News of the Month

March 8, 2003

Our lead story this month comes from CBS News. The story is dated January 27, but it gives March as the probable time that our Führer, George II, and his viziers, viceroys, and villains will kick off their illegal, immoral, and stupid war on Iraq, so it’s of importance to us. It describes the plans for the first war crime – uh, excuse me, the first strike – this way:

“If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. … (T)his is more than number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War.

“On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles. ‘There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,’ said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan. ‘The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before,’ the official said.

“ ‘We want them to quit. We want them not to fight,” says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of precision guided weapons. ‘So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes,’ says Ullman. … ‘You’re sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted,’ Ullman (said).”

Did you hear in there anywhere that US planners are even thinking about the thousands of civilian deaths they’re going to cause in Baghdad, from direct and delayed effects? If you use Hiroshima-class weaponry on an unprotected and unarmed city, guess who’s going to die first – the men, women, and children hiding in the cellars, or the soldiers, officers, and generals hiding in the bunkers? And we’re planning to destroy power generators along with the water supplies we’ve already destroyed?

OK: hold it. Stop. What if some foreign government decided that our stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were a threat to world security (which they are, by the way)? And then that nation launched a Hiroshima-class attack on Washington, DC, planning to destroy the city’s electric and water supplies, and to rain fire and death on everyone in it? And you were told that “It’s OK, because the President is a really, really bad guy?” What would it mean to you then?

In contrast to that, the great news is that on February 15, over 6 million people worldwide demonstrated against the Führer’s illegal war! According to Reuters, AP, and MSNBC there were 150,000 in Melbourne, over a million each in Rome and Barcelona, over half a million in London and Madrid, and over 250,000 in New York and Washington. In Europe, 500,000 stood in protest in Berlin, and in France over 300,000 people joined their voices in protest. Georgie says he is unmoved by our protests; but even on the day of the protests, we knew we’d made an impression that our Führer and his minions won’t soon forget. In the words of an MSNBC story on that day:

“Rattled by an outpouring of anti-war sentiment, the United States and Britain began rewording a U.N. draft resolution authorizing force against Saddam Hussein. Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the final product may be a softer text that doesn’t explicitly call for war.”

And, speaking of the protests, Austin’s version was pretty awesome itself. The Pagan Cluster, for example, carried a full-sized model of a Tomahawk missile, marked “Made in Texas,” down Congress Avenue. (There was even a photo of it on the CNN web site.) Then, when they got to the end of the march, they set it upright on the bridge, and did their best to hold it in place in the wind while the Cluster did the Spiral Dance around it. Despite their best efforts to hold it in place, right at the climax of the ritual, the missile broke in half and fell over, like W’s limp … organ. Even Mother Nature says no to needless war!

So who is the biggest threat to peace and justice in the world today? Der Führer wants us to believe it’s Saddam Hussein; but listen to this from a Washington Post article of February 24:

“The messages from U.S. embassies around the globe have become urgent and disturbing: Many people in the world increasingly think President Bush is a greater threat to world peace than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. ... ‘It is rather astonishing,’ said a senior U.S. official who has access to the reports. ‘There is an absence of any recognition that Hussein is the problem.’ One ambassador, who represents the United States in an allied nation, bluntly cabled that in that country, Bush has become the enemy.”

So why does the Bush junta care about what people in other countries think? Let’s continue:

“Polls have indicated that Americans are more likely to support an invasion of Iraq if they believe it has international backing. Antiwar protests were held in dozens of American cities at the same time as the protests in other countries. This week, the administration plans to begin a coordinated effort to draw attention to what one official called ‘the plight of the Iraqi people, with a focus on human rights and freedom and Saddam’s brutality.’ ... Secretary of State Colin L. Powell embarked late last week on a series of media appearances in Germany, France, Russia, and the Middle East to help explain the administration’s urgency in confronting Iraq over its banned weapons programs.”

In other words, the propaganda war has widened, from just hoaxing the citizens of this country, to running a formal smoke-and-mirrors campaign in certain targeted foreign nations. Why those specific nations? Because those nations are the ones who have the insight and rationality to pay attention to the man behind the curtain – to see the campaign to demonize Iraq as a cold, calculated campaign to hide from America and the world the facts that (1) Bush hasn’t been able to find the man he had originally demonized, Osama bin Laden, and (2) his mishandling of the Federal budget, in order to provide billions of dollars in refunds to his major corporate contributors, has put the US economy into the toilet for generations. He doesn’t want us to see that he has borrowed those billions of dollars of corporate tribute from our children and grandchildren.

Doesn’t he care about his own children and grandchildren? Of course not! They’ll be protected by the Bush family fortune – a fortune founded in the treason of his grandfather during World War II. But what’s a little treason among rich folk, if it helps them get richer? No biggie.

