The Emperor has no uniform...
William Rivers Pitt: There is, of course, the nearly
3,000 dead Americans from September 11th. The 9/11
Commission broke out some buckets of whitewash, and
like a group of dutiful Tom Sawyers, painted over the
grim realities of that day. It couldn't be stopped,
they said in their report. People like Richard Clarke,
Sibel Edmonds and the families of the lost who know
more about the events of that day than anyone on the
planet, disagree.
"Two planes hitting the twin towers did not rise to
the level of Rumsfeld's leaving his office and going
to the War Room? How can that be?" asked Mindy
Kleinberg, a 9/11 widow who has become a leader in the
truth movement. The thing is, Mindy, Mr. Rumsfeld was
probably fine-tuning the Iraq invasion plan he'd been
working on for years. He is, after all, a
professional.
Three more American kids got killed in Iraq today, George. That makes 30 dead American soldiers in the first 16 days of August. That's thirty more names to be added to the commemorative wall which will appear somewhere in Washington DC someday. Thirty more etchings in ebon stone, thirty more people who would not now be dead but for your decisions and your actions and your appalling dishonesty.
I'm pretty bored with those commonly accepted
standards that are supposed to be applied in the
treatment of a sitting President. Too many people have
been playing patty-cake with you over the last three
years, George. Too many journalists looking to keep
their sweet seat in the press crunch at the White
House, too many television news anchors who think
research and context is for other people, too many
media outlet owners - read: 'massive corporations' -
whose profit margins are intimately wed to your
suicidal policies, and, frankly, too many politicians
for the 'loyal opposition' who have been tested in the
forge of true crisis these last years, and been found
to be sorely wanting.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/081704A.shtml
Brain Dead, Made of Money, No Future at All
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 17 August 2004
To: George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear George:
A pretty awful joke has been making the rounds
lately. Some might say it's an awful joke because of
the comparison. Most, however, think it's an awful
joke because it isn't funny. It's too close to the
truth to be funny.
The joke: What is the difference between President
George W. Bush and President Ted Bundy?
The answer: Bush killed more people than Bundy.
See? I told you it was a terrible joke. On the one
hand, it is in poor taste by commonly accepted
standards to compare a sitting President to a
notorious serial killer. On the other hand, though,
the 943 dead American soldiers in Iraq, the more than
ten thousand dead Iraqi civilians, the more than five
thousand dead civilians in Afghanistan, and let's not
forget the large crowd of Americans you toddled off to
the Texas killing bottle while Governor, pretty much
means you have left Mr. Bundy in the deep shade when
it comes to the body count.
There is, of course, the nearly 3,000 dead Americans
from September 11th. The 9/11 Commission broke out
some buckets of whitewash, and like a group of dutiful
Tom Sawyers, painted over the grim realities of that
day. It couldn't be stopped, they said in their
report. People like Richard Clarke, Sibel Edmonds and
the families of the lost who know more about the
events of that day than anyone on the planet,
disagree.
"Two planes hitting the twin towers did not rise to
the level of Rumsfeld's leaving his office and going
to the War Room? How can that be?" asked Mindy
Kleinberg, a 9/11 widow who has become a leader in the
truth movement. The thing is, Mindy, Mr. Rumsfeld was
probably fine-tuning the Iraq invasion plan he'd been
working on for years. He is, after all, a
professional.
Three more American kids got killed in Iraq today,
George. That makes 30 dead American soldiers in the
first 16 days of August. That's thirty more names to
be added to the commemorative wall which will appear
somewhere in Washington DC someday. Thirty more
etchings in ebon stone, thirty more people who would
not now be dead but for your decisions and your
actions and your appalling dishonesty.
I'm pretty bored with those commonly accepted
standards that are supposed to be applied in the
treatment of a sitting President. Too many people have
been playing patty-cake with you over the last three
years, George. Too many journalists looking to keep
their sweet seat in the press crunch at the White
House, too many television news anchors who think
research and context is for other people, too many
media outlet owners - read: 'massive corporations' -
whose profit margins are intimately wed to your
suicidal policies, and, frankly, too many politicians
for the 'loyal opposition' who have been tested in the
forge of true crisis these last years, and been found
to be sorely wanting.
So let's not have any patty-cake between us, George.
Let's get down to brass tacks. Your people compared
Senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein during the 2002 midterm campaign. Cleland left
two legs and an arm in Vietnam, but your people did
that to him anyway. A little hard talk, East Texas
style, shouldn't be anything new to you.
A wiser man once wrote this:
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation,
whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an
invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may
choose to say he deems it necessary for such a
purpose, and you allow him to make war at
pleasure...if, today, he should choose to say he
thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the
British from invading us, how could you stop him? You
may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British
invading us' but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I can
see it, if you don't.'"
