10/02/12 – Dave Hagen – The Scott Horton Show

The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by the Future Freedom Foundation at www.fff.org.
Join the great Jacob Hornberger and some of the best writers in the Libertarian Movement like James Bovard, Sheldon Richmond, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more for a real individualist take on the most important matters of peace, liberty, and prosperity in our society.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation at www.fff.org.
Hey ladies, Scott Horton here.
To provide truly youthful, healthy, and healthy looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit.
Dagenian Lane at www.dagenianlane.com.
Dagenian Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's Dagenian Lane at www.dagenianlane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code SCOTT15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
As you know, I've been laid off from www.antiwar.com and have embarked on a mission to make this show into a real business.
And as you can tell, I've been doing alright at lining up some sponsors and some great ones at that.
But it isn't enough, so the perpetual fun drive rolls on.
The Scott Horton Show needs donors.
Needs donors and more advertisers if the show is to outlast my meager savings.
So please, stop by www.scotthorton.org to donate.
You can make single donations or sign up for a monthly subscription with PayPal.
You don't need an account with them to do so.
Or use Google Wallet, www.wepay.com, www.give.org, and now even accepting Bitcoins.
And if you own or represent a company or organization interested in sponsoring the show, please email scott at scotthorton.org so we can work it out.
That's scotthorton.org/donate.
And thanks.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is David Hagan.
He's a researcher on the brand-new movie just coming out called The Case Against George W. Bush.
It's based on Vincent Bugliosi's book, The Case Against George W. Bush for Murder.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good morning.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And now it's been a couple of years or so, I guess, but I have read Vincent Bugliosi's book.
And I guess for people who aren't familiar, I guess, could you please catch us up on who is Vincent Bugliosi?
Why would anybody take him seriously when he's making such an outrageous case, such as that a law, especially a felony statute like a murder statute, could apply to the President of the United States?
Sure, I'd be happy to.
Just real quickly for the listeners, I just want to remind them that the book title is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.
That was the name of the book.
And the title of the film is The Prosecution of an American President.
I just want to make sure they understand that.
Well, what the hell do I know?
I was going from memory.
I'm sorry.
It's okay.
Well, Vincent Bugliosi, many of you, especially those who are here in L.A., who are from L.A., probably remember him from way back.
He's the guy who put away Charles Manson.
He's the guy who did all the research and was the district attorney prosecuting the case.
You know, for the Tate-LaBianca murders.
And he put Manson away, and then he wrote a book about it called The Helter Skelter, which became a very well-known and well-received book.
It's still studied today in law schools and around the country.
And Vince has written several other books.
He wrote Outrage, which was an analysis of the O.J. Simpson case in a trial.
And he wrote Reclaiming History, which was a very in-depth analysis of the Kennedy assassination, which I believe also is being made into a movie, which will be out next year for the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
And then, finally, he wrote a book called Betrayal of America, which is about the 2000 election and the, you know, in his eyes, the crime committed by the Supreme Court in giving the election to Bush in the way they did.
Of course, he's written many other books, but he's just an amazing thinker and writer.
And the premise behind this book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, was that since Bush and his people essentially conspired to have the Iraq War, what they did was set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the war.
And they knew they had no real case for that war, so they knew they had to lie to get the war.
And so they did.
They told a series of lies, some main lies and then some supplementary lies, in order to induce Congress into giving them any authority to go to war.
And then, therefore, the consent that Congress thought they were giving Bush and his administration for the war was actually being induced by a set of lies, which could be viewed as making that consent null and void in retrospect.
So Vince has taken the position that Bush and his people basically, knowingly, intentionally, are guilty of conspiring to commit murder by sending our troops into harm's way, knowing they would be killed by an innocent third party who would be forced to defend themselves.
And that's a crime that they are guilty of because of the premeditation and their foreknowledge that they knew they would be lying to create that event.
And he's done an amazing, incredible amount of research to document and footnote and resource every single one of these allegations.
And then to your final point about how such a quote-unquote outrageous premise could be applied to the President of the United States, you have to remember the President of the United States is just a citizen of the country, just like you and I, with one potent exception, of course, him being the Commander-in-Chief.
He's surrounded by a set of protections while he's in office.
You're not allowed to just prosecute the President any way you want while he's the Commander-in-Chief.
He has a very important job to do.
Although they did that for Clinton, and they frustrated the functioning of the government to pursue what amounted to, in retrospect and in relative terms, to a frivolous case, considering the effect that what he did had on the nation as a whole.
But nevertheless, Presidents are not immune from prosecution.
In fact, Nixon actually resigned.
