Thursday, June 12, 2003


Here is the text of the speech Bill Moyers gave recentlly at the Take Back America Conference - it is so important that I wanted to cull it out from The War and Peace Watch e-letter in which it was first mentioned.

The Progressive Story of America

Bill Moyers was awarded the Lifetime Leadership Award at the Take Back America conference last week. His honey-worded acceptance speech won the hearts and minds of all privileged to hear him. The speech is destined to become a classic, and is coming to be known as the Progressive Story of America. It is our story.
____________________________________

Common Dreams
June 10, 2003

This is Your Story - The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On. 
by Bill Moyers

Text of speech to the 'Take Back America' Conference
June 4, 2003
Washington, DC
 
The following is Moyers acceptance speech for the Lifetime Leadership Award given at the Take Back America conference last week.

Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I don't deserve either, but as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either.

Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a better present than this award or a better party than your company.

Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my l6th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that -- here's my favorite part -- "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage." They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax.

The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."

That hooked me, and in one way or another -- after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell -- I've been covering the class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas were its advance guard. They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all. So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their family meals -- these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God would surely be just to the poor once they got past Judgment Day....

To read the rest of the speech click here:


2:35:42 PM    

Re: Bill Moyers Keeper of the Flame

Dear Friends:

Bill Moyers recently spoke at the Take Back America conference, where he
received the Lifetime Leadership Award. Among his fellow-presenters were
Democratic presidential hopefuls for the 2004 election. The well-honed
words flowed like honey, but Moyers won the hearts and minds of the
audience with his telling of the progressive story of America. It is our
story.

Because of the length of Moyers' speech, we will not be including it in the
War and Peace Watch newsletter, but you can read it on our web site,
www.warandpeacewatch.com where it is carried in its entirety. It can be
found in the "articles" section.

--John Nichols is a native Wisconsinite, who has written for The Capital
Times for the past decade.
___________________________

Capital Times
June 10, 2003

John Nichols: Moyers tends flame of democracy
by John Nichols

Democratic presidential candidates were handed a dream audience of 1,000
"ready-for-action" labor, civil rights, peace and economic justice
campaigners at the Campaign for America's Future's Take Back America
conference. And the 2004 contenders grabbed for it, delivering some of the
better speeches of a campaign that remains rhetorically - and directionally
- challenged. But it was a non-candidate who won the hearts and minds of
the crowd with a "Cross of Gold" speech for the 21st century.

Recalling the populism and old-school progressivism of the era in which
William Jennings Bryan stirred the Democratic National Convention of 1896
to enter into the great struggle between privilege and democracy - and to
spontaneously nominate the young Nebraskan for president - journalist and
former presidential aide Bill Moyers delivered a call to arms against
"government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."

Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and the
compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of America
sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged that "right-wing wrecking
crews" assembled by the Bush administration and its congressional allies
were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said, they would privatize public
services in order to enrich the corporate interests that fund campaigns and
provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If unchecked, Moyers
warned, the result of these machinations will be the dismantling of "every
last brick of the social contract."

"I think this is deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States
of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives gathered in
Washington last week - and for their allies across the United States - to
organize not merely in defense of social and economic justice but in order
to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln as
the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against slavery, Moyers
declared, "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half
oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free."

There was little doubt that the crowd of activists from across the country
would have nominated Moyers by acclamation when he finished a remarkable
address in which he challenged not just the policies of the Bush
administration but the failures of Democratic leaders in Congress to
effectively challenge the president and his minions. In the face of what he
described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek to
redistribute wealth upward from the many poor to the few wealthy, Moyers
said he could not understand "why the Democrats are afraid to be labeled
class warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."

Several of the Democratic presidential contenders who addressed the crowd
after Moyers picked up pieces of his argument. Former U.S. Sen. Carol
Moseley Braun actually quoted William Jennings Bryan, while North Carolina
Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts
tried - with about as much success as Al Gore in 2000 - to sound populist.
Former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt promised not to be
"Bush-lite," and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean drew warm applause when he
said the way for Democrats to get elected "is not to be like Republicans,
but to stand up against them and fight." Ultimately, however, only the Rev.
Al Sharpton and Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chairman Dennis
Kucinich came close to matching the fury and the passion of the crowd.

