Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

We’ve seen the beheadings, most recently of the French hostage by ISIS, and now with planes in the air, the why’s, what’s and how’s seem moot in comparison to the spectacle of torture videos, brazen threats against the West, and general fear-mongering.

But Vincent Bugliosi, whose documentary The Prosecution of an American President will be out on Oct. 7,  is not afraid to ask the tough questions.

This is a landmark attorney, whose high-profile conviction of Charles Manson brought Vincent Bugliosi to worldwide fame in 1971. CBS called him up for commentary during the O.J. Simpson trail, installed a fax machine in his house and relied on him for expertise, insights on which he later wrote a case-winning version of the whole public spectacle entitled “Outrage.” 

Not to mention Bugliosi’s career-win prosecution total of something like 105 out of 106 cases, with endorsements by icons F. Lee Bailey, and Alan Dershowitz as an exceptionally gifted legal mind bar none.

On the phone, Bugliosi, now in his 80’s who shined at UCLA Law School, doesn’t want to veer into the territory of ‘can we have dissent in America during the current crisis, airstrikes’ because “this is not my area of expertise,” he avers.

“The New York Times already did a piece on the press black-out of my book. My area of expertise is the prosecution of (former US President G. W.) Bush for murder.”

This new documentary is based on Bugliosi’s word-of-mouth best-seller with the incendiary title “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” Marketers changed the name of the documentary for spin reasons, but also in hopes that it would reach the widest audience with less of a fire-alarm title in the credits. 

You can almost hear the palpable silent gasp from any possible NSA attendees on the line with us, yet Bugliosi is so adamant about the rightness of this book-to-documentary, that spells out a clear-cut case to prosecute the former President for homicide, that he is even willing to risk it, everything - life’s work, reputation, credibility among his peers. 

To wit, he mentions “Page 8” of an intelligence report from 2002, which included 16 intel-gathering agencies with the CIA declaring the dictator in Iraq was “not a threat.” Later Bugliosi will reiterate the importance of that page when the “declassified” report was released to Congress with that part “deleted.” “I don’t know how he (meaning Bush) can live with himself." 

"He took us to war on a lie.” The meticulous-minded attorney recounts a meeting between Bush, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and his foreign policy adviser David Manning, in which Bush “was so afraid of not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that he was offering scenarios for how to draw them into conflict by flying planes painted in UN colors over their airspace,” among other things. “If (Iraq) took a shot at those planes, that would be grounds to invade.”

What this peer-respected and renown litigator says on the phone during our interview pretty much matches the match-light tone of the documentary. 

“We’ve been in the alternative news, do you know what that this?,” Bugliosi asks. 

His conversational habit of point-by-point interrogation is somehow soothing, because it sets the tone for his credibility and fact-checking skills. Also, badgering the witness (read: interviewer) is a job hazard at this point.

After a few hardballs, he cuts right to the chase. Answers the obvious question ‘why would you risk doing this?,’ point blank. “You mean put my legacy on the line? Yes, I’ve had people ask me that. ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? Are you sure you want to say this?’” 

A video clip from Democracy Now, the flagship news outlet of the greatly diminished Left in America, shows Bugliosi brazenly announcing on air that he was slated “for 45 minutes, but they cut me down to 20.” 

Clearly, when this man has a point to make, he goes for the vitals. 

“Whether you disagree with me or not,” is a lead-in he often uses to test the waters before he attempts to pry open the minds of people who are all too ready to turn a deaf ear on dissent. 

“We had to go to Canada for the money for this. There is a moneyman there I call ’Canada’s Most Patriotic American,’” Bugliosi jokes. “Nobody would do the audio (in the US), we had to go to the BBC. We’ve had all kinds of trouble getting it out there. That has never happened to me in my entire career.”

“And if you want to lead us up to now,” Vincent Bugliosi soldiers on, “ISIS leads directly back to Bush.” 

He refers to the faction that left Al-Quaeda in Pakistan to form ISIS. According to the UK’s Telegraph and most news sources now, ISIS is being billed as a “competitor” to its originating entity. 

“There were three levels of resistance in Iraq (during the 2003 war Bush sanctioned). One was the Iraqi army, which collapsed, threw down their weapons, took off their uniforms, and went home. Two was these young Iraqi men, young men, who took up weapons to defend their home. They stood in front of tanks in t-shirts and sneakers. I have pictures of them standing in front of tanks, no uniforms. Bush called them ‘terrorists;’ the US Army didn’t even call them terrorists, but ‘insurgents,’ because it was a heroic act (defense of their homeland). The third level was related to Al-Quaeda. They moved their headquarters from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Then they had Al-Quaeda-in-Iraq. ISIS is a spin-off of this. If you can believe this, these people were too brutal for Al-Quaeda. Did you know they were kicked out of Al-Quaeda-in-Iraq?”

Bugliosi continuously refers to Bush by names like “this small man” and “this despicable human being,” which takes a helluva lot of courage in the Post-911 America At War of the moment. “I have a lot of animus toward this man,” he admits, “because he got away with it.”

“He is still out there enjoying his hot dogs and blueberry pie and 4,500 young people (soldiers from Iraq War) are dead in their cold graves with no one to defend them. Recently someone close to him is reported to have said Bush is ‘the happiest he has ever been.’ How can he live with himself, Q?” 

That should give you a pretty solid glimpse into what this documentary, released by First Run Features in New York, packs as a punch with the premise. 

This UCLA-trained still-brilliant mind is not ready to let a former President off the hook, even though the echoes of Bush’s actions may be remote in the minds of most Americans, not to mention, it is generally frown upon to disparage any US President, past or present, in times of an active military conflict, as in Iraq right now.

“I looked for six months for a prosecutor who would take on this case against George (W.) Bush. And I got one to spend six days with me. But then I got sepsis (blood poisoning), you know what that is?”

“I flatlined. They called my wife and said ‘you better come here Mrs. Bugliosi, your husband is not going to make it.’ They put me on a respirator… slowly, slowly I recovered.”

“In all, I spent seven months on my back. And another three months in rehab. I was laid up for 10 months total between the book and the documentary.”

Some diehard Vincent Bugliosi supporters feel the timing of his life-threatening illness is suspect. “Yeah, a lot of them feel that way, but I don’t go there. I don’t believe that.”

“A lot of people tried to shut me up everywhere. I don’t even know how I got to testify before Congress (on the backlash against G. W. Bush after the Iraq invasion yielded no weapons of mass destruction).”

“They said ‘we are talking about impeachment. Impeaching George Bush.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Impeachment, I want to talk about Murder.’ They let me testify, but they didn’t do anything about it.”

“It’s all a lot of words, unless we do something about it. That’s what I lay down in my book, and in the documentary. I expect it to get out there by word-of-mouth. By people writing articles like this.”

“I think about those 4,500 soldiers, young people who never had a chance at life;” plus, the Iraqi lives of “men, women, children, and babies. The estimates (of body count) were from 100,000 to 1 million, but now it is somewhere around 500,000… and this isn’t counting their loved ones, so that total magnified.” 

“The Democrats are terrified of the Right Wing in this country. But the Right Wing is not terrified of the Democrats!” Bugliosi, who is not without a solid sense of humor, remarks in closing.

And he speaks of the real costs to us, like ISIS, or ISL, or whatever acronym this new horror in the world chooses. In sum, Vincent Bugliosi, in a raging climate of fear in the US and throughout the world, has the overwhelming courage to say ‘hey, wait a minute, this is wrong, and nobody is doing anything about it.’

Watching his documentary is like lifting the lid off the pervasive climate of fear inside the walls of our homes and in our nations, to self-reflect, dare to question whether the definition of terrorism is the same definition based on the same standards we use when we are not afraid to express ourselves in a free country, freely.

For the sake of debate, watch for The Prosecution of an American President, released by First Run Features on Oct. 7, also available on iTunes.

See www.firstrunfeatures.com.

[Jacket Copy Biography from First Run Features: Author Vincent Bugliosi’s illustrious career spans over 40 years and includes such bestselling titles as Helter Skelter (the biggest-selling true crime book in publishing history), Reclaiming History (the definitive study on the Kennedy assassination), Outrage (on the O.J. Simpson trial) and of course The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder. Being a former prosecutor with a 99% conviction rate, Mr. Bugliosi is renowned by many to be the nation’s foremost prosecutor.]

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