There’s something else about King Georgie that his handlers have kept from being widely known – he’s an addict. He’s what AA calls a “dry drunk” – someone who may have stopped actively drinking, but still exhibits all the symptoms of addiction. In an article entitled “Addiction, Brain Damage and the President – ‘Dry Drunk’ Syndrome and George W. Bush,” psychologist Katherine von Wormer says:

“ ‘Dry drunk’ traits consist of:

· Exaggerated self-importance and pomposity

· Grandiose behavior

· A rigid, judgmental outlook

· Impatience

· Childish behavior

· Irresponsible behavior

· Irrational rationalization

· Projection

· Overreaction

“Clearly, George W. Bush has all these traits except exaggerated self-importance. He may be pompous, especially with regard to international dealings, but his actual importance hardly can be exaggerated. His power, in fact, is such that if he collapses into paranoia, a large part of the world will collapse with him. Unfortunately, there are some indications of paranoia in statements such as the following: ‘We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.’ The trait of projection is evidenced here as well, projection of the fact that we are ready to attack onto another nation which may not be so inclined.”

So what is he addicted to? Power! As Dr. von Wormer says, “Senator William Fulbright, in his popular bestseller of the 1960s, The Arrogance of Power, masterfully described the essence of power-hungry politics as the pursuit of power; this he conceived as an end in itself. ‘The causes and consequences of war may have more to do with pathology than with politics,’ he wrote, ‘more to do with irrational pressures of pride and pain than with rational calculation of advantage and profit.’ “ The frat boy who never cared about anything but his nose and his di… sorry, his sex life, finds himself playing with the big boys, and he likes it. He can’t see that the big boys are playing him for a puppet; he still thinks he’s in charge of the world. If he ever really sees those strings, with his immature, addiction-driven personality, the whole world will feel the fallout from his infantile revenge tantrum.

Do you remember last month I mentioned Colin Powell’s hokey dog and pony show at the UN? Well, listen to this, written by a former guest on this show, Deda Divine:

“Contrast (Bill Clinton’s lie) with the lie that Secretary of State Colin Powell told to the UN Security Council earlier this month. General Powell stood before the Council and the world community and presented what he claimed was up-to-the-minute intelligence about Iraqi military operations. His purpose in presenting this evidence was to persuade the world community, and specifically the UN Security Council, of the legitimacy of the Bush Administration’s hell-bent drive to war against Iraq. A few days later the dossier was exposed as a compilation of three academic papers on the Middle East, one of which was written by a grad student in California. This dossier was cut and pasted verbatim, including grammatical errors from the student’s work; however, certain words were then changed to make the implications seem more sinister. Some of the data was more than ten years old.

“In fact, it’s interesting to note that just as the spotlight was shifting to an embarrassed Powell, we were suddenly riveted back into our fear trance by a Code Orange Alert. ‘Go out and buy duct tape and plastic wrap, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’ “

As usual, she hits it right on the head. One other thing – her e-mail “signature” has a fascinating quote from Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”.

Oh! Speaking of duct tape, I’ve got to tell you this one. In a story in the Washington Post, Al Kamen says, “Turns out that nearly half – 46 percent to be precise – of the duct tape sold in this country is manufactured by a company in Avon, Ohio. And the founder of that company, that would be Jack Kahl, gave how much to the Republican National Committee and other GOP committees in the 2000 election cycle? Would that be more than $100,000? His son, John Kahl, who became CEO after his father stepped down shortly after the election, told CNBC … that ‘we’re seeing a doubling and tripling of our sales, particularly in certain metro markets and around the coasts and borders.’ The plant has ‘gone to a 24/7 operation, which is about a 40 percent increase’ over this time last year, Kahl said. The company had more than $300 million in sales in 2001.”

As we get ready to go to war, yet again we’ll be using depleted uranium munitions. (Picture.) That sounds benign – if it’s “depleted” then it can’t be that harmful, right? Hah. Let me read some excerpts from an article in Yes! Magazine by Major Doug Rokke. Major Rokke has a Ph. D. in health physics, and he was assigned by the Army during Oil War I to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.

What is depleted uranium? Major Rokke says, “DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it’s like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.”

What kind of protection do our troops have? Major Rokke says, “As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that’s full of distortions. It doesn’t deal with the reality of uranium munitions. The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape.

What are the effects of depleted uranium? Major Rokke says, “These consequences last for eternity. The half-life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.” Speaking of the human consequences, he says, “And it’s not just children in Iraq. It’s children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you’ve got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived – the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times as likely.”

Are you a veteran? Do you know a veteran? As the bumper stickers say, these are the people to whom we owe our freedom. And yet these are the people who are being thrown away by the government, because it’s embarrassing to admit that we’ve killed our own troops with out own weapons. They did it after Vietnam – remember Agent Orange? How many years, and how many deaths, did it take to force the government to recognize that our soldiers in Vietnam had been poisoned by our own weapons? “Support our troops,” they say; but it’s all propaganda – a way to distract us from the reality of what they’re doing to our troops.

But let’s return to the children. (And remember, Iraq is a nation of children – largely because of our “actions” in Oil War I, 50% of Iraq’s population is under the age of 18.) What does depleted uranium do to the children? I’m going to show you a picture of what it does, but before I do, let me warn you: I have one of the strongest stomachs I know, and I can barely look at the picture of this living boy and not throw up. (Picture) His name is Huthaifa Ghanim Mohammed Sultan. That’s what depleted uranium does to children.

