An interview with Charlotte Dennett: Bringing G.W. Bush to justice

In this interview, author and attorney Charlotte Dennett talks about her new book, The People V. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way, what led her to run for Vermont state attorney general on a platform to prosecute George W. Bush, the current movement to bring Bush to justice, and connections between the US accountability movement and similar movements around the world.

Charlotte Dennett has been practicing law since 1997, with an emphasis on personal injury litigation and suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act. She's also been a reporter in the Middle East and is the coauthor with her husband, Gerard Colby, of Thy Will Be Done-The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Vermont.

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TF: Please describe the current state of the movement to prosecute Bush.

CD: The movement to prosecute Bush is now part of a growing Accountability Movement in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S. people are just fed up with government officials (whether elected or appointed) acting above the law, as they are with corporations (whether oil companies or giant media conglomerates) heeding the bottom line instead of serving the public interest. A group of us who recently attended a conference in Santa Cruz California called "Understanding Deep Politics" will soon be releasing a Declaration of Accountability which provides some suggested actions, and prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld (among others) remains high on the list of priorities.

Vincent Bugliosi is making progress on finding a DA to prosecute Bush in a state criminal court, and as I said, I may run again or I may focus on building the accountability movement. The point is this: there is now far more evidence of Bush's culpability than when I embarked on my campaign, especially in the area of war crimes.

Last week, Physicians for Human RIghts are calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation into human experimentation on detainees held at Guantanamo, which is a war crime.

Meanwhile, thanks to the release of the so-called "torture memos" a year ago, two Spanish prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation in the US that goes beyond a Special Prosecutor's investigation of CIA interrogators to include a) the lawyers who devised bogus laws in the Justice Department to exculpate the CIA and b) the people who authorized the torture: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, for starters. They have the right to do that because Spanish citizens were tortured in Guantánamo. (Their court filings refer to a systematic plan of torture that took on “almost an official nature and therefore entails criminal liability in the different structures of execution, command, design and authorization.”)

One of the prosecutors, Baltasar Garzón, has recently been brought up on professional misconduct charges in Spain, a decidedly political act by the right wing which is hoping to cripple him nationally and internationally. They do not want him to further his ongoing investigation into war crimes that occurred during the Spanish Civil law and went after him for violating a Spanish law that gave immunity to those who engaged in war crimes during that time. Garzón claims a higher authority to prosecute, including international law. He has broad international support. The other lawyer doing the US investigation, Eloy Velasco, is still at it as far as I know.

Meanwhile, Frances Boyle, a professor of international law at University of Illinois, has filed a criminal complaint with the ICC against Bush, Cheney et al for authorizing extraordinary renditions (kidnapping of terrorism suspects and sending them to secret black sites for torture) and that investigation is ongoing, with Boyle delivering more and more evidence. Former U.S. Attorney General was recently chosen to head an international commission to investigate Bush-era crimes. And as I write, he is in Calgary, Canada, defending the Canadian Mohawk protester Splitting the Sky for his attempted citizen's arrest last year of Bush.

All of this shows that the effort to hold Bush et al accountable for war crimes has gone global, and it will not end until justice is done.

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