THE HANDSTAND | DECEMBER 2005 |
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051114/delavega
The White House Criminal Conspiracyby Elizabeth de la
Vega The Nation (Elizabeth
de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than
twenty years' experience. During her tenure she was a
member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and chief of
the Legally, there are no significant
differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by
Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud
perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in
authority who used half-truths and recklessly false
statements to manipulate people who trusted them. There
is, however, a practical difference: The presidential
fraud is wider in scope and far graver in its
consequences than the Enron fraud. Yet thus far the
public seems paralyzed. In response
to the outcry raised by Enron and other scandals,
Congress passed the Corporate Corruption Bill, which
President Bush signed on Ironically,
the day Bush signed the Corporate Corruption Bill, he and
his aides were enmeshed in an orchestrated campaign to
trick the country into taking the biggest risk
imaginable--a war. Indeed, plans to attack Americans
may have been unaware of this deceit then, but they have
since learned the truth. According to a Washington
Post/ABC News poll conducted in June, 52 percent of
Americans now believe the President deliberately
distorted intelligence to make a case for war. In an
Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned by
AfterDowningStreet.org and completed So what do citizens do? First, they
must insist that the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence complete Phase II of its investigation,
which was to be an analysis of whether the Administration
manipulated or misrepresented prewar intelligence. The
focus of Phase II was to determine whether the
Administration misrepresented the information it received
about Third, we
can no longer shrink from the prospect of impeachment.
Impeachment would require, as John Bonifaz,
constitutional attorney, author of Warrior-King: The
Case for Impeaching George Bush and co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, has explained, that the House pass a
"resolution of inquiry or impeachment calling on the
Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into
whether grounds exist for the House to exercise its
constitutional power to impeach George W. Bush." If
the committee found such grounds, it would draft articles
of impeachment and submit them to the full House for a
vote. If those articles passed, the President would be
tried by the Senate. Resolutions of inquiry, such as
already have been introduced by Representatives Barbara
Lee and Dennis Kucinich demanding that the Administration
produce key information about its decision-making, could
also lead to impeachment. These three actions can be called for
simultaneously. Obviously we face a GOP-dominated House
and Senate, but the same outrage that led the public to
demand action against corporate law-breakers should be
harnessed behind an outcry against government
law-breakers. As we now know, it was not a failure of
intelligence that led us to war. It was a deliberate
distortion of intelligence by the Bush Administration.
But it is a failure of courage, on the part of Congress
(with notable exceptions) and the mainstream media, that
seems to have left us helpless to address this crime.
Speaking as a former federal prosecutor, I offer the
following legal analysis to encourage people to press
their representatives to act. The Nature
of the Conspiracy
The Supreme Court has defined the
phrase "conspiracy to defraud the The concept
of interfering with a lawful government function is best
explained by reference to two well-known cases where
courts found that executive branch officials had
defrauded the One is the
Watergate case, where a federal district court held that
Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, and his crew had
interfered with the lawful government functions of the
CIA and the FBI by causing the CIA to intervene in the
FBI's investigation into the burglary of Democratic Party
headquarters. The other is U.S. v. North, where
the court found that Reagan Administration National
Security Adviser John Poindexter, Poindexter's aide
Oliver North and others had interfered with Congress's
lawful power to oversee foreign affairs by lying about
secret arms deals during Congressional hearings into the
Iran/contra scandal. Finally, "fraud" is broadly
defined to include half-truths, omissions or
misrepresentation; in other words, statements that are
intentionally misleading, even if literally true. Fraud
also includes making statements with "reckless
indifference" to their truth. Conspiracies
to defraud usually begin with a goal that is not in and
of itself illegal. In this instance the goal was to
invade From the
fall of 2001 to at least March 2003, the following
officials, and others, made hundreds of false assertions
in speeches, on television, at the United Nations, to
foreign leaders and to Congress: President Bush, Vice
