The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, and: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (review)

Over the past thirty years, there are few works in the social sciences that explain how systems of power and punishment or control of leadership work in the major empires of our time—the US and Russia/Soviet Union. Moreover, those works that do exist are mostly outside the social sciences (or outside any discipline) because of what historian James Douglass refers to as “the Unspeakable;” the taboos and controls that prevent us from writing directly about these issues. Two new books that try to do that are Douglass’ work published by a Catholic press, not a university press, and lawyer-prosecutor Vincent Bulgiosi’s work documenting mass murder by President Bush, a topic he says no other book publisher or editor would touch other than Vanguard. Despite the different disciplines and approaches, what links these two books is their discussion of power of the US president in relation to the military-industrial complex-national security state, and whether the US legal system will or can hold these leaders or institutions accountable for murder. Douglass focuses on murders that he attributes to the national security state of a US president and other Americans “they” consider “traitors” (a threat to their goals of assassination, state terrorism and war overseas). In Bugliosi’s book, the murders are those committed by the president and his staff through use of the state apparatus in violation of national (and international) law.

From a scholarly perspective, Bugliosi’s book is thin and disappointing. The book offers little more than a potential dissertation topic—a study of how prosecutors, at levels from county and state attorneys to federal district prosecutors, have been unwilling as of January 2009 to prosecute George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and members of the “White House Iraq Group”; how other institutions hire these individuals and publish their writings; how the public has been silent; what it means for the US and international legal systems when clear legal violations of murder are not used for impeachment and not enforced; and under what circumstances and at what levels leaders can commit murder with no consequence. Despite similar books that appeared asserting similar legal charges, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and others have followed a ritual script of fortune and fame after their government jobs.

Although Bugliosi lays out a clear case for legal prosecution, and provides interesting data on prosecutor’s blind spots and on how US media functions, there is little new in Bugliosi’s book. He begins with the startling statement that Bush’s actions constitute “the most serious crime ever committed in American history.”¹ In his view, the death of 4,000 US soldiers in a war against Saddam Hussein who “was not an enemy of the United States”² makes this a crime. By contrast, the Native American genocides, enslavement and genocides of Africans, imperial wars that have killed millions in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, are not criminal activity. The book is mostly a vitriolic against Bush, whom Bugliosi derides as “this punk who hid out during the Vietnam War (sic)”³ and who, with Dick Cheney, has “the gonads of 10,000 elephants.”⁴ There is something reminiscent of Camus’ voice in L’Etranger here, where Bugliosi’s anger seems to stem from Bush’s lack of emotion and concern over the US deaths. He seems to fault Bush and his “co-conspirators” for the robotic pathology of modern leaders who treat wars like video games while simultaneously appearing “reluctant” to send people to their deaths. Although Bugliosi raises many of the right questions about what has gone “wrong” or “changed” in US culture, in the last chapter of the book, he never...