News of the Month
February 8, 2003
Well, let’s lead off with the US’s presentation to the UN of all the “evidence” that we’ve collected about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell took his Bush and pony show to New York on Wednesday, and showed everybody how little real, solid evidence we have against Iraq. What did he show? A couple of Iraqi generals on radio doing their version of the old “Who’s on First” routine about some modified trucks (ooo! modified trucks!); a movie of a fighter (asserted to be Iraqi) spraying something onto an area of land; some empty pipes that we’re assured were once chemical weapons cases, and other such completely ambiguous this-es, that’s, and the others. There were even some great drawings of “mobile production facilities for biological agents.” I’ve got some great drawings of Dubya doing … never mind.
You know damned well that if we had actually found any solid evidence of these supposed weapons of mass destruction, that they’d be trumpeting it from the rooftops. Instead, we get General Powell attacking the UN with weapons of mass distraction. He even feebly tried to link Iraq with al-Quaeda – remember them? The ones who, everyone says, destroyed the World Trade Center towers in 2001? The ones we weren’t going to rest until we’d captured and punished them? The ones who so thoroughly embarrassed our military and intelligence agencies that we had to grab a new “enemy of the year” out of any convenient hat, just to distract the people of this country from that embarrassment? Smoke and mirrors; smoke and mirrors.
Our next item tonight actually strikes a positive note. That’s nice, every now and then. According to a Reuters story last month, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all the state’s death row inmates. In the words of the report:
“ ‘How many more cases of wrongful convictions have to occur before we can all agree that this system in Illinois is broken?’ Ryan told a cheering audience at Northwestern University Law School that included several wrongfully convicted former death row inmates.
“ ‘I realize that my decision will draw ridicule, scorn and anger from many who oppose this decision,’ he said, acknowledging the feelings of relatives of crime victims, many of whom fought clemency. “I'm going to sleep well tonight, knowing that I made the right decision,’ he said.”
Oh – here’s a quick
quote from author Jean le Carré: “How Bush and his junta succeeded in
deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great
public relations conjuring tricks in history.”
Bin Laden? Who’s that? He’s last year’s news!
Even the nation’s intelligence communities agree – and I’m talking both the CIA and the FBI. In the words of an article in the American-Statesman last Sunday entitled “Push for al Qaeda link creating strife at CIA,”
“The Bush administration’s efforts to build a case for war against Iraq using intelligence to link it to al Qaeda and the development of prohibited weapons has created friction within U.S. intelligence agencies, government officials said. Some analysts at the CIA have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq to strengthen their political argument for war, government officials said.
“At the FBI, some investigators said they were baffled by the Bush administration’s insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s network. ‘We’ve been looking at this hard for more than a year, and you know what? We just don’t think it’s there,’ a government official said.
“President Bush asserted in his State of the Union address last week that Iraq was protecting and aiding al Qaeda’s operatives, but U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials said the evidence was fragmentary and inconclusive. ‘It’s more than just skepticism,’ said one official, describing the feelings of some analysts. ‘I think there is also a sense of disappointment with the community’s leadership that they are not standing up for them at a time when the intelligence is obviously being politicized.’ ”
Don’t tell me our glorious Führer is lying to us!! Hmph. Actually I’d be amazed if someday it turned out he told the truth about something.
OK. On to another positive note: massive demonstrations against King Georgie’s Oil War II were held on Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and numerous other places. The Washington Post estimated that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 people in DC; they called it the largest anti-war march since the Vietnam War. (By the way, do you realize it took us 7 years during Vietnam to amass the numbers of protesters that have joined us in the just past few months?) About 200,000 were estimated to be in San Francisco.
Remember, too, that Martin Luther King, Jr., stood solidly
against this nation’s imperialist wars.
Regarding our illegal invasion of Vietnam, he said, “The greatest purveyor of violence on the
planet is my own government.” Sadly,
that still holds true today. For
decades, we have “gifted” nation after nation with mass death and totalitarian
rule. In Iraq, for example, we have
been waging a genocidal war against the nation’s innocent civilians for over 10
years – destroying their water and sanitary infrastructures, and denying
life-saving medicines to everyone from infants to the elderly. We haven’t been killing Iraqi soldiers; that
would be a real war – one we’d have to acknowledge. No, we’ve been killing Iraqi civilians – men, women, and children. The best estimate we have is that about 150
Iraqi children die every day as a result of our “sanctions” – our active, armed
intervention to prevent needed supplies and medicines into that decimated
country.
And make no mistake
about it – this is not just a Republican war of genocide; the Democrats were
right in there, killing with the best of them.
On the 60 Minutes program that
aired May 12, 1996, Leslie Stahl asked Albright, who was then the US ambassador
to the United Nations, to explain US policy in the context of the devastation
she had seen among the children of Iraq.
Albright responded: “It’s a hard decision, Leslie, but we think the
price … is worth it.” Do you hear
that? Worth it! The Democrats, just like the Republicans,
think it’s worth it to kill 150 children a day, as long as US policy gets
enforced.
Nevertheless, it’s the Republicans we have to deal with right now. The Republicans, working in concert with their investors in the mega-corporations and their supporters in the radical sacrilegious right, are the ones conspiring to take away everyone’s civil liberties. The unconstitutional USA PATRIOT Act, followed closely by the equally unconstitutional Homeland Security Act, have given the people in power the tools to put the final nails into the coffin of our freedom. (Picture) Big Brother is truly watching us.
Just as Hitler solidified his power slowly in the 1930s, Bush – or more appropriately, Bush’s puppeteers – are taking the time solidify power in this decade. Hitler himself set fire to the Reichstag, the congressional building, but he blamed it on the communists; Bush has had his Reichstag fire, on September 11, 2001. It would be wonderful to be able to say he had nothing to do with that, but the evidence tells a different story – and he has consistently and continually prevented anyone from looking at that evidence, in any kind of investigation into the 9/11 attacks. And now he’s making preparations for his latter-day invasion of Poland, on the thinnest of trumped-up pretexts. We’re only a couple of steps from becoming the 21st Century’s equivalent of Nazi Germany in the last century.
Libertarians – listen to me: it’s time for us to change our emphasis. The old issues are red herrings now. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether we use the current method of voting, instant runoff voting, approval voting, or whatever – if the people who count the votes are in the pockets of the ruling junta, then how we vote is irrelevant. If the government can detain any person, citizen or not, in a secret prison indefinitely, try him in secret for unspecified crimes, and then relegate him to a secret prison – without ever notifying his family, then there’s where we need to put our energy; that’s what we need to fight.
If we waste our time now, and fail to fight with everything we have against the Bush crime family’s attempts to create the totalitarian state they dream of, then we have lost any claim to the moral high ground, forever. In the words of Kurt Alder, a German chemist during the rise of the Nazis, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” Will we Libertarians help evil triumph, by following our same old road while the iron jaws close around us all? Or will we follow the promise of liberty and justice, and oppose the real “axis of evil” (Picture) that is solidifying its power in Washington, and turning you and me into war criminals, as we speak?
Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General of the United States, has used his experience to draw up articles of impeachment against that axis of evil – all four of them. You can find full details at the “Vote to Impeach” web site, www.votetoimpeach.org. On the site, you can find the full text o the articles of impeachment, the Constitutional basis for impeachment, a collection of historical notes on the use of impeachment, and a form by which you can electronically sign the petition they maintain on their site urging the US Congress to remove the four primary villains.