentially by both visitors and quantity of download, and is linked from an increasing number of other sites. Also, for the very first time ever, a new book has just come out that talks about Bush and Murder in the same book: The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder, by Vincent Bugliosi. There is also a new book just out by Ron Suskind, The Way Of The World; yet another expose of how Bush criminally misled the US into war.
Time for the delay in publicly disclosing and investigating the true criminal facts about Bush et al is rapidly running out!
"OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE: Prosecutors (local District Attorneys) and (state and federal) attorneys general ...commit obstruction of justice when they fail to prosecute judges and other government officials for malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance in office (like Bush et al)." Since the US Attorney General does not respond to mail from ordinary unknown citizens, it becomes incumbent upon on managers of large news media companies and individual congresspersons to write to him about the fact of Bush et al's crimes, as it is their moral/legal responsibility and civic/constitutional duty.
Only they can get through to him. Either the US Attorney General does not know about the crimes and desperately needs to be educated, or he does know and immediately needs to be charged by congress with obstruction of justice for failing to prosecute Bush et al. In either case there is a vital role to be played by both parties.
To notify the US Attorney General of Bush et al's crimes, his address is 950 Pa Ave NW, Wash DC 20530. His email is oag@usdoj.gov . Sample message is (you can copy this into a letter or email):
To: Attorney General MB Mukasey; Pursuant to the law on Accessory after the Fact requirements to notify you if a person learns of a federal crime having been committed, this is to officially inform you that the crimes of Felony Criminal Fraud and Premeditated Murder have been committed by president GW Bush et al regarding Iraq. Full details of the hard eye-witnessed evidence and proof can be found in www.bushcrimes.net.
Bush et al means: Bush, Perle, Feith, Wurmser, Wolfowitz, Rice, Hadley, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Card, Tenent, McLaughlin, Rove, Libby, Hughes, Matalin, M Gerson, JR Wilkinson, and Calio, etc. While Bush and Cheney may only be reachable via impeachment, the rest of Bush et al are all government or ex-government empoyees and clearly fall under your juristriction.
By law you are required to open an investigation and prosecute Bush et al to the full extent of the law. If you fail to do so then you have deliberately committed Obstruction of Justice. The time and content of this notification has been recorded for future congressional criminal investigation purposes. (date) (Name or email address)
We have the legal obligation to notify AG Mukasey of Bush et al's crimes, and he has the legal obligation to investigate and prosecute Bush et al for those crimes. Given the consistent Bush record of his administration refusing to acknowledge the law, let alone obey it, we already know that Mukasy is not about to enforce the law against Bush et al. But we need to establish the record of him being notified of the crimes, so that his later criminal investigation can prove that he committed Obstruction of Justice by refusing to do his legal duty once notified of those crimes.
Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Expert at GWU says of the 35 Articles of Impeachment as presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler: "What's really disturbing for many of us is that it takes a real effort for Democrats to walk from the floor to their offices and not trip over (Bush's) crimes."
"I mean, they are all over the record, from destruction of evidence, to illegal surveillance, to unlawful torture programs. They're all over the place. And what's amazing is that the president is hiding in plain view. He hasn't really denied the elements of these offenses. So, all that is lacking is political will."
"The Democrats know that they can retain the Congress if they just let this guy, you know, sort of ripen on the vine. And that they are afraid that there could be a backlash if they try to impeach. But of course, that's literally all politics and no principle. They took an oath in the House of Representatives. And the most important thing they have to do as House members is to stand firm in the face of presidential crimes."
"And I think history will be very, very severe, not just for Speaker Pelosi, but all of the Democrats, of how they could let this come to pass where they stood silent and did nothing in the face of such a compelling criminal record." Simply put, our very clear and specific laws are not only are not being enforced, but the news media and congress are not even paying any attention to the fact that those laws are being broken.
In USC 18, the law reads as follows: ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT - Whoever, knowing that an offense has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact; one who knowing a felony to have been committed by another, receives relieves, comforts, or assists the felon in order to hinder the felon's apprehension, trial, or punishment. U.S.C. 18
Chair of the House Judiciary Comm. Conyers and Speaker Pelosi have made themselves Accessories After The Fact in Bush's crimes in their "non" impeachment hearing by deliberately hindering the trial and punishment of Bush et al. Their breaking of the law opens them up to equal guilt of the same charges and equal punishment. I notified them both of this fact on July 29, 2008, by regular mail. Pelosi had prevously claimed she did not know of any crimes committed by Bush.
Turley (on MSNBC) also pointed out that the law at the time of Bush's ordered illegal wiretapping of American citizens defined Bush's personal act as a felony crime. The recent shameful FISA vote to retroactively change that law means that Bush can no longer be arrested for that crime. FISA should have been called the "Bush Felony Arrest Relief Act". The news media, except for MSNBC, (Countdown, Keith Olbermann) has failed to point that fact out to its viewers and readers.
A slight digression to talk about why we got into the Iraq mess. This whole tragic Bush boondoggle of wasting $trillions better spent here at home, and the waste of hundreds of thousands of lives on a phony war were all brought about by Bush's use of PM; Perception Management: the preplanned management of your perception of reality. A very minor version of this is what you know as political "spin": taking a few benign facts and mixing in several lies about those facts, so that the truth becomes completely obscured.
Perception Management (PM) is a deliberate deception that can be the total absence of truth through a coordinated campaign of total lies. In the case of the Iraq war that deliberate deception involved the very people you really wanted to believe in. The GOP was the party in charge of national defense on 9/11, and you wanted to rely on them to protect us. But they had planned their PM campaign about the phony WMD in Iraq years before 9/11, and their plan took full criminal advantage of that known misplaced trust by using the false credibility of the highest levels of the federal government, unlimited federal funds, and all of the focused propaganda and public communication power that represented - despite basic morality and several laws to the contrary.
