For a long, long time, I have opposed the death penalty. However, if there is ever a cause for an exception, it is if it ever emerges that the actions leading up to the Iraq War amount to first-degree murder. If evidence of this does emerge, the only appropriate sanction for everyone responsible is the death penalty. And I mean everyone--including the former president.
As it stands now, the evidence that Bush is guilty of murder, as laid out in Vincent Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder only supports, in my mind, a charge of second-degree murder. But if there is evidence that bumps this up to first-degree murder, I would be among those not only supporting, but demanding, that the prosecution seek to send everyone responsible for this to the electric chair. It was specifically because of the possibility evidence could emerge to bump this up to first-degree murder that I came to believe impeaching Bush was not an option because it would be hard under the circumstances (a politically charged impeachment against the backdrop of a presidential election) to find an impartial jury.
As it stands now, the evidence that would support murder charges against Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al is the very definition of second-degree murder. Most of us know there are two pieces of particularly damning evidence.
- Bush deliberately edited the White Paper of a 2002 NIE to make any threat posed by Iraq more ominous than it actually was. The original report stated that while Iraq had WMD capability, it would only use it in self-defense.
- According to the NYT, Bush had already decided on war as early as January 2003, and was even willing to send U2s falsely painted in UN colors over Iraq in an attempt to provoke Saddam into starting a war. When I read this, the picture I got was of Hitler staging a phony attack on a German radio station located right on the Polish border--thus giving him justification to start World War II as a "counterattack."
Based on this and other evidence, the Iraq War was not an instance of invoking our right to self-defense, but an unlawful war of aggression. Therefore, the Iraqis were well within their rights to defend themselves--which makes the death of every American soldier an act of murder. As Bugliosi points out in his book:
[I]f a conspirator (or anyone for that matter) deliberately sets in motion a chain of events that he knows will cause a third-party innocent agent to commit an act (here, the killing of American soldiers by Iraqis), the conspirator is criminally responsible for that act.
But what if--God forbid--Bush and his people willfully planned the deaths of our troops, as opposed to merely planning an act with reckless disregard and indifference for the lives of the troops? If that evidence were to emerge--and so far, it hasn't--then to my mind, it would constitute an act of such depravity that to my mind, the death penalty would be the only appropriate punishment. If Bush, Cheney, et al. used the power of the government of the United States to plan thousands of deaths, that would be an offense against civilized society for which a life sentence would be a joke.
I thought long and hard about where to stand if evidence of first degree murder were to emerge. In the final analysis, I decided that the very reason I oppose the death penalty--humanitarian considerations--would merit the death penalty if it ever emerged that Bush and the others deliberately planned to kill our troops (as opposed to merely planning a war where they knew people would die--a depraved act by itself).
(cross-posted at The Christian Dem Home Journal)