Another reason might be they don't give peace prizes to

• What? Not Bush? - gt
  • Hey, doesn't surprise me - Rep
    • Another reason might be they don't give peace prizes to - warmongers.
      • but they do to dictators - Rep
        • President Chavez offered to help America's - Libby
          • Well, I've heard and read he's a pretty rough character - Rep
            • I'm not an expert on what - Libby
              • Not to mention, Chavez blasting the US over Iraq on the floor of the UN...nm - Democrat
        • NOT..nm - Democrat

The messages you are viewing are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select the boards given in left menu

Barrack Hussein Obama.....nuff said.

his own personal reasons.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050620/why_george_went_to_war.php

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11—indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Conversations With Bush The Candidate

Herskowitz—a longtime Houston newspaper columnist—has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers—expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript—pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior—who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

Debating The Timeline For War

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush—personally—in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"—because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way…"

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."

"I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred…" …

"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Woodward: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"

Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam—and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

Woodward: "Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible."

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

deficit in American history, caused by WHAT?

And I just love how anyone who doesn't agree with them is labeled as having no values.

What kind of values does someone have to take a healthy surplus upon entering office and not only SQUANDERING it but then going on to create the biggest deficit in American history?

What kind of values does someone have to send our children to an unnecessary war to die and/or be injured while neglecting to give them inadequate supplies?

What kind of values does someone have to send our children off to a foreign land to die for his own personal bogus war, when he was too much of a coward to serve in combat duty himself?

What kind of values does someone have to take the blood of 9/11 victims and the fear of all other Americans and USE it to wage a bogus war against Iraq when that was his goal before he was even elected President?

What kind of values does someone have to not care enough about securing or borders or our ports or protecting our airspace and chemical/nuclear plants and decreases the budget for rail and subway security?

What kind of values does someone have to have to neglect to develop enough smallpox vaccines FOUR YEARS after the worst attack in American history, when bio attacks using smallpox was felt to be a threat?

What kind of values does someone have to have to make sure that his huge war budget includes FREE comprehensive medical benefits for all Iraqi citizens while he presides over a country where many of his own citizens who work 40 hours or more a week can't even afford health insurance?

What kind of values does someone have to have to deny American scientists the opportunity to study stem cell research, using the argument that he wants to "protect life" when he presides over a country where our children are being routinely molested and MURDERED by animals who the government refuses to keep in jail? 

Out of all the talk on these boards about life being "precious" as it regards stem cell research, I have yet to see ONE SINGLE POST about the multitude of children that have been abducted, sexually abused and murdered in this country in the last six months.  What kind of values does someone have to have to care more about cells in a petrie dish than the children who are already here?

Those examples aren't values. Those examples do nothing but reflect the values that are ABSENT in an egotistical moron of a president who, at his very BEST, is nothing but DANGEROUS.

We all love our country.  Let's focus on that.  No matter who wins, there is a lot of work to be done.

G'night.

    Friday 11 November 2005

    She's just off the plane from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the cheapest route back from a reunion in the little Arkansas town where she grew up in the 1950s. For thirty years, she and her childhood friends have climbed to the top of Penitentiary Mountain, where the local persimmon trees grow, for a persimmon-spitting contest. (All in the great spirit of just having fun and being crazy.) She holds out her hands and says, I probably still have persimmon goop on me!

    We seat ourselves at a table in my dining room, two small tape recorders between us. She's dressed all in black with a bright green over-shirt, a middle-aged blond woman wearing gold earrings and a thin gold necklace. As she settles in, her sleeves pull back, revealing the jewelry she'd rather talk about. On her right wrist is a pink, plastic band. This one was to be a volunteer in the Astrodome for Hurricane Katrina. I did two days work there, then three days in Covington, Louisiana, the first week after. On her left wrist, next to a watch from another age, are two blue plastic bands: And this one, she says with growing animation, fingering the nearest of them, was my very first arrest of my whole life on September 26th in front of the White House with 400 of my closest friends. This is the bus number I was on and this is the arrest number they gave me and then, later on, I had to date it because now I have two. She fingers the second band. Last week 26 of us were arrested after a die-in right in front of the White House in commemoration of the two thousandth American and maybe one hundred thousandth Iraqi who died in this war. So now, she announces, chuckling heartily, I'm a felon for peace.

    When she speaks - and in the final g's she drops from words (It's freezin' in Mongolia!) - you can catch just a hint of the drawl of that long-gone child from Bentonville, Arkansas. In her blunt, straightforward manner, you can catch something of her 29 years in the Army; and in her ease perhaps, the 16 years she spent as a State Department diplomat. Animated, amused by her foibles (and those of her interviewer), articulate and thoughtful, she's just the sort of person you would want to defend - and then represent - your country, a task she continues to perform, after her own fashion, as one of the more out-of-the-ordinary antiwar activists of our moment.

