Why Don’t They Put Bush on Trial?

We should not be shocked that George W. Bush told a few lies in his memoirs. We became accustomed — the world became accustomed — to his lies during the eight black years when he sat on a seat he didn’t deserve, governing the largest and most powerful state in the world.

On this seat, he drove the world order to disaster, incited chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, distanced the United States from its friends and allies and instilled in others a hatred of his country as an unjust imperial power with no respect for international legitimacy or international law.

The last lie his mind produced was the claim that President Mubarak advised him to remove Saddam Hussein because he possessed biological weapons. I was close to the talks between them — I was following President Mubarak’s visit to the United States as the editor-in-chief of October Magazine — and so I learned from Egyptian and American sources what really happened in these talks: Everyone’s accounts agree that President Mubarak repeated his warning to President Bush against invading Iraq. President Mubarak explained that, by nature, the Iraqi people would forcefully and unceasingly resist the armies of invasion and occupation, just as they resisted the British occupation before, winning their independence with the blood of their martyrs. President Mubarak told Bush that the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the state structure would lead to the spread of terrorism in Iraq and in the region, and that America would be unable to counter it. He also told him that it is not foreign invasion that changes leaders, but popular will, a statement which I published in October Magazine at the time.

As a journalist close to the events of this period, I know how much pain President Mubarak felt for all that happened in Iraq, a pain that renews and increases every day with the killings, the destruction, the torture and the pillaging. All of which was watched and recorded in sound and picture, and displayed on television screens around the world — except in the United States, where Bush censored and banned everything to do with these operations, operations that bring back to mind the ugliest pages in the history of war crimes.

I wasn’t the only one to witness this; everyone else following President Mubarak’s visit and meeting with Bush knows what I know. But this is the Bush who became president of the United States in 2001 by a judicial ruling of doubtful integrity, the one commentators call “the president of failure” — he failed in the invasion of Afghanistan, he failed in the invasion of Iraq and he failed in the administration of America’s economy; he wasted $3 trillion in wars, brought the American economy to the brink of bankruptcy and transformed the United States from a land of freedom and hope to a police state with laws that allow warrantless wiretapping, the search of homes without the knowledge of their owners and the arrest of people without investigation, the presence of a lawyer or the presentation of charges.

Torture was practiced systematically, whether on Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the airport or elsewhere, or on Afghan prisoners. He created the Guantanamo detention camp, the worst such camp in history since the Nazi concentration camps. Years of his regime; all of it lie after lie. He claimed that his decisions were inspired by God — which psychologists have interpreted as auditory and visual hallucinations.

He lied when he announced on May 30, 2003, “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories … And we’ll find more weapons,” and when he said in another statement, “for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.” On March 24, 2004, he said, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere” — that is, that he hadn’t found anything! — and that he lied when he officially announced that there were intelligence documents confirming the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and laboratories conducting operations to produce radioactive materials as part of a plan to build a nuclear bomb. He also announced that Saddam was involved with the bombings in September 2001, and that he had a relationship with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. He even announced that Iraq had unmanned aircraft that could be used to target American cities. He officially informed the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and, on Jan. 30, 2003, that Saddam had bought uranium from Niger. He continued to repeat this lie even though the American envoy to Niger confirmed in his report that Saddam hadn’t acquired any amount of uranium. He lied, and lied endlessly.

In a book by Vincent Bugliosi, an American professor of law, there is a detailed report of the proof of the charge and the justifications for trial. He writes that the country’s president lied to the nation, deliberately and with malice aforethought, so as to push it into an illegal war, telling his people that he achieved democracy in Iraq and that he lied publicly when he announced “mission accomplished” on the back of a battleship.

Some in the United States think that these crimes will be forgotten with time, and they are dreaming. Have people forgotten the crimes of the Nazis and the Israelis, decades after they were committed? History doesn’t forget, it does not forgive, and every crime must be punished.