Bush et al managed your perception of reality (created false impressions) by manipulating your fear and taking advantage of your trust, and subjecting you to a total immersion of your senses in a sea of overwhelming and unanimous, credible sounding voices, all telling you the same believable lies with a somber straight face. The Bush people used phony documentation to show to Congress and the UN, and provided it to all their close friends in the news media so they would write credible sounding party-line news stories for you to read and believe (like they did through reporter Judith Miller of the New York Times, and now opinion editor Michael Gerson of the Washington Post who was once (still?) part of Bush's propaganda machine).
Plus the GOP had their own favorite party-line TV network. Voices to the contrary were either censored, ridiculed, or had their truthful information classified for "national security". The knowingly phony WMD became "real" to most of the country. Even today almost half of the public still believes Iraq had something to do with 9/11. They are still in denial about being made fools of by Bush, and that the Iraq war actually meant something for the safety of the US. Someone around Bush once said: "The truth is what we say it is". Bush's big lie worked, and people everywhere suffered for that one way or another.
Bush used the news media the same way he used you and our duped American soldiers -- like inconsequential disposable pawns in his criminal actions. He succeeded because Americans wanted to believe in him, and neither they nor the news media wanted to question Bush about national security. To question was to be publicly called un-patriotic - all part of the PM plan Bush alone controlled. Because people were killed and wounded by Bush's deliberate and pervasive campaign of lies (their Management of your Perception), the law defines Bush's PM campaign as criminal fraud.
Michael Gerson -- Bush's key speechwriter of twisted facts, collaboratively coined the phrase "you don't want the smoking gun (of an attack by Iraq) to be a mushroom cloud" (knowing from others that no Iraqi nuclear program or stockpiles existed), had a version of that line printed out as a script for congresspersons to speak from when they voted in favor of the war, just three weeks before a congressional election. A vote forced in timing by the Bush people, knowing that a lot of Democrats would cave in to their Perception Managed public opinion.
We are all painfully aware of the hundreds of millions of other crimes (one for each person acted upon) against the constitution and individuals committed by Bush in the name of the war: civil rights, human rights, torture, renditions, illegal wiretapping, the illegal recording of every single phone call and email of every American citizen without warrant, security classification of virtually every truth of the contrary facts Bush wanted to hide from the public (including court evidence), illegal imprisonment, brutal prisons, Gitmo, phony legal opinions and disregard of the law by a puppet Attorney General personally directed by Bush, censorship of government scientists and advisors, lies about all scientific facts contrary to Bush's agenda, use of taxpayer money to propagandize the American public, and the list goes on and on.
On the moral issues involved: Bush's anti-abortion stance is firm that it is wrong to murder innocent victims (a principle he ignored in Iraq), and he has said that those who do not support his war are failing to support our troops. Bush's idea of supporting the troops is:
1) to under fund protective armor and discharge benefits, and to disregard contractual discharge dates with the volunteer soldiers to force them to go back to a dangerous Iraq indefinitely on an involuntary forced labor basis (as the equivalent of military slaves under threat of punishment if they refuse, and death or maiming if they go), to leave their families to fend for themselves, to break up their marriages and
2) upon their return if wounded mentally (390,000 of them), to grossly under fund their needed medical care for PTSS, and to deny a 24 hour medical response for those suffering from severe depression such that thousands of them have committed suicide for lack of that care, and will continue to far into the future. Bush has completely failed to support our troops.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the official voice on the final facts of the matter, later concluded that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, that Iraq had no WMD prior to the war, and that all of Bush et al's arguments for going to war were all fabrications.
All of these facts were well known by Bush et al before their attack. In America, federal law defines the knowing telling of lies to congress, in order to gain their unwitting approval to start an unprovoked war that would wrongfully and knowingly kill tens of thousands of unarmed innocent civilians as well as American troops, as criminal fraud and a conspiracy to commit murder.
Had there been no fanatical group of neocons with their criminal Clean Break plan, no lying campaign about false threats from Iraq, no planning of an unprovoked war years in advance, and instead just another stupid president making stupid decisions about starting a war, then there would have been no crime involved. Virtually all the other countries in the world would have called Bush a war criminal, but no US fraud or murder laws would have been broken. Total incompetence yes; criminality no.
But it did not go down that way. Instead Bush did exactly as described. He planned an unprovoked war years in advance, complete with a preplanned lying campaign to the public about knowingly false threats of attack in a blatant but successful attempt to justify and obtain formal approval for his ideological murder of innocents and the destruction of their country. In the process Bush committed the crimes of felony criminal fraud and premeditated murder, among several others.
All of the congresspersons who voted for this phony war enabled Bush's crimes. Some have since repudiated their vote, but most have not (please send your congressperson a copy of this and demand in the name of the people that they publicly repudiate their crime-enabling vote for war based on Bush's fraud!). Neither the Justice Department nor Congress has yet begun any criminal investigation of Bush. Neither the national news media nor Congress have yet to publicize any detailed facts of his Iraq criminality.
Bush is a fool. But who is more foolish: The fool, or those who defend and follow the fool in his criminality? Both the national news media and congress had their own private self-interest agendas with Bush and the two major political parties, which they put ahead of the national interest by not reporting the criminal truth about Bush and Iraq to the American people.
Rep. Kucinich quite recently read into the record five hours of articles of impeachment against Bush. Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley of GWU said that nearly all of the articles were clear cut crimes against the constitution, and they were all committed in plain sight. The problem is that no one has taken any initiative to enforce the laws.
Howard Fineman of Newsweek says that the Republicans do not want to for the obvious reasons, and that the Democrats do not want to because they are seeking all the prior Republican voters they can capture this year and they do not want to rock the boat. Politics are the top priority, not legal principles. The law of the land be damned!
But we do not need impeachment -- that is too slow and not enough votes are there with current public knowledge. What is much faster and a lot more effective is the simple widespread public disclosure and discussion of these alarming criminal facts of Iraq. Your actions in widely communicating these facts is how you can help if you oppose the criminality of this president.
This simple exposure of facts would force rapid criminal investigations, and result in GOP congresspersons running from their support of Bush, his illegal war, and his policies, and eventually end in jail time for the criminals. That widespread national disclosure would immediately expose the horrible criminality of Bush et al, end the validity of his veto threats on legislation, and effectively end Bush's power as president.