    Last August, she had a large hand in running Camp Casey for Cindy Sheehan at the President's doorstep in Crawford, Texas; then again, that wasn't such a feat, given that in 1997 she had overseen the evacuation of 2,500 foreigners from the war zone that was then Sierra Leone, a harrowing experience for which she was given the State Department's Award for Heroism. That's why I joined the Foreign Service, she comments, her voice still filled with some residual excitement from those years. I wanted to go to places you wouldn't visit on vacation. In fact, the retired colonel opened and closed embassies from Africa to Uzbekistan and took some of the roughest diplomatic assignments on Earth, including the reopening of the American embassy in Kabul in December 2001.

    On March 19, 2003, the day before the first Cruise missiles were launched against Baghdad, she resigned from the Foreign Service in an open letter sent from the U.S. embassy in Mongolia (where she was then Deputy Chief of Mission) to Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it she wrote, in part:

    This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States. I disagree with the Administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. itself. I believe the Administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them.

    Once used to delivering official U.S. statements to other governments, she now says things like: Everyone should have to be handcuffed with the flexi-cuffs they use now and feel just how unflexible they are, just how they cut, and then imagine Iraqis, Afghans, and other people we pick up in them 24 hours a day. She relaxes, sits back, awaits the first question, and responds with gusto.

    Tomdispatch: I thought we'd start by talking about two important but quite different moments in your life. The first was not so long ago. Let me quote from a New York Times article on a recent Condoleezza Rice appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was a day that echoed the anguish, anger and skepticism that opinion polls show have begun to dominate the thinking of Americans. The hearing was punctuated by a heckler who called for an end to the war, only to be hustled out. Now, I believe this was you.

    Ann Wright: [She chuckles.] Yes! Not a heckler, I was a protester.

    TD: Tell me about it.

    AW: It was as much a protest against the Senators as against Condoleezza Rice, because they were not holding our Secretary of State responsible. I picked up the Washington Post that morning and noticed that Condoleezza was going to testify on Iraq, and I thought, well, I'm free until noon. When I walked in, I was not planning on doing anything.

    But I sat there for two hours and Senators were saying: We've heard the administration is discussing a military option in Syria and perhaps Iran. The committee needs to be brought in on this, because we've only given you authorization for military action in Iraq. In an almost rude, dismissive tone, the Secretary of State essentially replied: We'll talk to you when we want to; all options are on the table; and thank you very much. Then the senators just kind of sat there. It was like: Come on, guys talk! Pin that woman down! We, the people, want to know. I want to know. And then they just started off on something else. It was like: No! Come back to this question. We don't want to go to war in Syria or Iran...

    TD: And did you stand up?

    AW: So I stood up. I was back in the peanut gallery. I've never done anything like it before in my whole life. I took a deep breath and went, Stop the killing! Stop the war! Hold this woman accountable! You, the Senate, were bamboozled by the administration on Iraq and you cannot be bamboozled again! Stop this woman from killing!

    At that point, I ran out of things to say because I hadn't really planned it. [She laughs.] I was looking around. There was only one police officer and he was just ambling toward me. It was like he enjoyed what I was saying. I thought, until he gets here I've got to say something more, so I went: You failed us in Iraq, you can't fail us on Syria! The police office finally said, Uh, ma'am, you've got to come with me. This is the first time - somebody told me later - anyone's ever seen a protester put her arm around a police officer. [She laughs.]

    TD: So you weren't hustled out?

    AW: Noooooo. It was a slow walk and there was silence in the room, so I thought: Well, I can't let this go by and I started another little rant on the way out. That part wasn't mentioned in the news reports.

    TD: At least some papers like the Washington Post mentioned you by name. The Times merely called you a heckler.

    AW: Well, how rude! I wasn't heckling anyway. I was speaking on behalf of the people of America.

    TD: This obviously takes you a long way from your professional life, because you were in the Foreign Service for...

    AW: Sixteen years...

    TD: ... and in all those years this would have been rather inconceivable.

    AW: Having testified at congressional hearings as a Foreign Service officer, particularly on Somalia issues back in '93 and '94, I was always humbled to go into those rooms as a government employee. I always found it interesting when people in the audience stood up to say something. You know, I learned later that most protestors do it in the first ten minutes because that's when the cameras and all the reporters are sure to be there.

    As it happened, the chairman of the committee declined to have me arrested. The police officer said, Well, if you're disappointed, I can arrest you. I replied, If you don't mind, I'll just run on over to my lunch appointment. I was actually on my way to a presentation by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, where he would describe the secrecy of the administration and the way the State Department was isolated by the White House and the National Security Council.

