Bush has Enronized the United States of America:
- The president has committed fraud.
- It is a crime in the legal, not merely the colloquial, sense.
- It is far worse than Enron.
- It is not a victimless crime.
- We cannot shrug our shoulders and walk away.
The techniques of deception used by George W. Bush and his aides are identical to those used by Lay and Skilling. In his July 2002 speech announcing the signing of the Corporate Corruption Bill, the president said, "The only fair risks are [those] based on honest information." The president and his top advisers were acutely aware of the solemn risks posed by an invasion of Iraq, but instead of debating those risks honestly, they developed slogans, including the familiar "risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action" that simultaneously usurped and deflected counterarguments while providing no information whatsoever, honest or otherwise.
Such propaganda, cynical and craven as it is, might not qualify as criminal fraud, but the propaganda alone was insufficient to convince Congress and the American people to invest in the plan for war. To remedy this deficiency and close the deal, the president and his top aides made hundreds of representations, both general and specific, that were carefully crafted to manipulate public opinion. As we now know, many of those assertions were false and misleading. More important, we also now know that President Bush and his advisers had notice and direct knowledge that their representations were seriously undermined and in some key instances, disproved by information that was available to them. Consistently, the president and his aides knowingly conveyed false impressions, concealed important information, made deliberate misrepresentations, and professed certainty about facts that were speculative at best. Such is the definition of criminal fraud – whether committed by the president of the United States or the CEO of a major corporation.
The only difference between the fraud committed by the Enron officers and the fraud committed by the president is that the latter was far more comprehensive and far more calculated. Even as President Bush stood center stage endorsing honesty that July four years ago, he and his company were setting the stage for another show. If the "only fair risks" speech was a perky Frank Capra clip, the White House's next production would be 21st-century H.G. Wells.
As of July 30, 2002, Bush had directed the creation of the White House Iraq Group, a public-relations operation whose sole purpose was to market the war. This team, collectively called WHIG, was co-chaired by the president's closest aides and long-term political consultants, Senior Adviser Karl Rove – whom Bush has described as "the architect" of his 2004 reelection campaign – and former Counselor to the President Karen Hughes.
By July 30, 2002, the White House Iraq Group had already begun fabricating an ominous scenario that blurred together the Sept. 11 tragedy, mushroom clouds rising over American cities, and terrorists releasing strains of smallpox, interspersed with the shadowy face of a mad Iraqi dictator spring-loaded to attack the United States. They were collecting props – anthrax vials and undated photos showing centrifuge components and unidentifiable buildings where something ominous might be happening, but we can't afford to wait to find out. They were writing the script: power phrases like "Grave and gathering danger" and "We can't afford to let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud," designed less to inform than to inflame. And, finally, Rove, Hughes, and company were scheduling appearances for the President's War Council members that would begin just a month later, in early September 2002.
It was to be a bravura performance by the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and many supporting cast members. The production was so well done, in fact, that, like the radio audience terrified into hysteria by the infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast of 1938, most of us were fooled. Admittedly, we resisted buying the duct tape and plastic sheeting; we may not have wrapped our heads in wet towels to ward off Martian gas like the 1938 radio audience. What happened, however, was much worse: because of Bush's fiction, we agreed to bomb people 8,000 miles away whose only "crime" was that they were oppressed by a violent and cruel dictator.
Undoubtedly, Americans were panicked by H. G. Wells' radio play in part because they were exhausted and nervous in those tough Depression years. But Orson Welles' breathless report of a Martian invasion was never intended to cause panic, nor was it ultimately harmful.
The president's elaborate production was, and still remains, an entirely different story. It was a deliberate effort to create a permanent state of fear in America. And to say it was harmful is like saying that it hurts to get hit by a Mack truck.
Federal sentencing guidelines recognize that one who defrauds a vulnerable victim, such as a salesman who falsely represents the curative benefits of an elixir to a cancer patient, has committed an even more serious crime than one who defrauds a person who is not so "particularly susceptible." The president knew that Americans were "particularly susceptible" in 2002. We were exhausted, and justifiably terrified, not only because of Sept. 11 but also because of the anthrax murders and the random Washington, D.C., sniper killings that coincided with the Bush-Cheney administration's push for war.
President Bush and his White House Iraq Group did not merely exploit this fear; they magnified it. Worse yet, the president was the very person upon whom the public relied to protect it from danger and, one would hope, from omnipresent fear itself. Having used the authority of the Oval Office to make people more afraid, having created an even darker backdrop of fear, our highest officials exploited that reliance and the trust they enjoyed by virtue of their positions to sell something they knew the American public would not otherwise have bought. It was as if the cancer victim's trusted personal physician had convinced him that his disease was more advanced than it really was, and then used the same fraudulently heightened fear to manipulate him into buying a bogus cure-all.
In the language of criminal law, the president and his senior advisers have abused a position of trust to defraud the most vulnerable of victims.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for TomDispatch. This is the introduction to her new book,
United States v. George W. Bush et al. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.
United States v. George W. Bush et al. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.
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