Kucinich, who earned nine standing ovations for his anti-war and
anti-corporate free trade rhetoric, probably did more to advance his
candidacy than any of the other contenders. But he never got to the place
that Moyers reached with a speech that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described
as "one of the most amazing and spellbinding" addresses he had ever heard.
Author and activist Frances Moore Lappe said she was close to tears as she
thanked Moyers for providing precisely the mixture of perspective and hope
that progressives need as they prepare to challenge the right in 2004.

That, Moyers explained, was the point of his address, which reflected on
White House political czar Karl Rove's praise for Mark Hanna, the Ohio
political boss who managed the presidency of conservative Republican
William McKinley, the man who beat Bryan in 1896 and then - with Hanna's
help - fashioned a White House that served the interests of the corporate
trusts.

Comparing the excesses of Hanna and Rove, and McKinley and Bush, Moyers
said "the social dislocations and the meanness of the 19th century" were
being renewed by a new generation of politicians who, like their
predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution "in
the hard grip of the ruling class."

To break that grip, Moyers said, progressives of today must learn from the
revolutionaries and reformers of old. Recalling the progressive movement
that rose in the first years of the 20th century to "restore the balance
between wealth and commonwealth," and the successes of the New Dealers who
turned progressive ideals into national policy, Moyers challenged the crowd
to "get back in the fight." "Hear me!" he cried. "Allow yourself the
conceit to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as
there is one candle in your hand."

While others were campaigning last week, Moyers was tending the flame of
democracy. In doing so, he unwittingly made himself the candle
holder-in-chief for those who seek to spark a new progressive era.

--John Nichols is associate editor for The Capital Times. E-mail:
jnichols@madison.com. You can read more about Bill Moyers' speech in this
week's edition of The Nation magazine and in Nichols' Web column at
www.thenation.com.

Copyright 2002 The Capital Times
Freelance writers retain the copyright for their work that appears on this
site.
 _______________________________

In peace,

Otoño
________________________________

Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and
Peace Watch.
To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com
Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher.
contact:  Otoño Johnston
============================================================
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purposes only.)
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2:30:37 PM    

Re: Bad Iraq Data From Start to Finish

Dear Friends:

The bad news (i.e., the truth) about Bush relying upon, and encouraging,
distorted intelligence data continues to appear. You've all probably
noticed that the White House has been a bit uneasy this week, and is
scrambling for something to distract our attention. What shall it
be--another invasion to "liberate" a country, a brilliant photo-op, putting
the country on Mauve Alert?
____________________

Robertscheer.com
June 3, 2003

Bad Iraq Data From Start to Finish
Americans were duped: Evidence of administration manipulation and mendacity
just keeps rolling in.
by Robert Scheer

June 3, 2003--Ever since the tragedy of Sept. 11, the Bush administration
has relied on selective and distorted intelligence data to make the case
for invading Iraq. But the truth will out, and the White House is now
scrambling to explain away its mendacity.

On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice admitted that President Bush had used a forged
document in his State of the Union speech to prove Iraq represented a
nuclear threat: "We did not know at the time--maybe someone knew down in
the bowels of the agency--but no one in our circles knew that there were
doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course it was
information that was mistaken."

United Nations inspectors, belatedly presented with the same document,
realized within hours it was a crude forgery.

While this garbage and much else like it got rushed into the light, the
Bush administration protected its continuing lie about a connection between
9/11 and Saddam Hussein by repressing the results of interrogations of
captured top Al Qaeda leaders.

As Monday's New York Times reported, Al Qaeda honchos in separate
interrogations told a consistent story a year ago: The terrorist group, and
Osama bin Laden in particular, had shunned any connection with Hussein and
his government.

In going to war, the administration was unable to come up with a shred of
verifiable evidence linking Hussein with Bin Laden. The closest it came was
a purported meeting in Prague between an Al Qaeda member and an Iraqi
diplomat, which has been fully repudiated by the Czech government.

Keeping secret any information that contradicted the pro-war line of the
administration allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fabricate what
he called a "bulletproof" connection between Al Qaeda and Hussein. We were
expected to believe that our government had hard, definitive intelligence
we couldn't be shown - just as we were told to trust that U.N. inspectors
wouldn't be able to find all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in time
to avert disaster.

Thus, with the pattern established, it was not surprising last week to read
in the Los Angeles Times of a leaked report from the Pentagon's Defense
Intelligence Agency - secret since its completion last September - that
indicated the depth of our government's confusion as to the nature of the
Iraq WMD threat.

The report stated that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is
producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has - or will -
establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to
U.S. officials interviewed by The Times. Yet that very month, Rumsfeld told
Congress that Hussein's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles
of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."

