'The United States v George W Bush',by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega,is a fictional (up to press!) trial of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Colin Powell for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

De la Vega uses her long legal experience to write a convincing account of a fictional trial, in which the
mountain of evidence is grotesquely and sadly real. The specific crime for which de la Vega tries Bush and co is tricking the US into war, which in legal terms becomes the crime of conspiracy to defraud the United States, under Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.de la Vega puts it thus (p25):

'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.'

As in any proper trial, the indictment is set out first. Printed on a grey background, the charges against
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell run to no less than 21 pages. Highlights include the fact that the nineteen 9-11 hijackers consisted of fifteen Saudis, two from the Yemen, and two from the Lebanon. None came from Iraq, and the conclusion of no link between 9-11 or al-Qaeda and Iraq was immediately communicated to Bush and co.

Now recall how we were all incessantly told about Saddam's 'proven' links with al-Qaeda,and how 9-11 was an al-Qaeda attack. Now fast-forward a good few months to watch ,literally stunned,as Bush tells the news cameras that no such link had ever been asserted!

Recall how the drumbeat for war oscillated between Saddam's 'al-Qaeda link',the 'need for regime change', and (the great party piece!) Saddam's 'weapons of mass destruction'. The next page of de la Vega's indictment lists the conclusions of a December 2000 report stating that UNSCOM had 'destroyed or neutralized Iraq's nuclear infrastructure', and that Iraq would require foreign assistance and a year to make even a crude nuclear weapon,and seven years to produce enough weapon-grade fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

De la Vega then tells us that Bush began war plans against Iraq on November 21st 2001,and then she drops the bombshell that Bush did not receive a briefing about Iraq's alleged WMD until December 21st 2002, a small matter of thirteen months later!

De la Vega details how Bush met his little poodle Blair in March 2002, in secret, to discuss the
mass-deception of the British people into accepting the pretexts for Bush's war for oil.

This, and much more besides, is coolly described until you, the reader, are invited to reach a jury's verdict upon the accused.

With such a weight of evidence,only one verdict is possible:guilty on all counts.

The only defect with this timely book is that it is, as yet, fiction.

But at least Britain is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, and we must hope that Blair and Brown and the rest of the war party will find themselves in the dock to answer for the ongoing carnage and misery in Iraq.

The pretexts given for the so-called 'war on terror' are some of the biggest distortions, fabrications, misrepresentations and outright bare-faced lies in world history.

We MUST ensure that the call to bring Bush,Blair and the war party to justice is more than just futile
rhetorical gesturing by well-meaning but ineffective bobble-hatted peace campaigners. Let the campaign to bring Bush and Blair and co to justice follow these people to the grave. This book,by a professional
lawyer,is no small contribution to that task.

The reviewer, Brian Precious, is a postgraduate student and lives in London.