    TD: Another moment of protest, one I'm sure you thought about very carefully, took place the day before the shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq began. That day you sent a letter of public resignation to Colin Powell which began - and not many people could have written such a sentence - When I last saw you in Kabul in 2002...

    AW: Indeed I had volunteered to go to Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001 to be part of a small team that reopened the U.S. embassy. It had been closed for twelve years. I have a background in opening and closing embassies. I helped open an embassy in Uzbekistan, closed and reopened an embassy in Sierra Leone. I've been evacuated from Somalia and Sierra Leone. And with my military background, I've worked in a lot in combat environments.

    I volunteered because I felt the United States needed to respond to the events of 9/11, and the logical place to go after al-Qaeda was where they trained, knowing full well that you probably weren't going to get a lot of people. The al-Qaeda group is very smart and few of them, in my estimation, would have been hanging out where we were most likely to go after them in Afghanistan. Actually, I was amazed the administration went in physically. I thought, like the Clinton administration, they would send in cruise missiles. Considering the severity of September 11, I guess the military finally said: Well, it looks like we're going into that hell-hole where the Russians got their butts whipped. Everybody knew it was going to be tough.

    TD: You've commented elsewhere that a crucial moment for you was watching the President's Axis of Evil State of the Union address from a bunker in Kabul.

    AW: A bunker outside the chancellery building meant to protect against the rockets the mujahedeen were sending against each other after they defeated the Soviets. We had taken [then interim leader] Hamid Karzai, who had been invited to the State of the Union, to Bagram Air Base and sent him off three days before. We told him, You've got to start getting together some detailed plans for economic development funds because the attention of the United States doesn't stay on any country for long; so, get your little fledgling cabinet moving fast. Well, the President started talking about other interests that the United States had after 9/11 and these interests were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Just as he said that, the cameras focused on Karzai and you could almost see him going: Hmmmm [she mugs a wince], now I know what they were telling me at the embassy. And we were sitting there thinking, Oh my God...

    TD: You had a functioning TV?

    AW: Barely. We had a satellite dish made of pounded-out coke cans - these were being sold down in Kabul - and a computer chip sent in from Islamabad, because we wanted to hear from Washington what was going to happen with Afghanistan. When, instead of talking much about Afghanistan, the President started in on this axis-of-evil stuff we were stunned. We were thinking: Hell's bells, we're here in a very dangerous place without enough military. So for the President to start talking about this axis of evil... everyone in the bunker just went: Oh Christ, here we go! No wonder we're not getting the economic development specialists in here yet. If the American government was going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and clearing out the Taliban and preparing to help the people of Afghanistan, why the hell was it taking so long? Well, that statement said it all.

    TD: Did you at that moment suspect a future invasion of Iraq?

    AW: I'm a little naïve sometimes. I really never, ever suspected we would go to war in Iraq. There was no attempt at that moment to tie 9/11 to Iraq, so it didn't even dawn on me.

    Anyway, that was the preface to my letter of resignation. I wanted to emphasize that I had seen Colin Powell on his first trip to Kabul. I wanted to show that this was a person who had lots of experience.

    TD: In the whole Vietnam era, few, if any, government officials offered public resignations of protest, but before the invasion of Iraq even began, three diplomats - Brady Kiesling, John Brown, and yourself - resigned in a most public fashion. It must have been a wrenching decision.

    AW: I had been concerned since September 2002 when I read in the papers that we had something like 100,000 troops already in the Middle East, many left behind after the Bright Star [military] exercise we have every two years in Egypt. I thought: Uh-oh, the administration is doing some sneaky-Pete stuff on us. They were claiming they wanted UN inspectors to go back into Iraq, when a military build-up was already underway. It's one thing to put troops in the region for pressure, but if you're leaving that many behind, you're going to be using them. Then, as the mushroom-cloud rhetoric started getting stronger, it was like: Good God! These guys mean to go to war, no matter what the evidence is.

    By November, I was having trouble sleeping. I would wake up at three, four in the morning - this was in Mongolia where it was freezing cold - wrap up in blankets, go to the kitchen table, and just start pouring my soul out. By the time I finally sent that resignation letter in, I had a stack of drafts like this. [She lifts her hand a couple of feet off the table.] I did know two others had resigned, but quite honestly I hadn't read their letters and I didn't know them.

    TD: You were ending your life in a way, life as you had known it...

    AW: Thirty-five years in the government between my military service and the State Department, under seven administrations. It was hard. I liked representing America.

    TD: Was there a moment when you knew you couldn't represent this government anymore?

    AW: I kept hoping the administration would go back to the Security Council for its authorization to go to war. That's why I held off until virtually the bombs were being dropped. I was hoping against hope that our government would not go into what really is an illegal war of aggression that meets no criteria of international law. When it was finally evident we were going to do so, I said to myself: It ain't going to be on my watch.