But what about after the war? Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Associated Press, via the New York Times on February 28:

“There's no way to estimate the size of the military force that might be needed to maintain order until a civil government can function in the aftermath of any war against Iraq, Pentagon planners say. … The Pentagon has resisted requests from Democratic lawmakers to provide at least a range. When Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told a Senate committee last week that several hundred thousand troops might be needed, his comments were rejected two days later as ‘wildly off the mark’ by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.”

Who is Paul Wolfowitz? The British newspaper The Observer reported on Sunday (February 23) that “Lurking in the background behind Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are the people propelling US policy. And behind them, the masterminds of the Bush presidency as it arrived at the White House from Texas, are Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz.” Wolfowitz, in other words, is deep in White House internal operations. But back to the Times article:

“Some lawmakers aren't sure that Shinseki was wrong. A report last fall by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Central Command had discussed a plan for postwar Iraq that predicted up to 200,000 troops could be needed. Shinseki wasn't backing off his estimate ‘because to him it was his best military judgment, an educated military guess, based on what is deploying now,’ said Army spokesman Col. Joe Curtin. Also, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wasn’t as blunt as his deputy had been, telling reporters he believes Shinseki's estimate was high, but ‘If he's right, it's helpful.’ ”

Fascinating – the Secretary of Defense saying that about the Chief of Staff of the Army, who is effectively the commander of the Army, two steps below Rumsfeld himself. It tells us two things. First, it tells us that Rumsfeld isn’t listening to his commanders, which tells us that this war is being planned independently of the military – and everyone out there who’s been in the military knows the dangers in that. Second, it tells us that the inner cabal of planners are doing their best to prevent the actual costs of the war from being revealed to the American people. To continue with the story:

“Some lawmakers aren't sure that Shinseki was wrong. A report last fall by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Central Command had discussed a plan for postwar Iraq that predicted up to 200,000 troops could be needed. Shinseki wasn't backing off his estimate ‘because to him it was his best military judgment, an educated military guess, based on what is deploying now,’ said Army spokesman Col. Joe Curtin. … In his unusual public repudiation of Shinseki's comments, Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that a lower figure should be expected.”

It’s tempting, during these times when the people who squat illegally in power in the White House are galloping off to an immoral war – dragging us along with them – to forget about the rest of the world. But the world goes on. Israel, for example, continues its official policy of murdering innocent civilians in the name of the “war against terrorism.” Sound familiar? Here’s part of a story by Justin Huggler in the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip:

“(An) unpalatable truth lurked in the bullet holes that spattered Peace Street, where 14-year-old Tariq Akil was killed, and in the ruins of the house where Nuha al-Magadmeh, nine months pregnant, was crushed to death 10 days before she was due to give birth. These are what armies like to describe as ‘collateral damage’, the civilians who are ‘unavoidably’ killed in the course of a military operation.

“Israeli soldiers had dynamited a neighbouring house, which belonged to the family of a suicide bomber, Sami Abed al-Salam. He had killed himself when he tried to blow up a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip in December. The Israeli army routinely demolishes the homes of suicide bombers’ families, a practice condemned as collective punishment by human rights groups.

“In the neighbouring Nusseirat refugee camp's Peace Street, where Tariq Akil, 14, was killed, his uncle, Usama Akil, told us he was fleeing because one of his relatives is a wanted militant. The entire family had abandoned their house and run, but the boy was the last to leave. As he ran up the street, a tank opened fire.”

Now a quick story from the Austin American-Statesman: last Sunday, they had a front-page story with the headline “Alleged Sept. 11 mastermind caught,” with a picture of the man they were talking about. I didn’t know Dick Cheney had a beard!

Let me close this segment tonight by telling you about one of my personal heroes, someone you may not have even heard of, because he died nearly 60 years ago. His name was Dietrich Bonhöffer. (Picture) How highly do I think of him? My son’s first name is Dietrich.

Bonhöffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s. He was a fervent Christian and a devoted pacifist. When Hitler and the Gestapo took over control of the German churches, Bonhöffer and others founded the Confessing Church of Germany as an alternative to the Nazifiedized state church. In 1940 he became a member of the military intelligence agency, the Abwehr, and, acting as a double agent, attended meetings in Switzerland in the name of the German opposition that intended to overthrow Hitler.

Though a committed pacifist, he decided to actively participate in his group’s attempt to assassinate Hitler. His powerful book Ethics is, to a great extent, his working out of the causes of his “change of mind.” We in this country aren’t yet to the point at which Bonhöffer found himself, but we’re getting there. I fervently pray that we will not actually get that far down the road of perdition; but even more, I pray that if we do reach that point, there will be a Bonhöffer there to meet that need. This nation is spiritually bankrupt, as devoid of effective leaders in the spiritual arena as in the political arena. Dietrich Bonhöffer is an image we can all hold before us as a guide in these chaotic times.