Everyone's aware that Nixon resigned during Watergate, and many people are of the mind that he resigned because he didn't want to be impeached.
But that's not entirely accurate.
At the time, the prosecutor was discussing with his staff how to prosecute President Nixon without impeaching him.
They were trying to figure out how they could actually prosecute him based on the evidence they had, without even having to go through the process of impeachment.
And the staff was reporting to the Chief Prosecutor at that time that they could do that.
There were no statutes anywhere that told them they could not do that.
So it's kind of a gray area where there's not a lot of case law.
But the President is absolutely not immune from prosecution for his crux.
All right.
Now, on this specific case, George Bush and the lies leading to the Iraq War, first of all, we have to focus on really the crux of the case is the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002.
Which I remember in the press at the time, and maybe this was only in McClatchy newspapers, but I thought it was even pretty widely reported, although not focused on, that it really said in there at the time even that Saddam Hussein, even though the CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies agree that he must have some chemical weapons, that he would never use them on us unless we attack him first.
Now, in the movie, it seems like, and the movie is based on a speech that Bugliosi gave at UCLA Law School there, and he makes it seem like nobody knew that until later on when the classified version, the old classified version came out years later, that that was the case.
And that in 2002, the story was, oh, he's got chemical weapons and he'll use them on us.
So I was wondering if you could clear that up, because I distinctly remember, really, at the time, making the case that, look, even the CIA is saying he wouldn't use them unless we invade.
Maybe he would, if he even had them.
That's right.
The CIA was advising him of that.
And it's an interesting distinction, talking about the weapons of mass destruction issue.
A lot of people think that was one of the principal reasons why we had to go in there, is that he had, that was one of the reasons why it was sort of sold to us all as the main reason why we had to go in there, is because he had the weapons.
But as Vince points out in his book, the main reason why we would have to go to war against Iraq would be that if they were an imminent threat to us, that they would, in fact, use them, that they were intent on using them, they were trying to use them.
And so, yes, you're right.
It was known at the time that Iraq, it was being told to the administration by the counterterrorism experts that they didn't think Iraq was really an imminent threat.
But this is where you begin to see the premeditation on Bush's part, to have the war no matter what the facts tell him.
He's already decided what he wants to do.
So now he's got a problem.
His problem is that he's being told by his highest level advisors that Iraq is not a threat, therefore not justifying a war.
But he already knows that he has to have a war.
So now he's got to go around his intelligence people and find some other way to connect Iraq to an imminent threat to the United States.
And so what they did was they started using very carefully crafted deceptive language in their public speeches.
And when I say they, I mean Bush and Cheney and Rice, et cetera, the whole inner circle.
It was almost like they had the same rehearsed set of talking points, and they gave the same show night after night after night.
And in their speeches they would use the words Saddam and 9-11 over and over again, creating a kind of psychological imprint on listeners who eventually would come to assume that those were linked and somehow causally connected.
And so that's how they find it.
Yeah, and that was no accident.
I think if people remember back, George Bush would say, someone would either ask him outright or he would bring it up himself rhetorically.
And people ask, why do we have to go after Iraq now?
And the answer is, because of September 11th.
One Mississippi.
That's right.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississippi.
That's right.
Four Mississippi.
And then he would say, because we learned on that day you can't just wait around for somebody to attack you.
You have to attack them first from now on.
But it sounded like what he was saying was Saddam did it.
That's exactly the point, Scott.
He was trying to create the impression within the American people that Saddam was somehow behind 9-11.
And he did, without ever actually saying that.
He never came out and said Saddam was behind them, but he would make sneaky sentences.
The vice president did, though.
He would say, well, they kind of all did it.
If you listen to any individual interviews across the country.
The vice president said specifically that it's pretty well confirmed that Mohammed Attah met with Iraqi intelligence in Czechoslovakia, he said.
Just goes to show what a great liar Dick Cheney is when that country hadn't existed in 10 years at the time.
That's right.
Now look again at the plausible deniability of that statement.
He's not saying Iraq did 9-11.
He's making a link between what Iraq's intelligence operative group would be and those who we know were involved in the attacks on 9-11.
He's making a link.
And the inference drawn by the listener is that, aha, Iraq's involved.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
And if you listen to how they put their talking points out, Bush would say one set of points where he would say something along the lines of, before 9-11, many in the world believed it was possible to contain Saddam Hussein.
That's a quote from Bush.
And so in that one sentence, you have 9-11 and Saddam Hussein spoken in a way where you can infer that, well, since 9-11 was obviously his work, we now know he couldn't be contained because he clearly attacked us already.
