02/26/07 – Elizabeth de la Vega – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
It's time to remove Bush and Cheney from power.
Everybody knows it, but everybody also seems to agree that it just can't be done.
But my guest today, Elizabeth De La Vega, has written an entire book.
Basically, a good grand jury indictment, a make-believe one, of George Bush and Dick Cheney and why they ought to be removed from power.
It's called US v.
Bush.
United States vs.
George W. Bush et al.
It's by Elizabeth De La Vega, edited by Tom Anglehart from TomDispatch.com.
Welcome to the show, Elizabeth.
Well, thanks for having me.
Okay, now, so tell me about your career as a federal prosecutor, for how many years and what district and that kind of stuff.
Alright, well, I worked for 11 years in Minneapolis as an Assistant United States Attorney, and there I did just about any kind of federal case you can imagine, from bank robberies to, and I prosecuted them, I didn't commit them.
But bank robbery, prosecutions, white collar crime, the whole gamut.
And then I moved to San Jose where I became a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force.
And there I did a lot of prosecutions of gang robberies of computer companies, actually.
That was kind of a trend that was happening at the time.
And then I was the head of the San Jose branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for several years as well.
And I retired in 2004.
And was it for political reasons that you retired?
Not really.
There have been publicized now some problems with the United States Attorney, Kevin Ryan, who was in charge of the Northern District.
And actually, about 50 of the experienced lawyers left during his tenure, and I was one of them.
I'm not sure if I would call that political in the sense that people think of, but the Department of Justice came out with an early retirement package, and I decided it was time to move on.
And now, actually, this is sort of a sidebar off the main topic, but sort of brought up memories.
Didn't Bill Clinton fire all the federal prosecutors and hire new ones?
Isn't that what Bush is doing now, the same thing?
I would say no.
It's not uncommon at all for the – you have to distinguish between the United States Attorney, which is an appointed position in every district, and the Assistant U.S. Attorneys, who would be all the federal prosecutors.
And no one, to my knowledge, has ever fired all the federal prosecutors.
It's very common for a new president to ask the former U.S. Attorney to resign and to put in his own people.
What's happened now, however, is that the Bush administration is removing the people it put in itself, and some of those removals, at least the one in the Northern District of California, I believe is quite justified on performance grounds, but the other ones do not appear to be.
But the fact of the matter is, it is a presidential appointment, and so it's not as clear-cut an issue as it's kind of being made to be in the press.
There do appear to be instances where U.S. Attorneys are being removed because they wouldn't prosecute cases that the administration wanted them to do, or vice versa, they were prosecuting cases that the administration did not want them to do.
So, I don't think we really have enough facts yet as to all of them, but clearly the one in Alabama, or Arkansas, I guess, seems to be a very well-regarded U.S. Attorney, and he seems to have been removed for political reasons.
And, wow, so what happened to justice being blind and all that?
The idea that federal prosecutors get to keep or get to lose their jobs based on whether their prosecutions go along with what politicians prefer to see prosecuted?
Well, I just want to make that point again.
We're talking about two different things.
The U.S. Attorneys are appointed, and then the federal prosecutors who work under them are not.
But it's really never been the case that they are totally independent in the district, so it's just a little bit more ambiguous than what your question would imply.
But, truly, it is a problem that the administration is interfering to such a degree as it appears to be doing in the various districts.
I see.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, we should get to the real point here, which is your book, United States vs.
George Bush, and you set this thing up basically as a fictional grand jury, and why is that?
Well, it has to be fictional because there is no such grand jury, so that is really the only thing that's fictional about the book.
I do have a hypothetical indictment that's laid out, and, of course, there is no real indictment, and I'm not in a position to bring an indictment because I don't work for the federal government.
And if I did, I'm sure that Alberto Gonzalez would not approve such an indictment.
And then the testimony in this grand jury, which takes place over six days, is presented through fictitious agents, three of them.
But other than that, everything in the book is absolutely factual and really undisputed.
The facts are undisputed that I've used in the book.
Right, but you don't just say, look, here's a bunch of facts and lay it out.
You picked the grand jury, I mean, not just because you're a federal prosecutor, but you say in the book that the debate is so emotional in this country that you thought maybe if you put the whole idea in a courtroom setting, you could keep it where it's simply the facts, and it doesn't matter what your point of view is coming at it.
That's exactly right.
When I retired, when I took early retirement, I really had time to pay closer attention to the news that people get on TV.
I hadn't really watched TV very much before then.
And it was clear to me at that point why it was that so many people seemed to be confused about whether the administration had deceived the public about the war.
And the reason is that we never really have debates or even information laid out in any kind of way other than really people just shouting at each other.
And when there's an attempt to have some kind of substance in a conversation, the response is usually some kind of personal attack on whoever is the messenger.
So I thought that the format of a hypothetical grand jury would be a good one because it's a very non-charged atmosphere.