    TD: Was it like crossing a border into a different world?

    AW: It was a great relief. During the lead-up to war, I had begun showing symptoms of an impending heart attack. The State Department put me on a medivac flight to Singapore for heart tests. The doctors said, Lady, you're as strong as a horse. Are you just under some kind of stress? Yes, I am! The moment I sent in that letter, it was like a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At least I had made my stand and joined the other two who had resigned.

    TD: And what of those you left behind?

    AW: In the first couple of days, while I was still in Mongolia, I received over 400 emails from colleagues in the State Department saying: We're so sad you're not going to be with us, but we're so proud of the three of you who resigned because we think this going-to-war is just so horrible; then each one would describe how anti-American feeling was growing in the country where they were serving. It was so poignant, all those emails.

    TD: Why don't you think more people in the government - and in the military where there's clearly been opposition to Iraq at a very high level - quit and speak out?

    AW: There were a few. [General] Eric Shinseki talked about the shortchanging of the [Iraq] operations plan by a couple of hundred thousand people. He was forced out. But see, in the military, in the Foreign Service, you're not supposed to be speaking your own mind. Your job is to implement the policies of an administration elected by the people of America. If you don't want to, your only option is to resign. I understood that and that's one of the reasons I resigned - to give myself the freedom to talk out.

    There are a lot of people still in government service speaking out, but you've got to read between the lines. The senior military leaders in Iraq, what they've been saying is very different from what Donald Rumsfeld and the gang in Washington say. These guys are being honest and truthful about the lack of Iraqi battalions really ready for military work, the dangers the troops are under, the days when the military doesn't go out on the streets. They're signaling to America: We're up a creek on this one, guys, and you, the people of America, are going to have to help us out.

    TD: ...Let's talk about [Colin Powell's chief of staff] Larry Wilkerson as an example. He assumedly left after the election when Colin Powell did, so almost a year has passed. He saw what he believed was a secret cabal running the government and it took him that long after he was gone to tell us about it. I'm glad he spoke out. But I wonder why there isn't a more urgent impulse to do so?

    AW: If you look at Dick Clarke [the President's former chief adviser on terrorism on the National Security Council], he had all the secrets from the very beginning and he retired in January 2003. Yet he didn't say anything for over a year and a half, until he published that book [Against All Enemies] in 2004. If he had gone public before the war started, that man could have told us those same secrets right then. So could [the National Security Council's senior director for combating terrorism] Randy Beers. I worked with both of them on Somalia, on Sierra Leone. I know these guys personally and it's like: Guys, why didn't you come forward then?

    As you probably know, on the key issues of the first four years of the Bush administration, the State Department was essentially iced out. I mean, look at the Iraq War. Colin Powell and the State Department were just shoved aside and all State's functions put into the Department of Defense. Tragically, Colin Powell, who was trying to counsel Donald Rumsfeld behind the scenes that there weren't enough troops in Iraq, never stood up to say, Hold it, guys, I'll resign if we don't get this under control so that logical functions go in logical organizations and you, the Defense Department, don't do post-combat civil reconstruction stuff. That's ours. He just didn't do it. To me, he was more loyal to the Bush family than he was to the country. His resignation was possibly the one thing that could have deterred the war. Then the people of America would really have looked closely at what was going on. But tragically he decided loyalty to the administration was more valuable than loyalty to the country. I mean, it breaks my heart to say that, but it's what really happened.

    TD: So what is it that actually holds people back?

    AW: I think the higher up you go, the more common it is for people to retire, or maybe even resign, and not say what the reasons are, because they may hope to get back into government in a different administration. Dick Clarke had served every administration since George Washington and maybe he was looking toward being called back as a political appointee again. Sometimes such people don't speak out because they feel loyalty to the person who appointed them. Nobody appointed me to nothin', except the American people. I'm a career foreign service officer and I serve the American people. When an administration wasn't serving the best interests of the American people, I felt I had to stand up.

    TD: And are you now pretty much a full-time antiwar activist?

    AW: [She laughs.] That's the way it's turned out.

    TD: What, if anything, do you think your military career, your State Department career, and this... well, I can't call it a career... have in common?

    AW: Service to America. It's all just a continuation of a real concern I have about my country.

    TD: And what would you say to your former compatriots still in the military and the State Department?

    AW: Many of the emails I received from Foreign Service officers said, I wish I could resign right now, but I've got kids in college, I've got mortgages, and I'm going to try really hard, by staying, to ameliorate the intensity of these policies. All I can say is that they must be in agony about not being able to affect policy. There have been plenty of early retirements by people who finally realized they couldn't moderate the policies of the Bush administration.