All right, but now hold on because time is limited here, and we've got to get back to the point that I think this comes across much more specifically in the book than in the movie.
And that is the part about the imminence and how Condoleezza Rice, as the National Security Advisor, she's in charge of making sure that Bush understands what's in that NIE.
And that if that NIE officially says Iraq is not an offensive threat to the United States, then the way he says it in the book is what we ought to do, at least, is indict Condoleezza Rice for murder.
And then if she wants to flip and turn state's witness and testify that she told George Bush that that's what the NIE said, but he decided he was going to go ahead anyway and pretend he didn't know that, then go ahead and let her flip and turn state's witness.
But she's, you know, at least, you know, in the chain of command or whatever, she's culpable because apparently she didn't make it clear to the president that Iraq was not an offensive threat, which is exactly what it said in that official NIE.
That's right.
And if she knew otherwise, then she's guilty of going along with whatever they decided to do, knowing the truth, but going along anyway.
So Vince has very carefully laid out how all of Bush's co-conspirators are more and less culpable in addition to Bush.
This is not just about George Bush, Scott.
It's about Cheney.
It's about Rice.
It's about Rumsfeld.
It's really about the whole group around him, and they all share culpability for this conspiracy.
And so you're right.
I mean, going after Bush is the main way that you want to go in.
I mean, it's possible even Bush might want to turn state's evidence against his co-conspirators and out them, but we're never ever going to find out the truth about who really did what without pursuing this investigation against Bush in the first place.
And yet many, many more of them would be culpable and would be drawn into the prosecution as well.
Okay.
Now, I want to get back to what I was saying about the possibility of actually prosecuting a president and why that's so difficult politically.
But on the legal question, I wanted to make sure to nail down the way, if this is in fact correct, if I understand it correct, Vincent Bugliosi's case that he makes in this speech and in this movie, the prosecution of George W. Bush, that if Charles Manson was guilty, then George W. Bush is guilty.
Because Charles Manson actually didn't kill anybody.
He just sent his completely duped minions to go and kill people.
And so the prosecution case rested on a law, which I don't know exactly how clear the law is on this, but according to Bugliosi, it's pretty damn clear that if you do something that you at least should have known would lead to their death or directly cause their death, then you're guilty of murder or whatever level of manslaughter, etc., like that.
And that for George Bush to send American soldiers to invade a country means that he knows that they are going to get shot at in their attempt to invade that country, that they are going to die.
And that if he's lying to them and defrauding them and giving them false reasons as to why they have to do so, then that amounts to what Charles Manson did in manipulating these goofballs to kill in the movie stars or whatever.
So please iron that out, because I didn't explain that very well.
I'm not sure I really understand it.
Well, the way they're connected is it has to do with the notion that the killers in the LaBianca tape murders had been put up to no good by Manson.
So it was really Manson's intent being carried out by a third party, his cronies.
But nevertheless, Vince was able to show very clearly that Manson is therefore really the guilty principal who's behind this act that led to those murders.
You follow?
So since he knowingly set in motion that chain of events that led to the death of another person, it has to be inferred that the death of that person was intended.
And so he was able to create a jurisdictional pathway that showed that Manson was truly the person behind those murders.
So you're saying he wasn't guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
He was guilty of murder.
Well, conspiracy to commit murder is part of what goes on during a murder.
And I believe that actually the conspiracy to commit murder angle is one of the principal ways that Vince used to get at Manson and sort of unlock the jurisdiction and make it possible to go after him.
Well, I know like in Texas, the law considers, at least it used to be anyway, I don't know, no such thing as an accessory to a murder.
If you're an accessory to a murder, you're a murderer too.
That's it, according to law in Texas.
So it all just comes down to what the legislatures have said.
Right, and the various states have different takes on this.
But in general, all co-conspirators are guilty for all crimes committed by their fellow co-conspirators to further the object of the conspiracy.
So if a murder is taking place while the conspiracy is going on, they're all guilty of it.
But let's take that now and flip that over to how this relates to Bush because the part that relates is that Bush, like Manson, wasn't present at the murder scene.
And so what we have to do is show that Bush, nevertheless, it is Bush's intent and his will that is behind the reason why the troops are there in the first place.
He's the one who has an intent to create an event.
And during that event, which is the invasion of Iraq, soldiers are murdered by an innocent agent who's defending their country.
And since Bush is the principal conspirator behind setting that in motion, he's as guilty as if he committed the act himself.
That's federal law.
And so it's in that way that Bush and Manson are connected because there's a legal precedent where we can clearly show that what Bush did, and there's a whole ton of additional evidence in Vince's book, and we go over some of it in the movie that kind of pulls all this together.