By encouraging new support and funding for wounded GIs, it would also save the lives of over 400 veterans each month who, left untreated, would otherwise commit suicide (Veteran's Administration projects 5,000 GI suicides in 2007, for lack of funding for immediate treatment; within 24 hours). The head of the VA mental division recently told the press that only 800 GIs attempted suicide last year, and that the VA had done all they needed to do. Three days later he wrote a memo to his boss asking for PR guidance if the press found out the actual truth: that 12,000 GIs attempted suicide last year, for which they were not prepared! (Time, pg. 72, May 26, 2008, and other news media)
Please note that you can easily send this homepage summary to a friend, newsperson, or congressperson simply by clicking on the icon at the top of this homepage. Or you can send a separate email and suggest they look at bushcrimes.net . Thanks.
The above concludes the main summary of Bush's criminality in Iraq. Next is an 18 page more detailed summary, and in its first paragraph just below there (and at the top of the home page under the icon "Topic Listing") is a link to 10 Chapter links by topic, with 40 more pages of detail, references, commentary, and eye-witnessed evidence in their own words. While I urge you to read all the references noted within this site, if you want to read only one then I suggest "A Pretext For War" by James Bamford, available at Amazon.com in a used like-new paperback. This story was first posted on this site in June, 2006.
&mdash: Dick Fults, ex Air Force Intelligence, rfults1@comcast.net.
Documenting Bush's Criminal Actions on Iraq
Based upon documented facts from numerous well known authors and eyewitnesses, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and a large group of other neocon loyalists (Bush et al) appear to have committed at least 16 federal crimes relative to their unprovoked attack and atrocity on Iraq. If so, their crime on Iraq is the worst crime in American history. All sources, language of laws, and well documented facts are contained within this site. Multiple author, book, and page number references are noted just below, and dozens of source quotes are in this website's Links to Chapters, listed below.
The 1996 Plan to Attack Syria and Iraq, Unprovoked: The Clean Break Plan
In 1996 three American neocons developed, on contract, a strategic plan for the Israeli government. That plan was called A Clean Break. Along with several other actions uniquely related to Israel (for full text see Google for the Clean Break plan), it called for:
- the end of US involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process,
- adoption of a preemptive foreign policy,
- unprovoked attacks on Syria and Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power by force, and
since any such an unprovoked attack would by international treaty be a Crime Against Peace, a war crime, that Clean Break plan included the essential propaganda element of a phony pretext for public consumption to cover up that lack of provocation, such as non-existent threats of WMD, etc, and to provide a phony excuse for what would be, by legal definition, a criminal attack on Syria and Iraq, with the pretext being focused on both Iraq and Syria (see Google for definition of War Crimes, A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 258-265).
In other words, the above part 4 of the 1996 Clean Break plan called for the President of the attacking country to willfully and deliberately create a climate of false fear in the public, using criminal fraud threats of a false imminent attack by Iraq using chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, to justify his criminal attack on Iraq and its innocent civilians. Clean Break was a plan for a war crime.
The authors of that plan also wrote up sample press releases to be issued by the President of the attacking country, warning of the phony imminent dangers posed by Iraq and Syria. The lead author of that plan, Richard Perle, "felt that their Clean Breakrecommendations were so important that he personally hand-carried the report along with sample press releases of the phony cover-up pretexts to Netanyahu (then the equivalent of President of Israel). Wisely, Netanyahu rejected this plan" (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 258-265).
The 1999 Bush Connection to The Neocons and Clean Break
Fast forward three years. In 1999 Bush began his quest for the presidential nomination, and he was personally upset with Hussein because of a failed assassination attempt against his father in Kuwait after the first Gulf war. He hired neocons Rice and Wolfowitz to manage his tutoring of neo-conservative (neocon) foreign policy, and then hired that same Clean Break's Richard Perle to be his advisor on foreign policy (The Price of Loyalty, Suskind, pg. 80).
The other two authors were Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. All of these people were neocons and were later hired by Bush, within weeks after taking office, into the top war policy positions in his administration. After having selected neocons Cheney as his vice president and Rumsfeld as Sec. of Defense, Bush had surrounded himself with and empowered a large group of fanatic neocons to assume control of the nation's new foreign policy.
In the late 1990s the attention of the neocons in their publicly advocated Mid-East war policy became focused on Iraq, and an unprovoked attack on them by the US. Bush's personal quarrel was with Iraq, not Syria. So after many standard staff conversations with Perle about exactly what he had previously planned for the phony pretext regarding Iraq and Syria, and how he could now focus primarily on Iraq with its many legal implications, Bush hired Perle as the full time planner and advocate for the US's new neocon Iraq war crime policy.
Since Perle was now working for the US and not Israel, and had already joined with his fellow neocons in calling for an unprovoked attack against Iraq, he changed the prior Clean Break plan to substitute America for Israel and Iraq for the combination of Iraq and Syria. The phony pretext of non-existent WMD originally planned for the unprovoked attack on Syria was changed to target Iraq exclusively; an existing US enemy: same planner, same plan, different client, different focus.
The neocon ideology, as publicly advocated since the mid 1990's in published open letters, was a foreign policy of being unilateral and aggressive, and using preemptive, unprovoked attacks as needed to use the military power of the US to spread democracy (see Google definition of neo-conservative). In actual practice their policy was both immoral and illegal.
It is common knowledge that unprovoked attacks on densely populated cities of foreign countries would kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The premeditated unprovoked killing of tens of thousands of unarmed women and children based upon the deliberate pre-planned lies of a failed ideological plan is an unconscionable crime of mass murder, and certainly immoral. Telling deliberate lies to obtain public approval of such a pre-planned crime that would knowingly cause harm to innocent people, as in part 4 above of the neocon's revised Clean Break plan, is legally defined as criminal fraud (see Google definitions of murder, criminal fraud, and war crimes).
The three key missing elements in public knowledge of the Iraq war are:
- the fact that unprovoked attacks on Syria and Iraq, and the removal of Saddam Hussein by force, was first planned by American neocons in 1996 as the unused Israeli Clean Break plan; adopted by candidate Bush in 1999, with the substitutions of Iraq for both Iraq and Syria and the US for Israel, and then actively implemented by president Bush with those very same neocons in 2001 within weeks after taking office and 7 months before 9/11, and then the actual attack on Iraq in 2003.