And for people who read the book, I think they would agree it's just sort of a facts kind of book.
There's a discussion of the law, an explanation of the law at the beginning, and then the facts are laid out and the reader is in the position of the grand juror and can make his or her own decision based on these facts.
So I wanted to take the hysteria out of the discussion to the extent that's possible.
Right.
And you even, from a lot of our point of view, you even kind of dumbed down the argument against them that you're not trying to prove that they lied us into war because, of course, then you'd have to have magic powers and know what they think.
So instead, you make the case that they defrauded us.
It doesn't matter what they were thinking at the time exactly, that you can't prove their state of mind, but you can still show that they defrauded us.
So I'm no lawyer and I'm sure most of the audience aren't lawyers.
To prove they defrauded us, you don't have to prove that they're liars?
Well, you just asked about five questions.
Did I?
I know you don't really realize that, but...
I know you can handle it.
All right.
Let me start.
Let me just start over.
Okay?
The way it works is that the crime that I lay out in the case is conspiracy to defraud the United States.
And it has to be intentional.
It can't be just a mistake.
So there is some level of intent that has to be proved and knowledge.
But the point I make in the book is that under the law, there are many ways to defraud people, and lying is just one small part of the whole umbrella of ways to commit fraud.
And the reason for that is, and people who have tried to get away with a lie or have been on the receiving end of a lie, an outright lie, know that it's really easy to detect, you know, if somebody, if your kid comes home and says they were at the library on a certain night.
It's not that hard to find out if they in fact were somewhere else, you know, carousing around with their friends.
So that's not a good way to lie or to deceive.
So that's just one part.
So fraud includes all kinds of ways to deceive people.
For example, if someone comes out and makes a statement as if it's a certainty, such as, we know there are weapons of mass destruction, but the evidence that's available to them behind the scenes makes it very clear that there's no certainty about that fact whatsoever, then that's a form of fraud.
Or a half-truth is another form of fraud.
And one example of that in this case is Vice President Cheney was fond of telling this story, we know that there are chemical weapons in Iraq because Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told us.
Now, the parts he left out of that story were, number one, he told us that in 1995, and number two, he also said in that very same interview, which is reported in about a two-page report, that they were destroyed, the chemical weapons were destroyed.
So that's another form of fraud.
Or saying things in a way that's literally true but deliberately misleading, such as the statement the President made repeatedly where he would make a statement about 9-11 followed up immediately by something about the danger from Saddam Hussein to imply to people that there was a link.
And of course there wasn't.
Yeah, the excluded middle.
Yes, yes, that's right.
That's right.
And in fact, just so people can remember, let's go ahead and go back over.
If I remember correctly, basically they would say, you know, why do we have to go to Iraq?
And Bush would say, because of September 11th, we learned that you can't just wait around for attacks to happen, you've got to do something about it first.
But so if they only listened to the first part of the statement, all they get is because of September 11th.
And the nuanced reasoning behind the new preemptive doctrine is kind of left to the side.
Exactly, exactly.
And that, not only is that a form of fraud, but the fact that the administration continually worded that in that way tells you something about their knowledge of how weak their case was.
Because one thing that I talk about in the book, and people follow the Libby case would know too, that common sense actually is a big part of how you evaluate information in the law, believe it or not.
And common sense would tell you that the administration was trying to make the strongest case it possibly could about Iraq, about invading Iraq.
So if they really had any evidence that would have proved that there was a connection between 9-11 and Iraq, we would definitely have heard about it.
But yet they didn't.
So they repeatedly used this artful terminology, and it was actually very successful, sadly.
And at certain points along the way, the majority of people in the country thought that there was a connection between 9-11 and Iraq.
So it was really quite Machiavellian, actually.
And another part of this would be the premeditation.
You go through your book and explain how the neoconservatives have wanted to carry out this project since the 1990s.
Right.
Yeah, one of the things that I do lay out is that, for various reasons, different members of the administration had a predisposition to invade Iraq.
And a point I make is that, under the law, you really don't have to prove motivation to prove a crime.
But nevertheless, it's always instructive.
And here, we had, ultimately, at least 30 members of the Bush administration in high levels, including Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, on and on, who had, for up to 10 years before even, sorry, Libby and Wolfowitz and Cheney were talking about this in 1992, we're talking about these various principles from the Project for a New American Century, which were, they didn't call it that then, but the same principles applied, which were that the United States should be globally dominant, that we should have a substantial forced presence in the Middle East, in other words, we should have permanent bases over there, that we basically have an entitlement to the oil in the Middle East, and that we should take preemptive action to secure these so-called rights that we have in the Middle East.
And those are just some of the principles.
And those ideas were written in various forms throughout the 1990s, including up to 2000 in a document that Bush and Cheney commissioned for their campaign.