    TD: What message would you send to the person you once were from the person you are now?

    AW: You trained me well.

    TD: If in this room you had the thirty-five year-old woman about to go into Grenada, as you did back in 1983, what would you want her to mull over.

    AW: I would say: You were a good Army officer and Foreign Service officer. You weren't blind to the faults of America. In many jobs, you tried to rectify things that were going badly and you succeeded a couple of times. My resignation wasn't the first time I spoke out. For instance, I was loaned, or seconded, from the State Department to the staff of the United Nations operation in Somalia and ended up writing a memo concerning the military operations the UN was conducting to kill a warlord named Addid. They started taking helicopters, standing off, and just blowing up buildings where they had intelligence indicating perhaps he was there. Well, tragically he never was, and here we were blowing up all these Somali families. Of course the Somalis were outraged and that outrage ultimately led to Blackhawk Down.

    I wrote a legal opinion to the special representative of the Secretary General, saying the UN operations were illegal and had to stop. It was leaked to the Washington Post and I got in a bit of hot water initially, but ultimately my analysis proved correct. I was also a bit of a rabble-rouser on the utilization of women in the military back in the eighties, part of a small group of women who took on the Army when it was trying to reduce the career potentials of women. I ended up getting right in the thick of some major problems which ultimately cost the Army millions of dollars in the reassessment of units that had been given incorrect direct-combat probability codings. I was also part of a team which discovered that some of our troops had been looting private homes in Grenada. The Army court-martialed a lot of our soldiers for this violation of the law of land warfare. We used their example in rewriting how you teach the code of conduct and, actually, the Geneva Convention on the responsibility of occupiers.

    TD: You know a good deal about the obligations of an occupying power to protect public and private property, partially because in the 1980s you were doing planning on the Middle East, right?

    AW: Yes, from 1982 to 1984, I was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina when the Army was planning for potential operations using the Rapid Deployment Force - what ultimately became the Central Command. One of the first forces used in rapid deployment operations was the 82 Airborne at Fort Bragg. I was in the special operations end of it with civil affairs. Those are the people who write up the annexes to operations plans about how you interact with the civilian population, how you protect the facilities - sewage, water, electrical grids, libraries. We were doing it for the whole Middle East. I mean, we have operations plans on the shelf for every country in the world, or virtually. So we did one on Iraq; we did one on Syria; on Jordan, Egypt. All of them.

    We would, for instance, take the UNESCO list of treasures of the world and go through it. Okay, any in Iraq? Yep. Okay, mark 'em, circle 'em on a map, put 'em in the op-plan. Whatever you do, don't bomb this. Make sure we've got enough troops to protect this. It's our obligation under the law of land warfare. We'd be circling all the electrical grids, all the oil grids, all the museums. So for us to go into Iraq and let all that looting happen. Well, Rumsfeld wanted a light, mobile force, and screw the obligations of treaties. Typical of this administration on any treaty thing. Forget 'em.

    So everything was Katy-bar-the-door. Anybody could go in and rip up anything. Many of the explosives now being used to kill our troops come from the ammo dumps we did not secure. It was a total violation of every principle we had for planning military operations and their aftermath. People in the civil affairs units, they were just shaking their heads, wondering how in the hell this could have happened. We've been doing these operations plans forever, so I can only imagine the bitchin' and moanin' about - how come we don't have this civilian/military annex? It's in every other op-plan. And where are the troops, where are the MPs?

    TD: If back in the early eighties you were planning to save the antiquities of every country in the Middle East, then obviously the Pentagon was also planning for a range of possible invasions in the region. Do you look back now and ask: What kind of a country has contingency plans to invade any country you can imagine?

    AW: One of the things you are likely to do at a certain point in your military career is operations plans. It did not then seem abnormal to me at all that we had contingency plans for the Middle East, or for countries in the Caribbean or South America. At that stage, I was not looking at the imperialism of the United States. I just didn't equate those contingency plans with empire-building goals. However, depending on how those plans are used, they certainly can be just that. Remember as well that this was in the days of the Cold War and, by God, that camouflaged a lot of stuff. You could always say: You never can tell what those Soviets are going to do, so you better be prepared anywhere in the world to defeat them.

    TD: And we're still prepared anywhere in the world...

    AW: Well, we are and now, let's see, where are the Russians? [She laughs heartily.]

    TD: Tell me briefly the story of your life.

    AW: I grew up in Arkansas, just a normal childhood. I think the Girl Scouts was a formative organization for me. It had a plan to it, opportunity to travel outside Arkansas, good goals - working on those little badges. Early State Department. Early military too. It's kind of interesting, the militarization of our society, how we don't really think of some things, and yet when I look back, there I was a little Girl Scout in my green uniform, and so putting on an Army uniform after college wasn't that big a deal. I'd been in a uniform before and I knew how to salute, three fingers. [She demonstrates.]