- the fact that the 1996 revised Clean Break plan, because it advocated an unprovoked attack which is by international treaty a war crime, included the key provision of a phony pretext for public consumption; the false threat of WMD use by Iraq, to overcome the lack of any real provocation, and
- the fact that Bush et al's religiously use of the Clean Break's war crime plan and phony pretext lies to get the war approved was criminal fraud, a felony, and then their attack itself was a war crime; and that both were deliberate and willful criminal acts by legal definition; that led directly to their intentional premeditated murder, a capital crime, of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children, and thousands of American soldiers.
Of those Americans killed by his criminal attack on Iraq were over 3,900 in combat and over 14,000 in suicides to date by returning Iraq veterans (for lack of Bush denied immediate medical treatment, and possibly 5,000 in 2007 alone according to the Veterans Administration), including many who were soon facing redeployment. The CBS Evening News, on November 14, 2007, reported that there were 6,200 suicides by the end of 2005. Add another 7,800+ for 2006-7, and you get over 14,000 to date. (Lancet: Iraqi Dead May Total 800,000, Intl. Herald Tribune, Oct. 11, 2006, also see the section below titled The Language of the Law: Criminal Fraud & Murder, and Google for Iraq Veterans Suicides).
The typical medical problem the vets had was that, when they felt so bad that they finally and reluctantly agreed to seek help about their mental problems (post traumatic stress disorder), they were told no staff were available for several days to several weeks. Two days later they were dead;, of suicide. Despite hundreds of $billions spent on defense, Bush et al never adequately funded care for wounded soldiers with any type of wound (see Google for Walter Reed Iraq Wounded).
$360K+/year each for private contractors and $billions in no-bid contracts for supporters of the GOP, but next to nothing for the true needs of our fighting soldiers. Bush's financial medical and armor abandonment of the wounded soldiers he sent to die in Iraq is typical of Bush's total lack of compassion and responsibility for the Americans he is directly responsible for.
Almost four years ago he should have shifted military funds around to accomodate these mentally wounded soldiers back when they desperately first needed that immediate treatment (within 24 hours). By that simple management process Bush could and should have saved over 12,000 American lives, because most of those suicides were easily preventable (the author has over 12 years experience as an executive in the mental health field). Bush simply did not want to spend the money on wounded vets.
Bush could not be bothered with the petty details of 14,000 Americans dead by his intentional neglect, and over 400 more dying each new month. At the very least this was negligent homicide on his part for not acting, and the VA for not disclosing the problem to the public. His oblivious behavior of complete disregard for them is nothing short of unconsionable. His personal felony of Plame/Libby cover-up lying is peanuts compared with this deadly fiasco. No responsible president would ever commit such a deadly error.
Back in late March 2003, any responsible Commander-In-Chief would have said at a cabinet meeting: " As we are now at war, at every future meeting I want each of you to tell me of anything in general adversly happening to our troops overseas or here in the US, so that we can immediately fix the problem and prevent that problem from ever happening again". He would have then added that "we have a duty to do absolutely everything it takes to care for our wounded veterans to help them back into society; whatever the cost". And then he would have followed up their issues and progress at every meeting afterwards. That command statement, never spoken by Bush, would have taken only 25 seconds and saved over 12,000 American lives, so far.
Bush as Commander-in-Chief has consistenly ignored the funding needs of the mentally wounded soldiers, and his conservative mentality and lack of compassionate leadership has heavily influenced the macho non-medical military officers under his command to disregard post traumatic stress disorder (PDSD) as "psycho-babble" (Bush's personal term for symptoms of mental illness).
The Washington Post on December 2, 2007 published a frontpage article about a 7 year Army officer in Iraq, 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, who developed PTSD and then attempted a near fatal suicide. She had been rated consistenly as "superior", but non-medical officers at WalterReed have charged her as a criminal for getting sick, and argued that her PTSD was just an "excuse" for her attempted suicide. If convicted she could get life in prison.
They called her combat illness "psycho-babble", and wanted her to resign to end her medical benefits. A close military friend of hers, Sammantha Owen-Ewing, recently had PTSD and, while under psychiatric care at Walter Reed, was thrown out of the service in the middle of treatment.
When Whiteside had finished a day of her court-martial hearings, she got a text message from Sammantha's husband saying that Sammantha had hung herself the night before. What more can be said about the deranged character of Bush, and all the horrendous presidential examples and tone he sets with his complete disregard for human life and basic moral values.
Epilogue: Months after Whiteside's original court marshall hearing by non-medical military officers finding her guilty of the crime of being mentally wounded in Iraq, the only medical person in her chain of command overturned the original verdict and freed her. A few weeks later the stress of that hearing and the lack of adequate medical attention proved to be too much for her overstrained mind, and she very predictably committed suicide. Bush did not step in to help her at the time of her initial unconscionable indictment, and now she is another one of his dead victims.
As usual with Bush, no one was held responsible.
This suicide problem was known within DOD and the Veteran's Administration almost 4 years ago. But as of this date Bush has not even commented with his usual excuse, let alone actually done anything concrete on a crash basis about the 6 to 12 month process of fixing the problem, while he waits for yet another 5,000 soldiers to die in 2008.
This should be his number one priority, since it would only take 15 minutes of his time, and would have taken only 15 minutes almost 4 years ago: that is about 1,000 lives for each minute Bush could not bother to spend. What exactly does it take for this country to finally wake up? How many more Americans have to die? Where are congress and the news media?
The best thing for our country would be for Cheney and Bush to both resign effective immediately, so that we could have a responsible president that we all actually trust to do the right thing; ASAP. In the name of all decent Americans, Congress should demand their resignations immediately. They are both quite clearly unfit to lead this country.
The Felony Murder Doctrine states that even if Bush had originally planned to murder "only" a few thousand or so Iraqi innocents as "expected collateral damage" in his illegal war, the formal murder charge would be for all the people killed as a direct result of that unprovoked attack: 400,000 to 800,000.
