Scott Horton

David Swanson is a prominent anti-war activist who served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign and as a communications coordinator for ACORN. He is perhaps best known for his sustained efforts to promote awareness of the Downing Street memo, the secret note of a July 23, 2002 meeting of British government officials that revealed that the Bush Administration’s plans to invade and occupy Iraq had been cast at least ten months before the actual invasion and that Washington was striving to piece together a legal pretext for the invasion—“intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” in its remarkable words. Although the Bush Administration and the Blair Administration both scrambled to deny the obvious import of the memo, it remains a highly damning document which could in fact figure in a prosecution of the war’s promoters on a war-of-aggression theory, if such a prosecution were ever to be mounted.

Last Sunday, CBS aired its long-awaited feature on the prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman. The CBS piece, for which I was repeatedly interviewed, came through on its promise to deliver several additional bombshells. The most significant of these was the disclosure that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel….