US V. Bush Examines the Iraq War
Upcoming Movie Presents a Hypothetical Indictment of the President
Director Robert Boris currently is working on "U.S. V. Bush," a new movie based on the book by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega.
With an approval rating hovering near the bottom of the scale, it’s hard to believe that President George W. Bush had a moment after September 11, 2001 when, in the words of writer/director Robert Boris, he had the American people in the palm of his hand.
“After 9/11, when he climbed on top of that rubble and said ‘They are going to hear us all over the world,’ there was a moment--and these things don’t happen very often in American history--when all of us came together. We were a united nation; we really had a clear, fixed idea,” Boris said via telephone. “I never voted for Bush, but there I stood at that moment and said ‘This guy is right; let’s get together and do it.’ I was totally behind him going into Afghanistan.”
Boris, who is preparing to sit behind the cameras for “U.S. V. Bush” this summer, is convinced that America could have found Osama Bin Laden if we would have stayed in Afghanistan. “When the American people got together, no force on Earth could stop us. It happened at Pearl Harbor. This country was very divided about war; we had isolationists, we had people who didn’t want to go to war.”
After Pearl Harbor, Boris said that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew how to bring the people together and knew how to channel that energy to accomplish amazing things. In contrast, the minute Bush started to peel off into a secondary war, he became the “Great Divider”.
“I’ve seen this happen with Vietnam; I’ve seen this happen in other places. The country became very divided," Boris said. “Because of 9/11 and because of the very successful use of the idea that anybody that talked against the war was a traitor, the networks were afraid; they wouldn’t tackle him, they wouldn’t ask the tough questions.”
One notable media casualty was Helen Thomas, the journalist who always was quite visible at White House press conferences and even had a cameo role in the movie “Dave.”
“How many years has Helen Thomas been the first one in the first row asking the first question at a press conference? I’ve seen her with half-a-dozen presidents, for God’s sakes,” Boris said. “All of a sudden, she isn’t there anymore. Asking tough questions and doing the job that the media has always done no longer existed. And it broke my heart because there was a moment when America was so together and so united and all of a sudden, they became so divided.”
Elizabeth de la Vega is the former federal prosecutor who wrote the book upon which “U.S. V. Bush” is based. Her book lays out a hypothetical indictment of President Bush, which is then presented to a grand jury.
“People are more willing to ask questions and a lot of these figures out of the Bush administration have decided it’s their time to come clean and maybe separate themselves or put into the marketplace of ideas their own feeling about what happened,” he said.
That list of figures includes former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clark and former CIA Director George Tenet.
"What Elizabeth de la Vega did in her book, which is really quite brilliant, is that she’s assembled almost all of this information; it doesn’t matter whose agenda it is," Boris said.
Boris said that de la Vega has put together a case in the same way she did for 25 years as a federal prosecutor.
“To me, what I love about it is that it’s a great way for people to get closure. I don’t think there’s going to be any closure for the American people for the next 18 months while this man is still president, while this administration is still in force,” he said. “The one place where there won’t be spin is in this courtroom, in this story, in this movie and because of it, it’s the first time that the American people will get some closure.”