But when you look at the sum total of evidence that shows Bush's culpability in knowing that he's lying, knowing that he knows he's lying the whole time, then you begin to understand that he actually conspired to set in motion a chain of events which he knew would lead to death, and he knowingly made that happen.
So he is, at a minimum, as Vince points out, at a minimum, he would be guilty of second-degree murder for sending our troops with wanton disregard for human life into a situation where he knew they would die.
So at a very minimum, he would be guilty of second-degree murder.
And then it would be up to arguing the degree of premeditation and the degree of malice of forethought as to whether or not it would be first-degree murder.
But that case can also be made.
And in fact, that's Vince's primary approach, is that this is actually a first-degree murder case against George W. Bush.
Well, it clearly is.
I mean, for any of us who aren't lawyers, who are just people, I mean, it's pretty obvious enough.
You can go do a LexisNexis thing.
Where in January of 2002, they had announced, the policy is regime change, and we're going to come up with whatever pile of lies we need to between now and a year from March to get you to go along with this thing.
Are you ready for a pile of crap?
Here it goes.
And then Dick Cheney went and pretended that Hussein Kamel said that they still had weapons, when in fact what he said was he oversaw the destruction of every last bit of it all in 1991.
I mean, come on.
The whole thing.
Douglas Fyfe and all the crew at the Pentagon, etc.
It was clearly a premeditated murder plot.
But that makes – here's my thing.
That makes George Bush as guilty of being a president as every other president, except maybe Jimmy Carter.
He killed very, very few people.
But the rest of the presidents lie us into war all the time.
Bill Clinton pretended that 100,000 Kosovar men, women, and children had been murdered.
Barack Obama just pretended that 100,000 men, women, and children in Benghazi were about to be murdered.
Go back to Richard Nixon.
He got pardoned, and that was all power politics, was the only reason anything that seemed like the law could possibly apply to him.
And this is what comes across in this movie, too, is that Bugliosi, being a former prosecutor and being just immersed in looking at the world from that state point of view, he's flabbergasted.
He's like a naive kid in a way.
He's flabbergasted to find out that the law does not apply to people like himself.
The law is for people like him to use against people like me or you.
But for the law to apply to a president, for a president of the United States to go to jail for killing somebody?
I mean, come on.
This is the land of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like a far-fetched idea.
And yet, if you think about it, you know, you mentioned some other examples of crimes or alleged nefarious up-to-no-good acts by other presidents, and there's no question that presidents are constantly doing things that are more or less underhanded in the name of national security.
In the name of doing something good, they're doing something bad.
But yet in this case, we have so much specific evidence that shows the trail of breadcrumbs of how the crime was committed, upon whom it was committed, and then not only that, but then the further crimes committed to cover their tracks and to prevent anyone from investigating or outing them, as Joe Wilson tried to do.
Don't forget, they sent a very powerful message by outing Valerie Plame and by slamming Wilson the way they did to anyone else who might have some, quote-unquote, truth to add to the subject, in that we're not playing here.
This is hardball.
You got something to say, you stand the sideline, because we mean it.
And so they really frightened everybody on our team.
You know, it's like they propagandized their own team members that we're doing this and you better shut up about it.
And so they really played a kind of hardball that we hadn't seen before.
I don't think any president ever can be shown to be playing that kind of hardball against his own people.
Presidents may be unconscious of bombings going on, more or less unconscious of who's being killed in another country, but we've never before seen an instance where they're applying their power against us to propagandize against us.
So this is the perfect case with which to crack this house of cards.
And if you do, when we do, as we do, begin a prosecution of Bush, it will end all of that, because you set one precedent one time on one president, and no future president will be doing what George Bush did.
They will all in the back of their mind be thinking, wow, remember what happened to George Bush?
I better think twice about this.
I guarantee you, though, there are people in the audience right now saying, but you know, as long as you're only focusing on Bush and not saying a word about Obama, it just seems like you're partisan Democrats with a partisan axe to grind, and the law is just as much of a pretension as always.
Because after all, I mean, there's credible reporting in the Washington Post of all places.
There wasn't as much attention paid to it at the time during the PR campaign leading up to it, or what have you, as during Iraq and Bush.
But the Washington Post has reported that Barack Obama deliberately refused to read a CIA report that he already knew said that the surge would not work in Afghanistan.
And you have the editor of foreignpolicy.com has written this piece with multiple sources talking about how Obama knew good and well that it could not work for the stated goals, but he was so politically afraid of ending the Iraq and Afghan wars that the Republicans would call him a coward, that he went ahead and he did it anyway.