    If you look, we now have junior ROTC in the high schools. We have child soldiers in America. We're good at getting kids used to those uniforms. And then there's the militarization of industries and corporations, the necessity every ten years to have a war because we need a new generation of weaponry. Corporations in the military-industrial complex are making lots of money off of new types of weaponry and vehicles.

    TD: While you were in the military, did you have any sense that these wars were actually living weapons labs?

    AW: Particularly seeing the privatization after Gulf War I, going into Somalia. All of a sudden, as fast as military troops were arriving, you had Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root in Somalia. They started saying, You need mess halls, oh, we'll do the mess halls for you. And it turned out they had staged a lot of their equipment in the Middle East after the Gulf War. So it was in Somalia lickety-split. The privatization of military functions is now so pervasive that the military can no longer function by itself, without the contractors and corporations. These contractors, these mercenaries really, are now fundamentally critical to the operations of the U.S. military.

    TD: So a Girl Scout and...

    AW: In my junior year at the University of Arkansas, a recruiter came through town with the film, Join the Army, See the World. I had been an education major for three years. Nurse, teacher, those were the careers for women. I didn't want any of it. So, in the middle of the Vietnam War, I signed up to go to a three-week Army training program, just to see if I liked it. And I found it challenging. Even though there were protests going on all over America, I divorced myself from what the military actually did versus what opportunities it offered me. I hated all these people getting killed in Vietnam, but I said to myself: I'm not going to kill anyone and I'm taking the place of somebody who will be able to go do something else. All these arguments that... now you look at it and go: Oh my God, what did you do?

    TD: Don't you think this happens now?

    AW: Absolutely! I sympathize with the people in the military right now. The majority didn't sign up to kill anybody. You always prayed that, whatever administration it was, it didn't go off on some wild goose chase that got you into a war you personally thought was really stupid.

    TD: Would you counsel a young woman now to go into the military?

    AW: I think we will always have a military and I think the military is honorable service as long as the civilian leadership uses it in appropriate ways and is very cautious about sending us to war. And yes, I would encourage people to look at a military career, but I would also tell them that, if they're sent to do something they think is wrong, they don't have to stay in, though they may have to take some consequences for saying, Thank you very much but I'm not going to kill anybody.

    In fact, if I were recalled to active duty, which is possible... I put myself purposely at the Retired Ready Reserve so that, if there was ever an emergency and my country needed me, I could be recalled, and in fact there are people my age, 59, who are agreeing to be recalled. The ultimate irony would be resigning from my career in the diplomatic corps and then having the Bush administration recall me, because my specialty, civil affairs, reconstruction, is in really short supply. I'm a colonel. I know how to run battalions and brigades. I can do this stuff. But I would have to tell them, sorry, I refuse to be placed on active duty. And if they push hard enough, then I'd just have to be court-martialed and I'd go to Leavenworth. I will not serve this administration in the Iraq war which I firmly believe is an illegal war of aggression.

    TD: You know, if someone had said to me back in the 1960s that a Vice President of the United States might go to Congress to lobby for a torture exemption for the CIA the way Dick Cheney has done, I would have said: This couldn't happen. Never in American history. I'm staggered by this.

    AW: Me, too. The other thing that's quite interesting is the number of women who are involved in it. There were something like eighty women I've identified, ranging from high officers to CIA contractors being used as interrogators in Guantanamo. Talking about things that will come back to bite us big time, this is it. And we are complicit, all of us, because, quite honestly, we're not standing out in front of the White House every single day, and every time that Vice President leaves throwing our bodies in front of his car, throwing blood on it. We need to get tough with these guys. They're not listening to us. They think we're a bunch of wimps. We've got to get tougher and tougher with them to show them we're not going to put up with this stuff.

    TD: You've quoted Teddy Roosevelt as saying: To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. I was particularly struck by that word servile. Do you want to talk about dissent for a moment?

    AW: Well, we shouldn't be hesitant about voicing our opinions, even in the most difficult of times which generally is when your nation is going to war and you're standing up to say, this isn't right. That's tough and, in fact, the first couple of months after I resigned, oh man, all that TV and nothing on but the war, and very few people wanted to hear me. It probably was a good four months before anybody even asked me to come speak about why I had dissented, and that was a little lonely. [She chuckles.]

    TD: Any final thoughts?