The entire Iraq war was a criminal act: from A to Z. Approximately 75% or more of the Iraqis murdered by Bush were women and children: 300,000 to 600,000 of them, and over two thirds of that number were children: with up to 1 million or more additional children wounded. So much for compassionate conservatism and religious morality in Bush's presidency. (see section below titled Absence of WMD Verified by CIA Prior to Invasion)
Bush intentionally committed criminal fraud to get the war crime started and then attacked Iraq knowing that innocent civilians would die needlessly. This mass murder, and its criminal fraud cover-up, were planned years in advance by Bush and his fanatical neocon ideology. Whenever war criminals take over any country, by whatever means, their actions create a catastrophe for not only their own citizens but for whatever countries they decide to attack. History repeats that lesson time after time. Bush is our lesson.
Any such fraudulent unprovoked attack is neither for national defense nor national security: it is a malicious criminal act by criminal fanatics with a perverted sense of morality and common decency who have absolutely no regard or thought for human life or basic human rights. Obviously no prior poll was taken of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed to see if they wanted to die for Bush's phony neocon ideology.
Bush's subsequent attack caused his murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women and children and thousands of American troops, the wounding of another 2 million or so Iraqi's, the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure, and the physical displacement of over two million Iraqi's (Lancet: Iraqi Dead May Total 800,000, Intl. Herald Tribune, Oct. 11, 2006).
Bush has caused one of the worst refugee problems in history, for whom he has not offered any material help, most especially ignoring the tens of thousands of Iraqis who worked right with our troops and put their own lives on the line. Bush is quite obviously not much of a friend in times of need, except for convicted felons who lied for him.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the official voice on the final facts of the matter, later concluded that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, that Iraq had no WMD prior to the war, and that all of Bush et al's arguments for going to war were fabrications. All of these facts were well known by Bush et al before the attack.
In America, federal law defines the knowing telling of lies to congress, in order to gain their unwitting approval to start an unprovoked war that would knowingly kill tens of thousands of unarmed innocent civilians, as criminal fraud and a conspiracy to commit murder.
The American public would be shocked and outrageously upset to learn the facts that Bush and his neocons planned the unprovoked Iraq war crime before he even took office, and that his campaign of lying to promote it and cover it up was part of the original 1996 neocon criminal Clean Break plan he adopted, revised, and implemented in 2001, and that the war had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and everything to do with his personal criminal neocon ideology.
If they had those critical criminal facts in hand, after verification, the entire country would be polled to be demanding Bush and Cheney's investigation, impeachment, and ultimate imprisonment by virtual acclimation. It is way past time for Congress, the Justice Department, and the news media to once again fullfill their solemn responsibility to the American public, and stand up for true justice in our country; by putting the full criminal truth about Bush et al on their front pages and in their speeches, stories, and investigative actions.
This site contains eye-witnessed proof of all three key missing elements, as described above, within this homepage. Beyond this homepage summary is another 40 pages of evidentiary detail (see Links to Chapters below, and the section below titled Bush's Phony Pretext for a War Crime: The Clean Break Plan In Action).
What follows are the voluminous details and quotes of the eye-witnessed evidence of the willful and deliberate pre-planned campaign of criminal fraud lies by Bush et al per the revised Clean Break plan. Bush wanted to falsely convince the public that there was an imminent threat of attack from Iraq (using non-existent WMD), so that congress would vote to fraudulently approve his war crime attack on Iraq. He succeeded in his fraud, and now the whole world is paying for his gigantic and literally deadly lie.
Bush's Implementation of Clean Break: 2001
Bush's very first National Security meeting was held on January 30, 2001, 10 days after he took office and 7 months before 9/11, to discuss Mideast policy. It was chaired by Rice who said the agenda was (not Terrorism, North Korea, Iran, or the Taliban, but;) "How Iraq is destabilizing the region." Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill (who were not aware of the Clean Break plan and its history) witnessed Bush formally adopt the first major elements of the Clean Break plan as national policy.
Bush said he was "going to tilt it back towards Israel." Powell said such a move "would be hasty." This new policy would represent a very major, drastic change for the US, but there was very little discussion of it and no dissentions by any of the neocons. Immediately afterwards, O'Neil called it a "pre-scripted" meeting, which meant that it had obviously been discussed and agreed upon several months before. He also then said (in early February, 2001) "Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus." (The Price of Loyalty, Suskind, pgs. 70-86)
A few days later Bush publicly withdrew the US from the Israeli peace process and announced a new preemptive foreign policy (parts 1 and 2 of Clean Break). A few weeks later he hired all three authors of Clean Break into the three highest war policy positions in the US, and Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense: the architect of the war on Iraq.
Perle became chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which he packed with neocons. Feith became Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (3rd highest rank in the Pentagon), and Wurmser wound up as Cheney's Middle East expert. They collectively began preparations for parts 3 and 4 of the revised Clean Break: the Iraq war and its phony pretext. (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 260-69, 282, Hubris, Isikoff & Corn, pgs. 16-19, The Smoking Gun).
Suskind writes that a few weeks after that meeting Paul O'Neill had the occasion to see documents "being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset... One document, headed ;Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts, lists companies from thirty countries — including France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom — on their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest.
An attached document maps Iraq with markings for super giant oilfield&, other oilfield, and earmarked for production sharing, while demarking the large undeveloped southwest of the country into nine blocks to designate for future exploration.(The Price of Loyalty, Suskind, pg. 96)
Bush et al's Intentional Distortion and Cherry Picking of Intelligence After 9/11
The attack on 9/11 created a public fear of the unknown that was a perfect climate for Bush et al to redirect the fear from al Qaeda towards a fabricated fear of attack from Iraq, and to provide the perfect phony excuse for the US to attack Iraq on a preemptive basis; for the "security of our country", because they attacked us. This was done by Bush falsely claiming that Iraq was working hand in hand with al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks, when in fact Iraq had earlier rejected all overtures from al Qaeda. (For proof of that fabrication, see Bush's Phony Pretext For a War Crime, below).