President Cheney, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his
Under Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Their statements were
remarkably consistent and consistently false. Even worse, these falsehoods were made
against an overarching deception: that The
fifteen-month PR blitz conducted by the White House was a
massive fraud designed to trick the public into accepting
a goal that Bush's advisers had held even before the
election. A strategy document Dick Cheney commissioned
from the Project for a New American Century, written in
September 2000, for example, asserts that "the need
for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf
transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam
Hussein." But, as the document reflects, the
Administration hawks knew the public would not agree to
an attack against Not surprisingly, the Bush/Cheney
campaign did not trumpet this strategy. Instead, like
corporate officials keeping two sets of books, they
presented a nearly opposite public stance, decrying
nation-building and acting as if "we were an
imperialist power," in Cheney's words. Perhaps the
public accepts deceitful campaign oratory, but
nevertheless such duplicity is the stuff of fraud. And
Bush and Cheney carried on with it seamlessly after the
election. By now it's
no secret that the Bush Administration used the 9/11
attacks as a pretext to promote its war. They began
talking privately about invading In fact, the
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in effect as of
December 2001 said that As has been widely reported, the NIE is
a classified assessment prepared under the CIA's
direction, but only after input from the entire
intelligence community, or IC. If there is disagreement,
the dissenting views are also included. The December 2001
NIE contained no dissents about In his
January 2002 State of the Union address, for example,
Bush declared that Unbeknownst to the public, after 9/11
Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith had created a secret Pentagon unit called
the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG), which
ignored the NIE and "re-evaluated" previously
gathered raw intelligence on Yet that was
the quality of information Bush Administration officials
used for their arguments. As if picking peanuts out of a
Cracker Jacks box, they plucked favorable tidbits from
reports previously rejected as unreliable, presented them
as certainties and then used these "facts" to
make their case. Nothing exemplifies this recklessness
better than the story of lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed
Atta. On Yet Bush
officials used it to "prove" a link between But by
August 2002, despite the Administration's efforts, public
and Congressional support for the war was waning. So
Chief of Staff Andrew Card organized the White House Iraq
Group, of which Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was a
member, to market the war. The
Conspiracy Is Under Way
The PR
campaign intensified Sunday, September 8. On that day the
New York Times quoted anonymous
"officials" who said If, as Jonathan Schell put it, the
allegation that When in
September 2002 Bush began seeking Congressional
authorization to use force, based on assertions that were
unsupported by the National Intelligence Estimate,
Democratic senators demanded that a new NIE be assembled.
Astonishingly, though most NIEs require six months'
preparation, the October NIE took two weeks. This haste
resulted from Bush's insistence that Also, the CIA was obviously aware of
the Administration's dissatisfaction with the December
2001 NIE. So with little new intelligence, it now
maintained that "most agencies" believed The aluminum
tubes issue is illustrative. The classified October NIE
included the State and Energy departments' dissents about
the intended use of the tubes. Yet the declassified white
paper mentioned no disagreement. So Bush in his October 7
speech and his 2003 State of the Union address, and
Powell speaking to the United Nations Ironically,
Bush's key defense against charges of intentional
misrepresentation actually incriminates him further. As
Bob Woodward reported in his book Plan of Attack,
Tenet said that the case for It can hardly be disputed, finally,
that the Bush Administration's intentional
misrepresentations were designed to interfere with the
lawful governmental function of Congress. They presented
a complex deceit about The evidence
shows, then, that from early 2002 to at least March 2003,
the President and his aides conspired to defraud the
United States by intentionally misrepresenting
intelligence about Iraq to persuade Congress to authorize
force, thereby interfering with Congress's lawful
functions of overseeing foreign affairs and making
appropriations, all of which violates Title 18, United
States Code, Section 371. To what standards should we hold our
government officials? Certainly standards as high as
those Bush articulated for corporate officials. Higher,
one would think. The President and Vice President and
their appointees take an oath to defend the Constitution
and the laws of the
|