And there's all kinds of great journalism like that.
And there's just no difference at all.
Barack Obama, he hasn't murdered a million people like George Bush murdered, but he's murdered tens of thousands of people.
He's lied us into war, into two wars at least.
He's got an overt covert war in Syria right now where he admits that he's accidentally on the side of al-Qaeda, but he can't help himself anyway.
And as long as Bugliosi is only pointing the finger at Bush and something that happened a decade ago, then people go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You and Hillary Clinton say that, or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Why not go ahead and go after all of them?
There are a bunch of killers up there.
Why give a pass to these guys?
Well, we're not really giving a pass to them.
You have to, you know, all prosecutions, as Vince points out in the film, are for past criminal acts, right?
So you're always going to be going after someone who did something in the past.
There's just no way around that.
I mean, look at cold case files, for example.
These are dedicated men and women who pursue a killer, sometimes just one killer, who killed just one person 20 or 30 years.
And so, you know, they don't call off the search for the killer because the victim was a Democrat.
Yeah, that's not what I'm saying is let George Bush get off scot-free.
I'm saying indict Obama too.
Where's the case against, and this whole thing continues to the present day and must be stopped now too.
Isn't that a bad thing that happened back in the early part of this century, right?
Prosecuting Bush would be the best way to get a hold on the accountability of the presidential office.
Obama, to go back to your point about Obama, is not guilty at all of the same type of premeditated conspiracy to commit murder as Bush.
Not even close.
It's not even close, Scott.
Obama is guilty of aiding, perhaps after the fact, aiding and abetting an ongoing crime.
How can you say that?
He kills people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq still.
Every day he's putting troops back in Iraq right now.
He's got more theaters of war than Bush and Clinton combined.
I'm not going to argue that point, Scott, but what I will draw your attention to is...
Well, look, there's little children and mothers screaming and dying and crying.
That ain't murder when it's all based on lies?
It is murder, and it may be murder...
What truth is it based on?
But it's not killing American soldiers where we have a jurisdiction to pursue him under murder statutes in all 50 states.
That's the key difference.
What about the death of the ambassador?
Obama lied us into war for al-Qaeda in Libya, and then put the ambassador there like the troops in Beirut in 1983 with no protection and got him killed.
That's a murder charge right there, isn't it?
Well, I would have to look at that more carefully.
See, man, that's the whole thing about this.
I would love to be the prosecutor.
I'll put the grand jury together.
I'll be the number two guy to Bugliosi indicting George Bush.
But be honest.
The Democrats are soaked in Olympic-sized swimming pools full of blood, too.
Well, you know, at the end of the day, Scott, this isn't really about Democrats or Republicans.
This is about American people who have suffered tremendously, who have a legal remedy available to them which they can pursue.
And Vince has written a blueprint in his book on what that remedy is.
And the film, if your viewers can find the film.
I'm with you.
That's what I'm trying to say, David, is that I take it 100 percent seriously, absolutely seriously.
I'm afraid that people will not take you seriously because it seems partisan, when it ought to be completely nonpartisan, and the same laws and the same principles ought to apply across the board.
That's all.
I completely agree.
I completely agree.
Obama, for his part, has not pursued this case at a federal level, which he could have done.
It's his responsibility to pursue this case.
Okay, thank you very much.
That's David Hagan, the movie coming out, The Prosecution Against George W. Bush, or The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, about Vincent Bugliosi.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
We're opening in New York in two weeks.
In an empire where Congress knows nothing, the ubiquitous D.C. think tank is all.
And the Israel lobby and their neocon allies most own a dozen.
Well, Americans have a lobby in Washington, too.
It's called the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They advocate for us on Capitol Hill.
Join CNI to demand an end to the U.S.
-sponsored occupation of the Palestinians and an end to our government's destructive empire in the Middle East.at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here for libertystickers.com.
If you're like me, then you're right all the time.
Surrounded by people in desperate need of correction.
Well, we can't all have a radio show, but we can all get anti-government propaganda to stick on the back of our trucks.
Check out libertystickers.com.
Categories include anti-war, empire, police state, libertarian, Ron Paul, gun rights, founders quotes, and, of course, this stupid election.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
After the show, you should check out one of my sponsors, wallstreetwindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by Mike Swanson, a former hedge fund manager who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
Mike's site, wallstreetwindow.com, is unique in that he shows people what he's really investing in, updating you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike's betting his positions are going to go up due to the Federal Reserve printing all that money to finance the deficit.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
And if you'd like to sponsor the show, too, let me know at scott at scotthorton.org.