Interestingly enough, while the Bush and Cheney campaign group would talk about these ideas in their own circles, say to the American Enterprise Institute or other neoconservative groups, they did not make that their campaign platform at all.
Cheney and Bush talked about not wanting to engage in nation-building, about not, Cheney used the term, not invading countries willy-nilly, and that type of thing, because they very well knew that these ideas were not accepted in the mainstream.
Right, they said, Bush said in the debate with Al Gore that we ought to have a humble foreign policy.
Yes, he did.
Yeah, I don't know what happened to that.
Although it should have been clear that he was already an interventionist and an internationalist before he said that.
He was already on the record for interventionism.
So anybody who was snookered by that line in the debate was, to my eyes, willfully, you know, let themselves be snookered by it.
Right, well, this is an interesting point, actually, when you talk about fraud in the law, because in the criminal law, at least, you can't defend yourself to a charge of fraud by saying that people should have been smarter, they should have figured it out.
So in a sense of being a good citizen or in a sense of politics, you're right, people should not have been fooled, but that doesn't get the administration off the hook for what they did after they became public officials and deceived the public.
It doesn't.
It doesn't get them off the hook.
Even if, go ahead, explain that a little bit more in detail.
If I'm a pro-war nationalist American who's looking for any excuse to invade Iraq and Bush sells me a bill of goods and I buy it, he's still defrauding me?
Absolutely, absolutely, because the focus is on the conduct of the people who are doing, making the deceitful statements and so forth.
So theoretically, if you charge somebody with conspiracy to defraud, it really doesn't matter if they succeed or not, because the focus is on their conduct, not on how it's viewed by the person at the receiving end of the statements.
And that is something that juries are told in every single fraud case, is the law of fraud.
Okay, so now can we apply this the same way to Dick Cheney and George Bush being defrauded by the neoconservatives?
They were shopping for a bill of goods and the neoconservatives sold it to them?
No, because Dick Cheney and George Bush went out there and, for example, just some really simple things.
When George Bush came out on September 4th and told the whole world we were going to engage in an open dialogue about the war, that was September 4th, 2002, he knew very well that, oh, and he said, well, he hadn't decided whether to go to war and so forth.
Well, he knew at that time that he had actually asked for a preliminary war plan, September 17th, 2001, a formal war plan on November 2001, November 21st.
We had actually been stepping up the airstrikes against Iraq for months, and Donald Rumsfeld had approved, and they had been executed, bought 50 airstrikes that were likely to kill more than 30 people.
Bush had, without talking to Congress or certainly without getting approval or even mentioning it, taken $700 million from funds from Afghanistan to put them into Iraq preparation.
And the very next day, we launched the largest airstrikes we've launched since 1998.
So, clearly, he wasn't fooled by anything then when he came out and made that statement to people.
He was deliberately misleading the public.
And that's a flavor right there of the value of this book, US vs.
Bush.
It's written by a federal prosecutor, and it's laid out just like the argument you just heard.
A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Now, show me where he wasn't defrauding you.
There it all is, right there, where even your most pro-war uncle can't deny it.
Right.
And the sad thing, or the tragic thing here is, and really the reason I wrote the book, is that we have here, and you're in Texas, of course, something that is really much, much worse than the Enron fraud.
And the Enron fraud was horrible.
But the very same kinds of fraudulent statements and so forth that the people in the Enron case used are the same things that the administration used.
I just mentioned this thing about the half-truth.
Well, one of the grounds for the fraud case against Ken Lay was that in the fall of, I guess it was 2001, when the company was going down the tube, he came out and said to his employees and investors, oh, things are going well.
I just bought $4 million worth of stock.
Well, the part he left out there, and with which he was charged, was he sold $24 million worth of stock.
So, do you see the similarity there?
That sounds like a Dick Cheney line to me.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Now, another big part of this in the run-up to war in 2002 was, look, we know things that you don't.
Our intelligence agencies are the U.S. intelligence agencies, and they are full of supermen who never get anything wrong and know top-secret things that we have to make decisions on that you can't know about.
And then they turned around and said, oh, well, it was all bad intelligence's fault.
Right, right, right.
So, Steve, that's a very good point, which is why they actually have this obligation, because people do actually believe that kind of thing.
People in the country are really entitled to believe, even though so many years have gone by where we've been lied to, but nevertheless, society at least allows people to believe that when someone in authority, such as the president or somebody who's selling you life insurance or whatever, when they come out and make representations, that they actually have looked into the basis for them.
And so, when the administration tries to deflect any questions by just saying, well, we know something that you don't know, that's just another small component of the fraud.
It's a very typical way to deceive people, actually, by just kind of affirmatively going on the attack and saying, you know, you shouldn't be asking these questions or that kind of thing.
And Rumsfeld was the king of doing that.
And he would say things that were just actually on their face ridiculous, like the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And somehow people listen to that.
