David Hagen Hollywood Director Prosecution of an American President
'A legal approach for trying Bush has been found' – Hollywood director 2 July, 2013 19:11 Download audio file The casus
belli used by George W. Bush to take the United States to war in Iraq was a
façade and a lie, fabricated to meet international requirements for going to
war. Hollywood director David Hagen has teamed up with writer and former
prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to produce an unreleased film called ‘The
Prosecution of an American President". Mr. Hagen spoke to the Voice of
Russia on how Bush could be tried for murder in the U.S. legal system. This
is part one of a much longer interview. Robles:Hello,
Dave! How are you this evening? Hagen: I'm
good, John, thanks for having me on! Robles: Thanks
for agreeing to speak with us! Can you tell us a little bit about your film?
Why it's unusual? What your experiences are in directing etc.? And why
you've had problems getting this film to the viewers? Hagen: Yeah.
Sure. Wow! That's a little menu of questions! I started
working in Hollywood as an editor and found myself working on lots of
projects, that I was very fond of the topics, and while I was working at a
particular small studio doing a bunch of films with them, I was working on
maybe two other projects at the time, I met the executive producer, Peter
Miller, who actually is a literary agent for Vincent Bugliosi who has
written some great books that I have read. We started
talking and he asked me if I watched the film and I did. And after a while
of just talking to him about the film, and just giving him notes about the
film, he asked me if I would come on as the director of the film and just
take the film from where it was to the finish line. And I said, "Yes." The project had
been begun by the previous director David J. Burke and they had worked for
about a year and they had a pretty good amount of footage shot and they had
done a tremendous amount of work alreadf, but David had to leave for a
creative reason. And so I came
on and I was interested in this project, because I had read Vincent's book
"The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder". When I saw that
book on the shelf, I was like, "You've got to be kidding! That's a book?
Somebody wrote that book?” So I picked it
up, read it, I loved it, I bought a few copies and gave them out to my
friends as gifts. I was shocked by the level of journalism that I read in
Vincent's books. So I just started reading Vincent's books after that. I
found him to be a really interesting and innovative writer, because he has
such a legal mind. He was prosecutor understand? So his take on why things
worked was so unusual! So I felt I was privy to the inside scoop! You know.
What was really going on with things. So I am telling this to the executive
producer and he’s introducing me to Vince, and I told him these things and
we just hit it off immediately and became fast friends. I was very
familiar with his work, with his thinking, with his argumentation. And he
was pretty shocked to hear that from a filmmaker. He was like, "You're
kidding! You know my books? Really?" So we started
working together on what we would do with this film and this film really is
the documentary film version of his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush
for Murder". And the film
itself is only about hour and a half long, so we didn't have much time to go
into scope of Vincent's approach, but essentially Vince felt that there was
ample evidence for our President George Bush to be tried for murder, for
taking us to war illegally. Lying to us to take us to war the way that he
did. And he was surprised no one had thought about that as a legal case. Robles: I
don't think he's the only person who believes that, I mean actually George
Bush is afraid to travel around the world; to leave the U.S. Hagen: You
know, John, that is exactly what it's come to. So many years
after the fact Bush can’t go anywhere he wants to in the world, because I
think the world is beginning to catch up to looking at what he did as crime
as well. There were
people who thought that it was a crime right away. They were millions of
protestors who protested the Iraq war. They were record numbers of protests
in record numbers of cities around the world. Amazingly that just did not
deter this war machine and they just ruled forward with their war. We’ve
never seen anything like that in world history before, we’ve never seen a
world power have that much power, where they could just lie their way into a
global action like that with millions of people protesting, and it has no
effect. It has no effect at all. People talked a
lot in America about what they could do. They were talking about impeaching
Bush for a couple of years. They were talking about if there was some way to
get him to international criminal courts, because he violated U.N. treaties
in the way we prosecuted presenting evidence, you know a casus
belli which didn’t
actually exist. The U.N. Charter we have says we can go to war legally if we
can prove there's some just cause, so they went out their way to basically
manufacture something that would satisfy that international requirement. And
when you look at what they did, the degree to which they were mindful of the
international codes to present a casus
belliwhich would be agreed as a
justification for war. Robles: But
then all of those were proved to be falsifications. Hagen: That's
right. Amazingly! Not only were they false they were transparent, they were
like facades, you know. Like an old movie set, where it looks like a town,
but when you walk behind the set, you see; it's just a bunch of wooden
structures, it’s just scaffolding. It's trick! It only looks like a city
from the distance or if you look really quickly. And that's exactly the
strength of the legal arguments that the Bush administration put up. So Vince took
his legal mind and applied it to this subject and came up with an astounding
book that's just full of so much detail on a legal approach that would
actually work, because that's how the American system of justice works!
That’s what the court system is now, those are type of case histories and
case precedents that have previously won their way into becoming cases. And he said,
"Why not this one?" And that's why he wrote this book and what his voice in
wilderness is sort of saying. And I was very attracted to how brave that is.
I think Vincent Bugliosi must be the bravest man in the world. Robles: Are
there chances that any actions will be taken? Or is that the hope? If your
film is released to a larger audience, to the world, that maybe something
will happen? Hagen: Well, I
think that's exactly what Vince is hoping, is that getting the message out
in a public way will help many, many more people agree that there actually
may be a legitimate legal course of action, and there are a fairly simple
series of steps that can be taken here in America, in the U.S. justice
system, that actually would initiate a legal proceeding. Almost like
lighting a dynamite fuse.
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