After 9/11 Bush made it clear to all intelligence agency heads that he wanted to hear and see only data that supported his case for attacking Iraq. Because of Bush's intimidation, and Tenet's bureaucratic need to please Bush, Tenet did not always press the truth on Bush in his daily one-on-one briefings (no records of these private meetings were kept).
In 2002, Tenet even suppressed current key hard CIA gathered intelligence evidence from thirty different first-hand sources within Iraq; of zero WMD in Iraq (verification that all production programs had been halted and all WMD destroyed by 1992) that would have stopped Congressional approval dead in its tracks. Tenet's suppression of this crucial intelligence doomed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans to death, because Congressional approval was going to be contingent on evidence of WMD in Iraq — silence on the verified absence of WMD meant approval.
This new CIA WMD evidence (for details see the heading a few paragraphs below; Absence of WMD Verified By CIA Before Invasion) accurately corroborated the 1995 intelligence statements from Saddam's son-in-law, already in the hands of the CIA. Had Tenet gloated to Bush privately, or personally asked Bush's opinion on what to do with the very recent CIA hard evidence of no Iraqi WMD (that he personally suppressed to demonstrate his intense loyalty), it is a virtual certainty that Bush would have been most grateful to Tenet for not derailing his pre-planned attack on Iraq. If questioned under oath Tenet would either have to admit to personally causing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and thousands of American GIs), or admit that he told Bush about the newly verified absence of WMD and that Bush told him to keep quiet about it. (Hubris, Isikoff & Corn, pgs. 21-32, State of War, Risen, pgs. 23-37, 84-107, Absence of WMD Verified).
Saddam son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who managed Iraq's special weapons (WMD) programs, defected to Jordan in 1995; bringing with him masses of information on WMD. Kamel said on August 12, 1995 that all weapons biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed and all weapons programs were halted in 1991. When he returned to Iraq he was murdered by Saddam, and his information was ignored then by the CIA, and later on by Bush. But that was not the story Feith's OSP, Bush's WHIG, or Cheney wanted the American public to hear."
David Wurmser (one of the authors of Clean Break) was put in charge of a secret intelligence unit named Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Bamford writes "Wurmser's unit was little more than a pro-war propaganda cell. It was designed to produce evidence to support the pretexts for attacking Iraq... But the primary purpose of the unit was to come up with some basis to counter the CIA, whose analysts had consistently found no credible links between Al Qaeda and Hussein...
Gregory Thielmann, who was in charge of military assessments within the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said the makeup of the (Wurmers's) intelligence unit was a giveaway, indicating that they had no interest in true analysis. "They (Bush et al) wanted people to find evidence to support their (prior) answers about war."
One such example comes from a non-Bush staffer, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwaitkowski (now retired), who was working inside Wurmser's "intelligence" unit. She said "It wasn't intelligence, it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together.
"She says she was warned by an office mate that "I shouldn't say anything say anything positive about the Palestinians." Bamford writes that "Kwaitkowski also discovered that most of the longtime career Pentagon civilians in the office, and some of the military, were quickly being transferred out to make room for new appointments, mostly from neo-conservative and pro-Israel think tanks." (Wurmser's unit was subsequently merged with other units.) (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 286-298, 307-355).
Absence Of WMD Verified By CIA Before Invasion
The director of the CIA, G. Tenet, had a daily intelligence briefing with Bush. However, published reports state that his initial main message to Bush was that the CIA had no intelligence assets within Iraq, and no evidence of either any WMD or any connection between Iraq and 9/11. Bush's message to him was essentially: find me evidence to support a war with Iraq. In the spring of 2002 Charlie Allen, the CIA's assistant director collection and the highest ranking CIA official willing to try and solve the intelligence gap, developed a creative method to gather fresh intelligence on WMD within Iraq.
From a prior UN collected list of US domiciled relatives of key Iraqi scientists who had previously been identified as working on various WMD programs in the early 1990s, Allen contacted a number of them for making intelligence collection trips to Iraq to interview their relatives as to the current status of these various programs. He found 30 of these now American citizens, who had last left Iraq 10 years or more prior, willing to make the trip.
All of these relatives were unknown to each other and had no knowledge that others had been recruited for similar trips. In "State of War" Risen used the detailed illustration and background of Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad contacting her brother, Saad Tawfig in Bagdad, who had previously worked on Iraq's nuclear program (pgs. 84-107).
Upon their return in the fall of 2002, Dr. Alhaddad and all the others reported that, despite the heavy security difficulties there, they had been able to conduct private interviews with their scientist relatives. All thirty of them unanimously stated that their personal contacts within Iraq had told them that all such WMD programs had been halted in 1991-92, and all the weapons destroyed, and that they had been reassigned to other duties years earlier.
"Tawfig told his sister that he worried that America was going to invade (Iraq) for no reason, when there was nothing left of the weapons program". The relatives provided lengthy verbatim quotes of the details from their scientists. As intelligence this information had come from many different sources and was fully collaborated. It was also fresh information collected in secret from the very people who had previously worked on these programs. The complete accuracy of this hard intelligence was later verified on the ground in Iraq after the war.
It was solid hard evidence, the very best available, collected and reported months before the invasion of Iraq. This was one of two pieces of hard intelligence that would have immediately derailed the entire argument for war, and avoided all the subsequent deaths and destruction. The other would have been the extensive publicizing of the story of the background and implementation of the "Clean Break" plan by Bush, but that critical and very relevant fact Bush failed to disclose; and neither Congress nor the news media have yet chosen to make this incredibly incriminating story widely known to the American public.
Allen wrote up his report of all the details and the conclusions of the data collection and sent copies to both Tenet and his deputy. Tenet and the CIA promptly ignored the whole data collection report and did not "officially" share its results with anyone outside the agency, most especially not with congress, either in writing or as a briefing (congressional approval was contingent on solid evidence of WMD in Iraq).
