What crime did he commit?

The follow-up question I have is if Bush (and his lackeys) are found guilty of misleading the public in order to convince us to go to war in Iraq and overthrow a sovereign nation, what then? Well, we should take a page from the Bush Admin playbook and consider what their tactics for something like this would be. Namely, what's the harshest crime we could actually make stick with an indictment?

Treason? Sure, we were already at war in Afghanistan, so technically, almost anything you do illegal internationally during wartime could be construed as treason (see pg. 32 of the playbook, "Drawing your own conclusions and twisting the meaning of the law to suit your needs"). But since the motive wasn't to commit the crime and go to war for another (i.e. enemy) nation, it would be hard to make that stick. Plus, short of him dressing like Hitler and being caught on videotape giving Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden each a nuclear bomb while he takes a crap on Old Glory, there's no way a sitting president would ever be convicted of treason.

Sedition? Again, since he wasn't working for another country, and particularly not for an enemy country, it would be hard to pin sedition on him. Though a savvy prosecutor could make a strong argument that his Patriot Act was in effect an attempt to overthrow our government by proxy.

No, I don't think either of those are the route to take. But, if we go back to their playbook (see footnote 3 on pg. 27, under "Making shit up when we can't find an otherwise legal reason to throw someone in Gitmo") we'll find that in relation to Americans working against our better interests during the war, they have successfully pinned one high crime on someone: Conspiring to murder American nationals.

The facts:

• Based on discussions they had amongst themselves to sell the war to the American people, their own intelligence investigations since 9/11 and motives they have hardly tried to keep secret (see books by Richard Clark and Scott McClellan), their actions could without a doubt be described as "conspiring."


• They knew ahead of time that their actions (us going to war) would cause the loss of American lives, the lives of military servicemen and servicewomen as well as civilian support and news reporters.

Sure sounds like conspiring to murder American nationals to me.

Add on top of the fact they knowingly misled us that they conspired to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and you've got another whole can of worms to open in the international courts. Plus, there's the matter of the ongoing investigation (heavily gagged by court order so no one can talk about it -- luckily I was watching BBC news this morning and caught report they did on the subject) of war profiteering by companies with government contracts in Iraq.