But you're right, that was just another little component of the many, many ways that the administration went about deceiving people.
Okay, now, wow, we're already running short on time.
And I want to ask you about what they knew about the aluminum tubes and that kind of thing.
But before that, I want to get to whether this is possible.
I mean, let's be honest, we can't remove Bush without removing Cheney, too, or else we get Cheney.
So we've got to remove both of them.
And if we do that, then that means that basically it's a Democratic coup and the Democrats are installing their guy, Pelosi, as the new president.
So if the Democrats called you and said, look, we read your book, you're absolutely right, we have to impeach and remove these people from power, how, from a political point of view, do you get away with doing it?
Do you have Pelosi promise to only serve until 08 and then not run in 08?
Well, okay, well, it's getting a little bit ahead of ourselves to think about all those different steps.
The reason I wrote the book is to make it very clear that we have something that is not only a crime in a statutory sense, but it's an abuse of power in the constitutional sense, it's both.
So given that we know that, I'm very process-oriented.
I'm not saying somebody should go out and indict the president tomorrow.
What I am saying, however, is that Congress needs to do its job now.
And that is to start, and they are starting, by the way, to conduct hearings and so forth in various different committees that will very likely address some of these issues about the prewar fraud.
But that's the key step right now, and really to try to game it all out as to how it will all come out in the end, I don't think it's possible and I don't actually even think it's wise.
The key thing is to just have vigorous hearings.
For example, Henry Waxman is doing hearings about the contracting fraud.
Those hearings in and of themselves will unearth issues about the prewar fraud.
Well, what about all the torture and kidnapping?
Same thing.
There are so many different areas of misconduct by this administration.
Tapping our phones.
Right, the illegal wiretapping.
And in a way that has actually made it harder for not only people in the country, but Congress, to find things that will actually bear fruit.
And I think my, not that Congress is asking my opinion, but my opinion is that Congress should pick a few of these topics and just hone in on them.
Because once you reveal deceit and fraud and abuse of power in one area, it becomes a lot easier for the public to grasp the same kind of conduct in another area.
And you don't have to make the case even as comprehensively as you would otherwise.
So, they just need to focus on a few areas.
And I think the prewar fraud and the torture and the illegal spying are the three that they should just focus on right now.
Now, it seems to me, and I have a pretty strict constructionist view of the Constitution, and it seems to me that all the presidents for a hundred years have been in terrible violation of it, particularly since the 1930s when the Supreme Court ruled that the Interstate Commerce Clause said that the national government could prosecute you for feeding your own family wheat that you grew on your own property.
But do you see the Bush-Cheney administration as a severe tangent off of the flow of the growth of American government?
I mean, it's been getting bigger and bigger and bigger for a long time now.
But do you see the Bush-Cheney administration as really something so different that they've got to be removed from power?
Yes, actually I do.
And the final straw with the Bush administration, it appears to me that in the past, much of the abuse of power was done by officials who at least knew what they were doing was wrong.
For example, Nixon, when he finally got caught, finally had, if you can call it that, the good grace to resign.
But these people, Bush and Cheney and their whole crew, are blatantly at this point violating the law.
And the final straw are these signing statements because the president purports to sign a law and he basically has his fingers crossed behind his back and says, well, I'm actually not going to follow this.
And he issues these signing statements as to the parts he's not going to follow.
That indicates to me a complete disregard for the system, and in criminal law terms he's incorrigible, really.
So, yes, and the president has used this war, which, by the way, the war he considers himself to be the wartime president of is not the invasion of Iraq, but it's this infinite, undefined global war on terror that really doesn't even exist.
But he's used this as a way of aggregating all this other power onto himself.
And it's a scale that I'm not a historian, and I don't purport to be, but it seems to be far exceeding that, which we've seen in the recent past, at least.
Yeah, the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.
And I'm sure you know there's a new Northern Command now that the United States is now a theater of operations for the U.S. military.
Actually, I did not know that.
Yeah, that's scary stuff, it seems to me, with all of Jefferson and Madison's talk of the dangers of standing armies and such.
Right, and one thing about impeachment, by the way, people are so reluctant to talk about it, but the truth is, impeachment is not a radical thing at all.
It's actually a conservative thing in the sense that it has been in the Constitution since the beginning.
It's mentioned six times, and it's specifically designed for abuses of power by the Executive Branch in the time of war.
The Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution were particularly concerned about how a leader can use a war environment to enhance his powers.
So, far from being a situation where we shouldn't think about it in the time of war, it's actually the opposite.
Yeah, more important now than ever.
Right, right.
Wasn't that the Nixon slogan, now more than ever?
I don't know.
I'm sorry, that was terrible.
Okay, everyone run out and go get the book.
It's U.S. v.
Bush by Elizabeth De La Vega.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Thanks, Scott.
Bye-bye.