Did Rumsfeld know of the DIA report? If so, did he keep that information
from the president? Or did he and Bush knowingly deceive the American
people? And isn't that an impeachable offense?

Unfortunately, the president still hasn't learned his lesson.

Only last week, on his trip to Europe, he pointed to two mobile trailers
the U.S. had seized in Iraq as proof of Iraq's threatening WMD program.
Yet, as emerged over the weekend in newspapers on both sides of the
Atlantic, Bush's claims rest on intelligence that is again unable to
withstand scrutiny: Some leading weapons experts summoned by the
administration to make the case for the ominous trailers take issue with
the Bush administration's interpretation of their design and use.

On Saturday, the New York Times, which had originally hyped the trailer
story based on official U.S. sources, published a front-page report quoting
experts who repudiated the administration's claims.

One such expert went so far as to say the government's "white paper" on the
labs "was a rushed job and looks political." Others questioned myriad
technical claims and suppositions in the report that led to the
government's conclusion that the trailers were germ labs that could be used
to cook up anthrax or other bioweapons.

"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," one top U.S.
scientist told the New York Times. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you
could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

On Sunday, the London Observer, citing British intelligence sources,
reported that it "is increasingly likely that the units were designed to be
used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system
originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987."

The British Parliament is in an uproar, but so far the U.S. Congress has
failed to exercise its obligation to hold the executive branch accountable.


Copyright © 2003 Robert Scheer  
_______________________________

In peace,

Otoño
________________________________

Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and
Peace Watch.
To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com
Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher.
contact:  Otoño Johnston
============================================================
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational
purposes only.)
============================================================

2:29:48 PM    

Re: Doris Meissner Speaks Out on US Detentions

Dear Friends:

Newsweek's Malcolm Beith spoke with Doris Meissner, commissioner of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton and now
a senior fellow at Washington's Migration Policy Institute, about the US
Justice Department's heavy-handed treatment of hundreds of illegal
immigrants detained in the wake of September 11. Excerpts of the interview
follow, in which she speaks of these violations of people's civil liberties
and the harsh use of immigration law, all in the name of national security.

 ______________________________

Newsweek International
June 16, 2003 issue

The Last Word: Doris Meissner
 
And Justice for All...?
 
June 16 issue--Last week the U.S. Justice Department's Inspector General
issued a long-awaited report on the government's treatment of hundreds of
illegal immigrants detained in the wake of September 11. Among its
findings: the government failed to inform many detainees of the charges
against them, denied them bond, prevented many from seeking legal
representation and tolerated "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" by
corrections officers at a center in Brooklyn. Out of the 762 detainees, not
one was indicted on terrorism charges.

           Newsweek's Malcolm Beith spoke with Doris Meissner, commissioner
of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton
and now a senior fellow at Washington's Migration Policy Institute, about
the scandal. Excerpts:
      
        What are your thoughts on the report?
        I think it really corroborates what a lot of outside observers have
been talking about, which is that in the name of responding to the
terrorist attacks, there have been substantial violations of people's
liberties, and the immigration law has been used as a very blunt
instrument.
       
        What could--or should--the government have done differently?
        [After the September 11 attacks] it's understandable that there
would have been--at the outset--this almost panicky reaction on the part of
government officials to just start arresting people. But it's also
reasonable to say that after the first couple of weeks, when it became
clear that there were not going to be a series of repeat attacks
immediately, somebody needed to take a deep breath and sit down and say,
"Wait a minute, what are we doing here? And what is going to be the best
way to isolate who might have been involved in these attacks and file
charges against them?" That didn't happen.
       
        Last week Attorney General John Ashcroft defended his department's
actions and asked Congress for even broader powers, including tougher
sentences and the right to hold suspected terrorists without bond.
        I cannot imagine that Congress would grant that right. [But] the
danger in this kind of discussion is to be dismissive. The government does
have the responsibility to do certain things differently, and as a public
we are in a different place. But you have to abide by the due-process rules
of our system: there must be probable cause, there must be an investigation
of individual law-breaking and ultimately charges have to be filed. Our
legal system focuses on punishment of criminal behavior that individual
people commit, not guilt by association.
       