    AW: We now have a two-and-a-half-year track record of being a very brutal country. We are the cause of the violence in Iraq. That violence will continue as long as we're there, and the administration maintains that we will be there until we win. That means to me that this administration is planning for a long-term siege in Iraq. It means that young men and women in America should be prepared for the draft because the military right now cannot support what this administration wants. In fact, yesterday I was talking to about ninety high school seniors in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a very Republican part of the United States. I said: Your parents may support this war, but how strongly do you feel about it? If it drags on for years and there's a draft, how many of you will willingly go? Only three put up their hands.

    We are continuing down a very dangerous road. The United States and its citizenry are held in disdain in world opinion for not being able to stop this war machine. So one of the things I'm doing is ratcheting up my own level of response. A dear friend, Joe Palambo, a Vietnam veteran in Veterans for Peace who went to hear the President in Norfolk when he talked about terrorism, was recently cited in the newspapers this way: There was one protestor in the second row of the audience who stood up and railed against the President, saying: You're the terrorist! This war is a war of terrorism! Joe called me right after that happened and said, Hey, Ann, I heard what you did in the Senate and I thought, I'm going to go do the same thing to the President.

    I mean, we're going to dog these guys all over the country. Our Secretary of State, our Secretary of Defense, our Vice President, our President, our National Security Adviser, the head of the CIA, any of these people who are the warmongers, who are the murderers in the name of our country, wherever they go, the people of America need to stand up to them to say, No! Stop! Stop this war. Stop this killing. Get us out of this mess. Because that's the only time they hear it, when we stand up in these venues. They don't come out to the street in front of the White House to see the hundreds of thousands of people who are protesting. They ignore that. But for those fifteen seconds, if you can stand up so that everybody in that audience sees that there's one person, or maybe even two or three... Who knows?

  -------

http://www.nonukesnorth.net/peacesymbol.shtml 

Someone asked me awhile back about the peace symbol and where it came from. In the event that you do not know this story, it is quite interesting especially in light of the **nuclear** problems we are having 49 years after the symbol's creation. Altho there are those who swear it is the reincarnation of some ancient rune of an evil, Anton LeBay, devil-worsipping, anti-Christ **secret** society, they are referring to the V (for victory sign) that Churchill and Nixon and others have used over the years. The V being evil has something to do with Masons and **secrets** the rest of us are not privy to. Anyway, when Gerald Holtom designed the peace sign as we know it some far-far-far right and fundamental religious groups spread the notion that the symbol was an outgrowth of the **V** and a Satanic Communist symbol.

The real story, especially the semaphores, which I did not know much about before researching this a few years ago, is pretty cool.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/09/arrest-bush-che.html

(I don't know how to make sophisticated links.) 

It's not just about torture of terrorists.  It's many, many other things they have done. 

Nobel Peace Prize winners since 1975

Busted for wearing a peace T-shirt; has this country gone completely insane?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_956.shtml

Bush gives new reason for Iraq war

Says US must prevent oil fields from falling into hands of terrorists

By Jennifer Loven, Associated Press  |  August 31, 2005

CORONADO, Calif. -- President Bush answered growing antiwar protests
yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in
Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields, which he said
would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.

The president, standing against a backdrop of the USS Ronald Reagan,
the newest aircraft carrier in the Navy's fleet, said terrorists
would be denied their goal of making Iraq a base from which to
recruit followers, train them, and finance attacks.

''We will defeat the terrorists, Bush said. ''We will build a free
Iraq that will fight terrorists instead of giving them aid and
sanctuary.

Appearing at Naval Air Station North Island to commemorate the
anniversary of the Allies' World War II victory over Japan, Bush
compared his resolve to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's in the
1940s and said America's mission in Iraq is to turn it into a
democratic ally just as the United States did with Japan after its
1945 surrender. Bush's V-J Day ceremony did not fall on the actual
anniversary. Japan announced its surrender on Aug. 15, 1945 -- Aug.
14 in the United States because of the time difference.

Democrats said Bush's leadership falls far short of Roosevelt's.

''Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman led America to victory
in World War II because they laid out a clear plan for success to the
American people, America's allies, and America's troops, said Howard
Dean, Democratic Party chairman. ''President Bush has failed to put
together a plan, so despite the bravery and sacrifice of our troops,
we are not making the progress that we should be in Iraq. The troops,
our allies, and the American people deserve better leadership from
our commander in chief.

The speech was Bush's third in just over a week defending his Iraq
policies, as the White House scrambles to counter growing public
concern about the war. But the devastation wrought by Hurricane
Katrina in the Gulf Coast drew attention away; the White House
announced during the president's remarks that he was cutting his
August vacation short to return to Washington, D.C., to oversee the
federal response effort.

After the speech, Bush hurried back to Texas ahead of schedule to
prepare to fly back to the nation's capital today. He was to return
to the White House on Friday, after spending more than four weeks
operating from his ranch in Crawford.

Bush's August break has been marked by problems in Iraq.