The wiser man who wrote these words was Abraham
Lincoln, in a letter to his law partner Billy Hendron.
Lincoln wrote this letter in 1848 while serving in the
House of Representatives, years before he himself
would assume the office of the Presidency. Lincoln
became, in the fullness of time, a war President who
unwillingly inherited his war, and then pursued it
with grim determination.
He summoned Generals like Ulysses Grant, whose
essential demeanor, in the words of Civil War
historian Bruce Catton, "was that of a man who had
made up his mind to drive his head through a stone
wall." From March of 1864 to April of 1865, Grant used
the mighty Army of the Potomac as Lincoln's merciless
fist, until the white flags were raised over bloodied
ground at Appomattox.
Lincoln was a war President who won his war, though
the fighting of it was not his choice. He fought the
enemies arrayed before him, and did not invent enemies
out of whole cloth. Imagine Lincoln, faced with the
Confederate insurrection, deciding to undertake an
invasion of Greenland. He would have been laughed out
of the White House. That's basically what you've done
in Iraq.
You fancy yourself a war President, right? "I'm a
war President," you said on television not long ago.
"I make decisions in the Oval Office with war on my
mind." Your war in Iraq is a war of choice, not of
necessity. It had nothing to do with September 11,
weapons of mass destruction, or bringing democracy to
the Iraqi people. It had nothing to do with defending
the American people.
Your boys wanted to get paid. Cash money on the
barrelhead for Halliburton, right? Almost twelve
billion dollars they've made to this point. Hey, it's
good work if you can get it. All you had to do was use
September 11th against your own people for months,
scare them to death, denigrate the work of the weapons
inspectors you agreed to send in there, flap around
some claims about weapons of mass destruction (26,000
liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin,
500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas, per your own
words from your 2003 State of the Union Address), and
then fly onto an aircraft carrier and declare victory
while your people were still dying.
As if that wasn't bad enough, you're also losing
your war of choice.
Hard to believe, isn't it? Your daddy rolled up Iraq
like a windowshade when it was his turn at the big
wheel. Your daddy made it look easy, which is perhaps
why you thought you could take care of business over
there on the cheap. Do you have trouble looking daddy
in the eyes these days?
Right now, the soldiers you sent into harm's way are
fighting a running battle in the holy city of Najaf,
which is home to the Shrine to Ali. Ali, in case you
didn't know, is considered to be the legitimate heir
to Mohammed himself by followers of the Shi'ite faith.
Shi'ites all around the world - millions of them in
places like Iran and India and right here in America -
are reacting to this action in the same way Catholic
parishioners in Boston would react if someone rolled
tanks on the Vatican. If you so much as chip the paint
on that shrine, you're going to unite yet another
group of people in explosive rage against the United
States.
The gap between you and Abraham Lincoln is so wide,
George, that it cannot be measured by any scientific
instruments currently known to modern science. Abe had
you pegged, though, 156 years ago. You were allowed to
make war at your pleasure, and the world entire is
desperately wondering how you can be stopped.
You might have heard, George, about a fellow named
Hugo Chavez winning the referendum on his Presidency
in Venezuela. Millions of poor people flooded out of
the hills to cast their votes for him, because he uses
his nation's oil revenues to pay for their food and
education. Quite a novel idea, yes? How many schools
could we have built - schools like citadels - with the
twelve billion dollars you have thrown at Halliburton?
How many hungry people in your own country could have
been fed? How many jobs programs could have been
funded? How many catastrophically polluted Superfund
sites could have been cleaned?
That apparently wasn't on your program, George. You
have eviscerated OSHA regulations - those pesky things
that keep workers from getting injured and killed on
the job - because you want to appear
'business-friendly.' The $1.5 million you got from the
chemical industry in campaign funding compelled you to
lower the safety standards for chemicals used in the
production of superconductors, chemicals that are
believed to cause miscarriages in pregnant workers.
You eliminated overtime pay for six million workers,
going so far as to have tips for employers posted on
your administration's Labor Department website which
will help them screw employees out of the wages they
earn. You have obliterated environmental protections
across the board.
The list goes on. For a man who fashions his
political persona as a "regular fella," you have
delivered a large screwing to the real regular fellas
who are going to have to plow through the wreckage
you've left in your wake.
I worry about you, George. You live in a stark
black-and-white world, and you actually think God
speaks to you. There are a lot of people in padded
rooms, wearing coats that button up the back, because
they have had similar delusions. You see monsters
everywhere. Some of them do exist, to be sure, but I
am forced to remember the words of Frederich
Nietzsche: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it
that in the process he does not become a monster. And
when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks
into you."
You have become a monster, George, and the abyss is
staring into your eyes. I wonder what it sees there. I
know what I see.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'