The CIA subsequently shut down Allen's program. One month later the CIA (with Tenet as the chief editor) issued its National Intelligence Estimate on the status of WMD in Iraq, supposedly its best work on assessing the threat from Iraq. It falsely stated that "Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program." (State of War, Risen, Pgs. 84-107)
Bush's Phony Pretext For a War Crime: The Clean Break Plan in Action
As a bit of background, on September 12, 2001, Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke walked into the White House for a series of meetings about the attack the day before. Clarke says "I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks should be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda.
Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002. On the morning of the 12th (Tuesday?) DODs focus was already beginning to shift from Al Qaeda.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Sec. Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq"...I vented. "Having been attacked by Al Qaeda, for us to now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor." ...Later in the day, Sec. Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets.
At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President (Bush) did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted, that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied." (A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 285-87)
Ever since taking office, Bush had been requesting evidence of Iraq's intent and capability to attack the US. But all US intelligence agencies kept reporting back that there was no such evidence — none at all. In order to obtain approval for his long planned unprovoked attack on Iraq, Bush implemented part 4 of his adopted and revised Clean Break plan to invent evidence of WMD and sell a false fear among Congress and Americans that Iraq was just about to attack the US.
To enable and spread that deliberately false propaganda Bush created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) under Cheney with Rove as Chairman. This group started to meet weekly in the White House in August, 2002, and was composed of Rice, Libby, Hadley, several other high ranking administration officials, presidential speech writers, and all the top spin doctors in the GOP. All of these people were criminal fraud and murder co-conspirators along with Bush.
Their job was to twist and distort all available stories with a political spin as though it were a fun filled challenging political campaign rather than the very real life and death matter it was: to willfully and deliberately create that false fear, wordsmith (spin) it into sound bites and public propaganda, write them up for Bush et all to leak to the media and sell to the public, and then coordinate their public release for maximum impact to fan the flames of war crimes and hasten the intended unlawful death of tens of thousands of innocents: exactly as did Himmler in Germany and Tojo in Japan in WWII.
Bush et al knew exactly the lies they were creating and the damage it would cause to innocent people. Their willful and deliberately false stories included non-existent Iraq ties to al Qaeda, phony mobile bio-labs, illusionary mushroom clouds, forged uranium buys, non-existent WMD, sea-launched bombs on drones, etc, etc. the Bush manufactured evidence of phony WMD that Congress was waiting to see, and the lies that Powell told to the UN. Today the whole country knows that Bush and Cheney lied about the need to attack Iraq. What the country does not know is that they both committed felony criminal fraud by doing so.
Using public funds to pay for a gigantic phony pro-war propaganda campaign targeted against the American public (another federal crime), Bush's pervasive lies won a fraudulent congressional approval to commit a monumental war crime. The members of Congress who voted to approve military action against Iraq are responsible for enabling Bush's war crime on Iraq. Some have since repudiated their deadly vote, but the majority have not (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs. 160-74, 283-331, 317-331, 367-377, Hubris, Isikoff & Corn, pgs. 27-65, 208-22, Greatest Story Ever Sold, Rich, pgs. 184-198, 217, Hoodwinked, Prados, pgs. 185-95).
Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson was one of the 77 senators who voted in favor of the war, based upon the information he was told by George Tenet and Dick Cheney. "We now know (January, 2004) after the fact and on the basis of [CIA chief weapons inspector] Dr. [David] Kay's testimony today in the Senate Armed services Committee, that the information (from Tenet and Cheney) was false; and not only that there were not weapons of mass destruction — chemical and biological — but there was no fleet UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, nor was there any capability of putting UAVs on ships and transporting them to the Atlantic coast and launching them at U.S. cities on the eastern seaboard... The degree of specificity I was given a year and a half ago, prior to my vote, was not only inaccurate; it was patently false."
In late 2002 Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau chief John Walcott told reporter Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, "We began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the (Iraq war) arguments the administration was making. These people were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration's deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication." As one CIA official told 50 of his staff during a group meeting in January, 2003, "if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." (A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs. 318-34).
On September 7, 2002 Bush reported at a Camp David news conference "that they (Iraqis) were six months away from developing a (nuclear) weapon" (later proven by the IAEA to be a lie). Senior State Department intelligence official Gregory Theilmann said "They (Bush et al) were distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous... I thought there were limits on how much one was willing to do in order to twist things." "Senior (administration) officials made statements which I can only describe as dishonest" (A Pretext for War, Bamford, pgs.318-23, 333-4).
Shortly before the initiation of WHIG (as described above), Feith in the Pentagon created the top secret Office of Special Plans (OSP), headed by a Perle protege A. Shulsky and utilizing a variety of Pentagon staff and outside contractors. One of the non-Bush staff assigned was Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was in a key position to observe the entire operation.
She stated that "They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the congress, and even internally to the Pentagon — to try and make this case of immediacy, this case of severe threat to the United States... They were political, politically manipulated."
"They did have, obviously, bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize." She further said that in the end the public heard what they were supposed to hear, what the OSP wanted them to hear. "They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda story line, which is the same story line we heard from the president and Vice-President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002."
"The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them," she said, "because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President's office were critical in this propaganda effort — to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for preemptive war... The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum, that is a subversion of the Constitution. A preemptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for."
Bamford writes on, "Once Feith's intelligence unit had cherry picked the most damming items from the streams of U.S. and Israeli reports, they were then sent to the OSP to be turned into ‘analysis’ and ‘talking points’. Then the OSP would brief senior administration officials. These officials would then use the OSP's false and exaggerated intelligence as ammunition when attempting to hard-sell the need to go to war to their reluctant colleagues, such as Colin Powell, and even to allies like British Prime Minister Tony Blair."
In late summer 2002, after completing their politically spun "study" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Feith had the staffers on the study brief the CIA, who saw it for what it was and expressed no interest because the CIA's evidence had always shown that no such links existed. Then Feith changed the presentation to include criticisms of the CIA for disagreeing with them and showed it to S. Hadley (then deputy to C. Rice, and now National Security Advisor) and Scooter Libby in Cheney's office in the White House.
Almost immediately afterwards the CIA reversed itself, and its deputy director J. McLaughlin, in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote "We have solid evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida going back a decade." And that is exactly how Bush et al manufactured "intelligence" that convinced Congress to approve the attack on Iraq. (A Pretext For War, Bamford, pgs 307-317)
The several books and page numbers referenced herein recite numerous incidents of extreme White House and Pentagon pressure applied to the Intelligence agencies and their individual employees to produce evidence proving Iraqi WMD and connections between Iraq and 9/11, even though they said repeatedly that no such evidence existed. Many eyewitnesses to these incidents are named, and their comments quoted verbatim.
Many reported the replacement of truthful experienced analysts with inexperienced loyalists who were more cooperative at ignoring the true facts and relying instead on twisted figments of half-truths that were spun to support the pro war advocates. There are many recitations of these eye-witnessed incidents in several pages of considerable detail in the BushCrimes.net site chapter: Compelling Eye-witnessed Evidence of Cover-up & Crimes.
Read all of the pages of all the books referenced herein for a much more complete and detailed picture of how Bush et al planned and then lied their way into this terrible and completely unnecessary war: the worst crime in American history. Bush's best remembered legacy will be his betrayal of his own country.
The Language of the Law: Criminal Fraud & Murder
The language of the US criminal code defines Criminal Fraud as intentionally creating and telling lies that knowingly cause harm to innocent people. Murder is defined as intentionally taking unprovoked actions that knowingly cause the death of innocent people. Bush's public lying campaign about the false urgent need to go to war with Iraq was an intentional implementation of the above part 4 of the long premeditated revised Clean Break plan; its criminal fraud cover-up.
Bush's intentional lies about non-existent threats from Iraq caused a great deal of harm to 32,900 American dead and wounded soldiers and to the millions of Iraqi dead, wounded, and displaced — Criminal Fraud by legal definition. His intentional unprovoked attack on Iraq knowingly caused the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent unarmed Iraqi civilians — Murder by legal definition (see Google crime definitions).
Bush et al's criminal actions re Iraq were willful, deliberate, and premeditated. Their collective criminal intent was to wage an illegal unprovoked attack on Iraq, knowing full well that such an unprovoked attack would kill (murder) tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children and the unarmed men in their family and cause thousands of American casualties, and to use criminal fraud on the American public as their means to gain fraudulent congressional approval for their personal, purely ideological, unprovoked attack on Iraq.
The truly amazing thing is that half of the American public (the GOP half) and most of congress bought all of these lies hook line and sinker! Not only the public but the news media as well. They actually believed everything that one of the deadliest liars in history, Bush, told them. They were all thoroughly used by Bush. Both Congress and the news media have continued to play dumb ever since, and to remain silent on these true criminal facts of the war even though they both now know better.
When I watched the first debate between Gore and Bush back in 2000, it was instantly apparent to me (and I automatically thought everyone else as well) that Bush was an extreme mental lightweight who had no ability to think or talk on his feet. He could not and did not carry on any dialogue whatsoever on any of the debate issues.
The only thing he could do was to mouth his memorized GOP sound bites on whatever the issue was, over and over and over. He was quite obviously no thinker. Can anyone seriously imagine a George Bush personally researching, preparing, and verbally presenting hundreds of slide shows on global warming all by himself with no notes, let alone having the brains to know it was the right thing to do?
Today Bush is still in denial of that basic scientific fact, perhaps because he has a closed mind. To say he is a slow learner would be grossly overstating his speed of adaptation to new facts. But all of this was self evident when he first campaigned; to anyone with an open mind.
It is very difficult to understand how so many people could ever have voted for him as an effective President: not only once but twice! At the time he was great on campaigning on what a "uniter, not a divider" and a "compassionate conservative" he was, and how the GOP could not allow the Democrats to have any increased tax money because they would just waste it. Now we have the worst deficit in history after he inherited a surplus, his record of wasting $trillions on war crimes in Iraq while denying a few $billion for the truly needy while cutting hundreds of $billions in taxes for the rich, and one of the most partisan political environments in our history.
In addition, in his infinite arrogance, he has used his preplanned war as a preplanned excuse in a blatant attempt to void our constitution. Bush is simply a compulsive liar of the worst kind. And he was nominated almost by acclimation by the GOP, as their conservative hero. Now Bush is the worst war criminal this country has ever produced, along with all those who knowingly helped spread his lies about Iraq. Hopefully hard time in prison awaits them all. Just a few more facts to consider as background.
The GOP has always maintained that they are the party of "Law and Order", yet they (and sadly most top democrats as well) currently (without widespread knowlege of all the criminal facts) consider any legal action against Bush and Cheney for their alleged criminal acts in the Iraq war as only a partisan desire of the radical left. All law abiding Americans support the enforcement of our laws against the felonies of Criminal Fraud and Murder. Bush himself recently said that "Ours is a nation of laws, and laws must be enforced." Our criminal laws apply equally to everyone: there are no exceptions. The American rule of law is the glue that binds our country together: it cannot be foresaken for a criminal president who openly and arrogantly flaunts the law.
So, given all the credible evidence of the horrendous premeditated crimes they have committed, why are Bush and Cheney not being frog marched out of the White House and taken to jail? Why are our criminal laws not being enforced or, at the very least, why are these crimes not even being formally investigated, let alone their documented factual evidence not even being publicized?
The news media, Congress, and the Justice Department continue to be strangely silent on the horrendous criminality of Bush's war on Iraq. Their deliberate disregard of these explosive hard criminal facts is puzzling in the face of the incredibly incriminating evidence made publicly available over the past two years, as summarized and referenced in this website. Old fashioned personal integrity, professionalism, and true patriotic concern for our country seem to be woefully missing these days in high positions. Higher profits and keeping their jobs seem to be a higher priority than telling the criminal truth about Bush's war.
They apparently do not want to risk alienating Bush and his small but rich and vocal right wing base with full factual disclosure, and instead prefer to ignore his blatant crimes for as long as possible while maintaining their cozy business-as-usual relationship with a criminal president. All they have at risk is an inevitable contemptuous exposure for their deliberate refusal to have done the right thing back when it really mattered: when there were still lives to be saved (or is it more aptly called; deliberate obstruction of justice?). It is now time for them to take responsibility for the country instead of their own personal interests.