        How does one single out suspicious individuals without resorting to
racial profiling?
        By following leads and building from the individual to the general,
rather than going from the general to the individual. The actual cases that
have been made on terrorism in this country--the Lackawanna group in New
York, the group in Oregon--have come from the kind of law enforcement that
I've just described or from community cooperation, people coming forward to
the government. This [immigrant-detention] stuff has been ultimately a
sideshow from the standpoint of effectiveness, but it's a sideshow that has
deeply compromised people's rights and our civil-liberties principles.
           
        Supporters of these new measures have criticized the INS for being
too lax under your watch. How do you respond to that?
        Our immigration system has always been too lax. I have always
argued that. But we set priorities in the 1990s based on what the needs at
the time seemed to be--and were--which were the southwest border [with
Mexico] and technology, where ports of entry, visas and screening were
concerned. A lot of fixes were made in the 1990s that responded to 1990s
problems. September 11 has created a whole other set of priorities.
       
        With the tightening of borders, should we expect to see a new
America in the future?
        I think that even with September 11, what we're seeing is an
America that is remaining open to immigration and that fundamentally
endorses the idea that we are a nation of immigrants. The really remarkable
thing that has happened since September 11 is what has not happened--that
Congress has not gone into a fit of anti-immigration legislation and
fundamentally changed immigration rules.
       
        How should potential immigrants react to the administration's
policies? You seem to think that America will remain welcoming.
        I say that with some degree of glass-half-full hope. I am deeply
concerned [about] the messages that we are sending, through these changed
procedures, to the countries of the Middle East and to the Arab and Muslim
worlds. The actions that we are taking are tapping into this deep, deep
resentment about America as a hypocritical country that is anti-Muslim and
anti-Arab. That can fuel terrorism and it can fuel the ability to recruit
among younger generations in particular. We need to address that and I
don't see a real effort to do that.
     
       © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
_______________________________

In peace,

Otoño
________________________________

Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and
Peace Watch.
To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com
Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher.
contact:  Otoño Johnston
============================================================
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational
purposes only.)
============================================================
2:29:01 PM    

Re: The Impeachable Offense

Dear Friends:

Is it essential to unearth the truth about the purported weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, but then we must go a step further. Geov Parrish,
among others, feels that the Bush administration's blatant manipulation of
intelligence regarding the WMD, and the more serious crime of an unprovoked
invasion of a foreign country are unconscionable. Soldiers were deployed on
the basis of a threat that Bush knew, or should have known, was
non-existent. This lie resulted in the deaths of both civilians and
soldiers in Iraq, and jeopardized American troops' lives. This arrogant
abuse of power betrayed the American people and the world at large. We call
for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
____________________________________

Working for Change.Com
June 9, 2003

The Impeachable Offense
by Geov Parrish

Finally, and far too late, the networks, the big dailies, and the national
news magazines are discovering that the Bush Administration's case for
invading Iraq was a combination of willfully gross exaggerations and
flat-out lies.

For weeks, various recently leaked or released documents have confirmed
that there was little or no evidence in American and British files that
even plausibly pointed to an Iraqi threat of either nuclear or other banned
weapons or an Iraqi link to Al-Qaeda. Intelligence analysts in both
governments did not believe such threats existed; allegations of a threat
only materialized when the politicians got involved.

The new documentation of hyped claims, combined with an utter lack of post-
invasion evidence that such claims had any basis in fact, are an enormous
political scandal in Britain. However, their content does little more than
confirm what opponents of the proposed invasion have said since last
summer. Even then, it was a staple of opposition to Bush's invasion that
intelligence community reports assessed the possibility of the existence of
Iraqi WMDs as minimal and Iraq's threat to the U.S. as nonexistent. It was
also an opposition staple that the Bush Administration routinely either
misrepresented or ignored such expertise, and that most of the endless
variety of Bush assertions "proving" either Iraqi WMDs or links between
Saddam and Al-Qaeda were on their face preposterous.

The Bush team's strategy of rapidly shifting justifications effectively
deflected attention each time actual facts on the ground caught up with the
rhetoric; by then, the White House was already hammering on a new reason
for its unprovoked war. All this has been known for months by enough people
to fuel the instant birth of a massive peace movement in America, and to
inspire tens of millions to pour into the streets of cities around the
world. The lack of any subsequent supporting discoveries of WMDs or terror
links, and the utter disinterest by the British and American governments in
finding any, comes as no surprise; a stopped clock is occasionally correct,
but usually it's wrong, and usually its owner knows the clock is broken.

