United States v. George W. Bush et al. - Softcover

De La Vega, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583227563 ISBN 13: 9781583227565

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2006

Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller

What if there were a fraud worse than Enron and no one did anything about it?
In United States v. George W. Bush et. al., former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and her passion for justice to the most important case of her career. The defendants are George W Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war, or, in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Ms. de la Vega has reviewed the evidence, researched the law, drafted an indictment, and in this lively, accessible book, presented it to a grand jury. If the indictment and grand jury are both hypothetical, the facts are tragically real: Over half of all Americans believe the president misled the country into a war that has left 2,500 hundred American soldiers and countless Iraqis dead. The cost is $350 billion -- and counting.
The legal question is: Did the president and his team use the same techniques as those used by Enron’s Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and fraudsters everywhere -- false pretenses, half-truths, deliberate omissions -- in order to deceive Congress and the American public?
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to "sit" with the grand jurors as de la Vega presents a case of prewar fraud that should persuade any fair-minded person who loves this country as much as she so obviously does. Faced with an ongoing crime of such magnitude, she argues, we can not simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.

About this title

About the Author:

ELIZABETH DE LA VEGA, a former federal prosecutor, was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis as well as a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California. Since her retirement in 2004, she has been a regular contributor to Tomdispatch. Her articles have also appeared in the Nation, the LA Times, Salon, and Mother Jones. She is not in the Witness Protection Program.

From Publishers Weekly:

By revisiting public statements, official documents and journalistic reports from the months leading up to the Iraq invasion, de la Vega builds a legal case that President Bush and top members of his administration engaged in a conspiracy to "deceive the American public and Congress into supporting the war." Drawing on her experience as a federal prosecutor, as well as the work of scholars and legal experts, she brings a well-honed legal perspective to the issue. She presents her argument in transcript form as a hypothetical weeklong presentation to a grand jury, including extensive testimony from three fictional investigative agents. Despite her somewhat specialized approach, the author clearly defines the legal terms and issues and avoids jargon. If anything, the book feels casual and straightforward to a fault: awkward asides about room temperature and coffee breaks, meant to humanize de la Vega's hypothetical grand jurors, are contrived; in explaining some of her claims, she relies too much on an analogy to the Enron fraud. Still, whenever she focuses on the issues at hand—most compellingly in her final analysis of the administration's spurious claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program—de la Vega makes a persuasive case. (Dec. 1)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1583227563
• ISBN 13: 9781583227565
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256