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  • From: Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [internetworkers] that pinko Byrd
  • Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 12:05:48 -0400

Senator Robert Byrd utters more seditious inciteful rhetoric. On the
Senate floor, of all places!

So pass it on, my friends.

<http://www.senate.gov/~byrd/byrd_speeches/byrd_speeches_2003may/byrd_speeches_2003may_list/byrd_speeches_2003may_list_2.html>

The Truth Will Emerge

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, - -
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers."

Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure
it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what
lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth
has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.

But the danger is that at some point it may no longer matter. The
danger is that damage is done before the truth is widely realized. The
reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts
and go along with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a
lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of it -- more than I would
ever have believed -- right on this Senate Floor.

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the
American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked
invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing
International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that
the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to
switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded
the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up
to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his
cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from
mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to
deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a
heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to
our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from
a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and
justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of
fear. It was a placebo for the anger.

Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to
refute the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been
brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the
White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction
have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps
they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack on
Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of what
we were told was the urgent reason to go in. It seems also to have, for
the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection
team he led, which President Bush and company so derided. As Blix
always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if they
do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam
Hussein has come up missing.

The Administration assured the U.S. public and the world, over and
over again, that an attack was necessary to protect our people and the
world from terrorism. It assiduously worked to alarm the public and
blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden until they
virtually became one.

What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq
was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq
did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq's threatening
death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much
morphed into one prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles
proved to be outdated and of limited range. Their army was quickly
overwhelmed by our technology and our well trained troops.

Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of
diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only
fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional
buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they
continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush team's extensive hype of
WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has become more
than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication
and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk?
Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not
really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the
world?

What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are
"liberators." The facts don't seem to support the label we have so
euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal,
despicable despot, but "liberation" implies the follow up of freedom,
self-determination and a better life for the common people. In fact, if
the situation in Iraq is the result of "liberation," we may have set the
cause of freedom back 200 years.

Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for the Iraqi people,
water is scarce, and often foul, electricity is a sometime thing, food
is in short supply, hospitals are stacked with the wounded and maimed,
historic treasures of the region and of the Iraqi people have been
looted, and nuclear material may have been disseminated to heaven knows
where, while U.S. troops, on orders, looked on and guarded the oil supply.

Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and
refurbish its oil industry are awarded to Administration cronies,
without benefit of competitive bidding, and the U.S. steadfastly resists
offers of U.N. assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the
real motives of the U.S. government are the subject of worldwide
speculation and mistrust?

And in what may be the most damaging development, the U.S. appears to
be pushing off Iraq's clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has been
summarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling
face of the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an
occupier. The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the
beckoning hand of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that
image, as U.S. soldiers try to sustain order in a land ravaged by
poverty and disease. "Regime change" in Iraq has so far meant anarchy,
curbed only by an occupying military force and a U.S. administrative
presence that is evasive about if and when it intends to depart.

Democracy and Freedom cannot be force fed at the point of an
occupier's gun. To think otherwise is folly. One has to stop and
ponder. How could we have been so impossibly naive? How could we
expect to easily plant a clone of U.S. culture, values, and government
in a country so riven with religious, territorial, and tribal rivalries,
so suspicious of U.S. motives, and so at odds with the galloping
materialism which drives the western-style economies?

As so many warned this Administration before it launched its misguided
war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crack down in Iraq is likely to
convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to plan other horrors of the type we have
seen in the past several days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we
have given them new fuel for their fury. We did not complete our
mission in Afghanistan because we were so eager to attack Iraq. Now it
appears that Al Queda is back with a vengeance. We have returned to
orange alert in the U.S., and we may well have destabilized the Mideast
region, a region we have never fully understood. We have alienated
friends around the globe with our dissembling and our haughty insistence
on punishing former friends who may not see things quite our way.

The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the window to be
replaced by force, unilateralism, and punishment for transgressions. I
read most recently with amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our
longtime friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our
government is berating the new Turkish government for conducting its
affairs in accordance with its own Constitution and its democratic
institutions.

Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms race as countries
move ahead to develop WMD as a last ditch attempt to ward off a possible
preemptive strike from a newly belligerent U.S. which claims the right
to hit where it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this
President. Congress, in what will go down in history as its most
unfortunate act, handed away its power to declare war for the
foreseeable future and empowered this President to wage war at will.

As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to
ask questions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy
Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the numbers of troops which
will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the
occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How
will we afford this long-term massive commitment, fight terrorism at
home, address a serious crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth
military spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit
which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone? If the
President's tax cut passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the
shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and
shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or
may be politically costly.

But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American
people unfortunately are used to political shading, spin, and the usual
chicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it
up to a point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in
invisible ink for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors,
tinged with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood - - when it
comes to wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women, and
children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that
kind of lie - - not oil, not revenge, not reelection, not somebody's
grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory.

And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often
of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition
quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the
truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of
deceit, will fall.

###





  • [internetworkers] that pinko Byrd, Beckett, 05/23/2003

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