But this wasn't a matter of reporting the time; it was a matter of the Bush
Administration's swearing to Congress, America, and the world that the
legal justification for invading, conquering, and occupying Iraq was based
on evidence that did not in fact exist. The Bush Administration made such
assertions repeatedly, for over half a year. Such assertions are not simply
an appalling campaign of lies. They are an impeachable offense.

For months, various mostly liberal and progressive critics of Bush have
been whipping up impeachment calls on the Internet. Such calls have been
delusional, boiling down, essentially, to the fact that Bush's critics hate
a number of his policies. But there are no pending or existing indictments;
no evidence of criminal wrongdoing; and no conceivable political route by
which the votes for impeachment could be mustered by a
Republican-controlled House of Representatives and upheld by two-thirds of
a Republican-controlled Senate. Critics may charge that Dubya's
administration has been appallingly corrupt, or that it is gutting the Bill
of Rights; but so far the corruption has been legal, and conservative
federal courts have mostly upheld post-9/11 civil liberties atrocities.
George W. Bush has inspired remarkable amounts of hatred amongst many of
his critics; but that alone doesn't make impeachment legally viable or
politically sustainable. It has been a non-starter.

Until now.

If proven -- and they can, in fact, be proven as such -- the Bush
Administration's lies to the United Nations, to the American people, and to
Congress in last October's effort to win authority to invade, all
constitute an either unwitting or witting effort to put American soldiers
in harm's way, guaranteeing the deaths of some. America's military was
deployed for reasons Bush and his entire foreign policy apparatus either
knew or should have known were fallacious.

They did so anyway, in the service of a war whose unprovoked nature was a
sharp departure from international law and norms. Bush claimed as his legal
authority last October's Congressional vote. On the eve of that vote, in a
major speech aimed at Congress, Bush claimed satellite photos gave
irrefutable evidence that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program,
and claimed -- mere days after intelligence agencies put the date at 2010
-- that Iraq would have such weapons ready to deploy within a year. "Facing
clear evidence of peril," Bush told Congress, America, and the world, "we
cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom
cloud."

All this was nonsense, and plenty of the administration's own experts had
told the White House it was nonsense. From August to March, Bush and his
team first insisted they had evidence that did not in fact exist, and then
presented evidence, such as Colin Powell's U.N. citations of a forged bill
of sales and a plagiarized ten-year-old graduate student paper, that was
patently false. In doing so to win approval for an unprovoked and legally
unjustifiable war, Bush and his top officials -- including Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz -- have
done something that (unlike, say, violating international law) is
considered an extremely serious affront by much of the American public,
Republicans as well as Democrats. They have caused the unnecessary deaths
of a lot of U.S. soldiers.

The outrage thus far is coming from the media and from the British example.
With a few honorable exceptions, such as Sen. Robert Byrd, it is not coming
from Congressional Democrats. Contrast this with the Clinton impeachment,
where years of fanatical attempts by Congressional Republicans and
right-wing talk radio hosts to impale Clinton over Whitewater had resulted
in a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, whose obsessive efforts finally
provided the legal pretext for the Monica Lewinsky charges.

By contrast, this time, given the relative Democratic spinelessness, no
attack on the fitness of George W. Bush and his band of neocon zealots can
have any traction without widespread public outrage, including support from
independents and at least some Republicans.

Corporate corruption and civil liberty attacks don't rise to that level.
Misuse of the American military does -- either willfully or through
incompetence. Soldiers are sacrosanct to many Americans, especially
conservatives. Now, we have learned, the President of the United States has
deployed our soldiers on the basis of a threat he knew or should have known
did not exist.

The unprovoked invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq should never have
happened. Instead, the White House claimed that Bush spent several months
allegedly agonizing over whether to launch an invasion he had already
approved.

Before and after his secret decision, for at least half a year, his
Administration's claims were largely false. If Bush himself didn't know
that, he should have.

If he did know it, he has lied to Congress -- just like Clinton -- and to
America and the world, but repeatedly and on a far more serious matter than
the definition of "sex." Bush, instead, used his lies to intentionally
sacrifice the lives of American soldiers -- along with other coalition
soldiers and countless Iraqis, soldier and civilian alike.

For this egregious abuse of his oath of office, George W. Bush should be
impeached.

--Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle
Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot
for WorkingForChange.

© Working Assets Online
_______________________________

In peace,

Otoño
________________________________

Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and
Peace Watch.
To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com
Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher.
contact:  Otoño Johnston
============================================================
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational
purposes only.)
============================================================
2:27:16 PM