Extraordinary Conflict of Interest: Bush Cousin Is Judge in Explosive 9/11 Case against Bush Officials

4/28 UPDATE: Bush court dismisses 9/11 suit against Bush officials, orders sanctions

From info provided by
Center for 9/11 Justice:

Confounding lawyers and legal scholars all over the world, Judge John Walker, first cousin of former President George W. Bush, was one of three judges of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to hear argument Tuesday in Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers, the lawsuit brought by a soldier injured during the attack on the Pentagon that accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney, former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers of conspiring to facilitate the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that killed 3000 Americans and has resulted in the deaths of many more, due to the toxicity of the clean-up conditions at Ground Zero.

William Veale, April Gallop’s lawyer from the Center for 9/11 Justice, learning of the assignment the usual 5 days before the argument, filed a motion to disqualify Judge Walker the day before the argument.

When the case was called in the normal course, there had still been no decision made by the court.  When Veale reminded the court of the pending motion, Judge Winter said it is denied.  Veale requested a continuance to seek appellate review of the court’s ruling but that motion was denied as well.

Argument followed but Walker, and fellow judges Cabranes and Winter, seemed more interested in making sure that Veale was properly licensed to practice before the court than the stark legal issues presented by the appeal.  The appeal is from a ruling by then District Court Judge, now 2nd Circuit Court Judge, Denny Chin, dismissing Ms. Gallop’s lawsuit with prejudice, writing that the allegations contained there are “implausible” and the product of “cynical delusion and fantasy.”

Gallop’s appeal brief points out that when Judge Chin summarized the factual assertions contained there, he mischaracterized important allegations, but most significantly, left out any mention of vast sections of the 25-page brief.  Giving her lawyers greatest pause was Chin’s failure to mention the words, actions, and locations of the three defendants at the time of the crime, and as Veale managed to point out during the argument, despite frequent interruptions by Walker and the other judges, with regard to Cheney, his words and actions had to do with an instrumentality of the crime, the airplane that was heading for the Pentagon.  In Cheney’s case, these matters were the subject of testimony by Norman Mineta, a cabinet secretary, a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a man with an airport named after him.

Judge Winter inquired of Veale what airport that was.  It used to be called the San Jose Airport in Santa Clara County, California.

Judge Cabranes asked Veale what had happened to the airplane, if, as the lawsuit suggests, it did not hit the Pentagon?  Veale asked in response, “How would I know?”  The implied criticism of the irony that a lawyer who has been denied the ability to use the power of subpoena to learn the truth would be chided for not having an answer to the key to the unraveling of the entire conspiracy seemed to be lost on the judge.

The judge gave no sign that he was familiar with the details of the allegations in the Complaint concerning conflicts between the flight path of American 77 according to the NTSB and that same flight path according to the 9/11 Commission, or the scrubbing of the radar tracks of the area at the time of the attacks, or of the counter-intuitive strategy of the suicidal hijacker who chose NOT to kill 20,000 occupants of the building AND Secretary Rumsfeld, but instead flew into a sparsely occupied and recently reinforced section of the building that resulted in 125 deaths including only one flag officer, if one is to accept the government’s version.

Veale asked what offense to justice could come from allowing the case to go forward, when the possibility of sanctions awaits purveyors of frivolous accusations.  Gallop’s lawyer’s final lament acknowledged the existence of evil in the world, its attraction to power and its disregard for citizenship, but Walker interrupted that sentence before it could be completed as well.

Background info can be found here. Documents related to the case can be found here. Also see this Alex Jones interview of April Gallop in 2008: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

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