While I was still in Bermuda, I happened to be casually surfing the internet, and came across an excerpt of a book recently published by a woman named Elizabeth de la Vega. I’m not a big book reader, but the premise of the book was rather interesting: how an attorney could bring about a charge of fraud against George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell for conspiring to lie to the public and to congress about the validity and truthfulness of facts that were presented when it was being decided whether or not the United States would go to war with Iraq. Now I can hear you say to yourself that this topic has had myriad articles, books, advertisements and speeches published about it already and that there’s no need for yet another collection of it. “We get it,” you say, “he lied. I’m sick of people telling me.”
What makes this book different are two major points. The first is that it’s presented not in typical book form, but in the style of a court reporter’s transcript. Rather than being a one way dialogue that the reader is forced to take part in, they are simply observers in the courtroom, listening to the back and forth discussion of the witness, attorney, and occasionally the grand jury. Rather than “he said”/”she said” and all the other variations that authors are forced to used scattered over the page, it’s presented in a form closer to the following (excerpt from page 128):
Q. Could you please tell us, briefly, about your educational background and how you ended up as a Special Agent with the Department of Commerce?A. Yes ma’am. I graduated from Kalamazoo High School and went to Michigan on a full basketball scholarship - not to toot my own horn.Q. Of course not. University of Michigan?
GRAND JUROR: Go blue.
A. Exactly. I was also the arm wrestling champion of Kalamazoo High in 1983.
As you can see, not only is there the technical side of it, but she lightens the mood by throwing in a joke or quip every once in a while, which I can only imagine happens in real grand jury indictment proceedings. They give the story quite a realistic feel, because you can very vividly in your mind picture the attorney asking the questions, and the witness responding as they do; it’s very human.
The other, and questionably the more appropriate reason why I really think that you should give this book a read, is that it wasn’t written by some crackpot conspiracy theorist who’s idea of “high fashion” is a tinfoil hat so the government can’t steal his thoughts. There are too many “BU$H SHOULD DIE!!!!” books out there that really have no basis in fact outside of the fact that Bush is in fact the president of the United States.
How do I know this? Because Elizabeth de la Vega was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis, not to mention being a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Branch Chief in San Jose, California. She isn’t writing this as some paranoid delusion while she spends her last days of life in a 6′ x 6′ cell padded with cloth and rubber; no, she has lived and breathed doing case research for her entire career. By using those same research skills, she presents a very compelling argument for pressing real honest to goodness charges.
Yes, the “witnesses” in the book are fake. That is the only part of the book that is fake. Every fact that is presented in the book has been carefully researched, checked, double checked, and then re-checked one more time to verify its accuracy and she even says on her own website she would testify to these facts herself, given the chance.
Whether or not there really is a case against Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell (the 5 defendants named in the suit presented in the book) is up to a district attorney to decide. Ms. de la Vega retired in 2004, so she is unable to bring charges herself. Then again, seeing the blatant abuses of power in the past few weeks by the current administration, I’m sure any charges brought by any would be ruled “unconstitutional” and be dropped by one of Bush’s cronies.
But I’m getting off point, and a little upset. Back on topic, this really is a great book as it presents the material in an incredibly easy style to read, not to mention brings up some facts that I’m sure many people weren’t aware of. Whether they were secret memos, or issues that mysteriously weren’t covered in the media in North America, it sheds new light on the issue and should be read by everyone, Democrat or Republican. It’s quite short (237 pages, not to mention smaller than most other paperbacks) so even if you don’t like it, you haven’t wasted a lot of time.
What really gets me is that I may not be American, but the goings on there do affect my daily life, and this book definitely cleared up a few things for me about what Mr. Bush had said and what he had done, and why some of those things weren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s interesting to get the full behind-the-scenes story, ranging from internal memos in the White House, to notes taken by an aide’s secretary in London’s Downing Street.
To quote the author’s final word:
We, the American people, relied on the truthfulness, integrity, fullness, and completeness of the information about Iraq that the president provided to us. We were, just like the Enron fraud victims, entitled to know the truth about Iraq so we could make informed choices about our lives.
Love him or hate him, this book is quite interesting and if nothing else entertaining. Yes there’s an obvious bias towards Mr. Bush, but in a grand jury, it’s only one side presenting their case; there’s no defense present, they’re simply trying to get a group of people to decide if charges should be brought. In that sense, it’s quite real if a bit unfair. Does it over-do it? Not at all. It’s not some 900 page behemoth that you spend 5 months reading, but something you can easily read on a single rainy Saturday afternoon (if you put your mind to it.)
Rating: 4.5/5
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