It has been an especially deadly month there for US troops, with the
number of those who have died since the invasion of Iraq in March
2003 now nearing 1,900.

The growing death toll has become a regular feature of the slightly
larger protests that Bush now encounters everywhere he goes -- a
movement boosted by a vigil set up in a field down the road from the
president's ranch by a mother grieving the loss of her soldier son in
Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan arrived in Crawford only days after Bush did, asking
for a meeting so he could explain why her son and others are dying in
Iraq. The White House refused, and Sheehan's camp turned into a hub
of activity for hundreds of activists around the country demanding
that troops be brought home.

This week, the administration also had to defend the proposed
constitution produced in Iraq at US urging. Critics fear the impact
of its rejection by many Sunnis, and say it fails to protect
religious freedom and women's rights.

At the naval base, Bush declared, ''We will not rest until victory is
America's and our freedom is secure from Al Qaeda and its forces in
Iraq led by Abu Musab alZarqawi.

''If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would
create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks, Bush
said. ''They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could
recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the
United States and our coalition.

Like GT so eloquently wrote below, she has nothing to do with my request that you leave our board.  The only person who has anything to do with it is YOU.

You and every single one of your *friends* are rude, crude, abrasive, insulting, and continually lie, lie, LIE.  You are the kind of people I would choose NOT to associate with in real life because you have no values and you have a gang mentality, but most of all, you're just deplorable human beings, as you yourselves have demonstrated through your posts.

You have your own board.  Would you please just go back there?  You are offensive to many on this board.  This is the liberal board.  You clearly don't belong here any more than I don't belong on your board, where you and you *friends* indeed constantly gang up on anyone who disagrees with you.  If that's how you want to conduct yourselves on your own board, that's fine.  It's your board, and if you choose to turn it into a filthy sewer, that's your option.  But you don't have the right do that on the liberal board.  I'm very close to writing to the administrator and complaining about you all before I leave, as well.  You don't contribute anything of value to this board, and all you morons do is chase kind, loving and intelligent people away.

As GT says in her posts, you are clearly obsessed with her, and I don't understand why, but you're becoming psychotic about it, and you're showing that psychosis to anyone who reads this board.  You paint her to be a terrible person, and from what I read in her posts, she is NOT a terrible person.  She is loving and caring and intelligent..all traits that not ONE of you posseses.  You are way out of your limited ignorant hateful league on this board.  Please.  JUST GO AWAY.

I don't want government involved in my health care.  The VA is a joke and our veterans do not get the care that they need and deserve.  If heroes like that aren't taken care of by our government....what in the he11 makes us think that the government will take care of us?   

Maybe people who are struggling to afford healthcare, fill up their gas tanks and feed their families just happen to agree with his VIEWS on the issues.

ever called you a kool-aid drinker is because you constantly post about rhetoric.  When will you wake up and realize that even democrat politicians say one thing and do another.  You can't get much more obvious about than the Obama administration and yet you continue to sing his praise.  You are blinded by your own political party. 

Obama...the man who said he would sign no bill with pork in it and then did without batting an eyelash.

The man who said he would pull troops out of Iraq and has extended the time frame to keep troops in Iraq longer and to deploy more in Afghan.  He ridiculed McCain for not wanting a time line but I guess a time line is okay as long as you can push it back whenever you feel the need, huh? 

A man who promised tax cuts on 95% of the American people and yet he wants cap and trade which will tax everyone A LOT.

Gay rights activists sing his praise and yet Obama himself isn't for same sex marriage.

He wants people to have the right to choose to carry a child or abort it and yet he takes the rights away from hospitals and doctors by not allowing them to refuse to perform that procedure.  You complain about taking the rights away from people but yet you have no problem taking rights away from people with a different view point than yourself.

Yet all you ever come back with is that we are a bunch of babies who need to grow some balls and how ignorant we are for watching Fox News even though Fox has higher ratings than the crap you watch.

The channels you profess to tell the truth aren't even covering the tea parties.  I personally feel that thousands and thousands of Americans protesting is a big deal and should be reported on whether or not a channel agrees with the reason behind it.  Picking and choosing what to report is not telling the truth.  It is being very one sided.  Any open minded person would realize that.

marriage would not still be limited to two people (of whatever flavor) at a time.  Bygamy would still be bygamy. 

You're right.  Think what men with half a dozen legal wives and a couple of dozen kids could do to any medical plan, let alone our system for deducting dependents from income tax. 

On the other hand, I have a same-sex housemate who is disabled, unemployed and uninsured.  We are not gay, but if same-sex marriage were legal, I could marry her and get her insured under my plan.  Many marriages involve no sex.  Maybe they didn't start out that way but over time they evolve in that direction.  We would simply be skipping the honeymoon part.