Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. wrote:
> In article <bmepsa$1q6b$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>,
> map@economicdemocracy.org says...
>>
>> "Then there is the occupation of the United States. I wake up in the
>> morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied
>> country,
>> that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to
>> cross the border--dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials
>> (ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the
>> United States in 1848)--those Mexican workers are not alien to me.
>>
>> "Those millions of people in this country who are not citizens and
>> therefore, by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of
>> their homes and held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional
>> rights--those people are not alien to me. But this small group of men
>> who have taken power in Washington, they are alien to me."
>>
>> October 2003 Issue
>>
>> It Seems to Me Howard Zinn
>>
>> An Occupied Country
>>
>> It has become clear, very quickly, that Iraq is not a liberated
>> country, but an occupied country. We became familiar with the term
>> "occupied country" during World War II. We talked of German-occupied
>> France, German-occupied Europe. And after the war we spoke of
>> Soviet-occupied Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe. It was the
>> Nazis, the Soviets, who occupied other countries.
>>
>> Now we are the occupiers. True, we liberated Iraq from Saddam
>> Hussein,
>> but not from us. Just as in 1898 we liberated Cuba from Spain, but
>> not
>> from us. Spanish tyranny was overthrown, but the United States
>> established a military base in Cuba, as we are doing in Iraq. U.S.
>> corporations moved in to Cuba, just as Bechtel and Halliburton and
>> the
>> oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The United States was deciding
>> what kind of constitution Cuba would have, just as our government is
>> now forming a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation, an occupation.
>>
>> And it is an ugly occupation. On August 7, The New York Times
>> reported
>> that U.S. General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad was worried about Iraqi
>> reaction to the occupation. Iraqi leaders who were pro-American were
>> giving him a message, as he put it: "When you take a father in front
>> of his family and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground
>> you have had a significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect
>> in the eyes of his family." (That's very perceptive.)
>>
>> CBS News reported on July 19 that Amnesty International is looking
>> into a number of cases of suspected torture in Iraq by American
>> authorities. One such case involves Khraisan al-Aballi, CBS said.
>> "When American soldiers raided the al-Aballi house, they came in
>> shooting. . . . They shot and wounded his brother Dureid." U.S.
>> soldiers took Khraisan, his 80-year-old father, and his brother away.
>> "Khraisan says his interrogators stripped him naked and kept him
>> awake
>> for more than a week, either standing or on his knees, bound hand and
>> foot, with a bag over his head," CBS reported. Khraisan told CBS he
>> informed his captors, "I don't know what you want. I don't know what
>> you want. I have nothing." At one point, "I asked them to kill me,"
>> Khraisan said. After eight days, they let him and his father go. Paul
>> Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, responded, "We are, in fact,
>> carrying out our international obligations."
>>
>> On June 17, two reporters for the Knight Ridder chain wrote about the
>> Falluja area: "In dozens of interviews during the past five days,
>> most residents across the area said there was no Ba'athist or Sunni
>> conspiracy against U.S. soldiers, there were only people ready to
>> fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they
>> themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops." One
>> woman said, after her husband was taken from their home because of
>> empty wooden crates, which they had bought for firewood, that the
>> United States is guilty of terrorism. "If I find any American
>> soldiers, I will cut their heads off," she said. According to the
>> reporters, "Residents in At Agilia--a village north of Baghdad--said
>> two of their farmers and five others from another village were killed
>> when U.S. soldiers shot them while they were watering their fields of
>> sunflowers, tomatoes, and cucumbers."
>>
>> Soldiers who are set down in a country where they were told they
>> would
>> be welcomed as liberators only to find they are surrounded by a
>> hostile population become fearful, trigger-happy, and unhappy. We've
>> been reading the reports of GIs angry at their being kept in Iraq. In
>> mid-July, an ABC News reporter in Iraq told of being pulled aside by
>> a sergeant who said to him: "I've got my own 'Most Wanted List.' " He
>> was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published,
>> featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons, and other wanted members of the
>> former Iraqi regime. "The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald
>> Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz," the sergeant said.
>>
>> Such sentiments are becoming known to the American public. In May, a
>> Gallup Poll reported that only 13 percent of the American public
>> thought the war was going badly. By July 4, the figure was 42
>> percent.
>> By late August, it was 49 percent.
>>
>> Then there is the occupation of the United States. I wake up in the
>> morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied
>> country,
>> that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to
>> cross the border--dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials
>> (ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the
>> United States in 1848)--those Mexican workers are not alien to me.
>> Those
>> millions of people in this country who are not citizens and
>> therefore,
>> by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes
>> and
>> held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights--those
>> people are not alien to me. But this small group of men who have
>> taken
>> power in Washington, they are alien to me.
>>
>> I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President who was
>> not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care
>> nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about
>> freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the
>> earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our
>> children and grandchildren will inherit. More Americans are beginning
>> to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly wrong,
>> that this is not what we want our country to be.
>>
>> More and more every day, the lies are being exposed. And then there
>> is
>> the largest lie: that everything the United States does is to be
>> pardoned because we are engaged in a "war on terrorism." This ignores
>> the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people's
>> homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture,
>> that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not
>> give us more security but less security.
>>
>> You get some sense of what this government means by the "war on
>> terrorism" when you examine what Rumsfeld said a year ago when he was
>> addressing the NATO ministers in Brussels. "There are things that we
>> know," he said. "And then there are known unknowns. That is to say,
>> there are things that we now know that we don't know. But there are
>> also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.
>> . . . That is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. .
>> . . Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists
>> does
>> not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
>>
>> Well, Rumsfeld has clarified things for us.
>>
>> That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find
>> the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb
>> Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of
>> thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals
>> are.
>>
>> That explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons
>> Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of
>> most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and
>> terrorizing the population.
>>
>> That explains why the government, not knowing who are terrorists and
>> who are not, will put hundreds of people in confinement at Guantanamo
>> under such conditions that twenty have tried to commit suicide.
>>
>> That explains why, not knowing which noncitizens are terrorists, the
>> Attorney General will take away the constitutional rights of twenty
>> million of them.
>>
>> The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people
>> in
>> other countries, but it is also a war on the people of the United
>> States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The
>> wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over
>> to the super-rich. The lives of our young are being stolen. And the
>> thieves are in the White House.
>>
>> It's interesting to me that polls taken among African Americans have
>> shown consistently 60 percent opposition to the war in Iraq. Shortly
>> after Colin Powell made his report to the United Nations on "Weapons
>> of Mass Destruction," I did a phone interview with an African
>> American
>> radio station in Washington, D.C., a program called "GW on the Hill."
>> After I talked with the host there were eight call-ins. I took notes
>> on what the callers said:
>>
>> John: "What Powell said was political garbage."
>>
>> Another caller: "Powell was just playing the game. That's what
>> happens
>> when people get into high office."
>>
>> Robert: "If we go to war, innocent people will die for no good
>> reason."
>>
>> Kareen: "What Powell said was hogwash. War will not be good for this
>> country."
>>
>> Susan: "What is so good about being a powerful country?"
>>
>> Terry: "It's all about oil."
>>
>> Another caller: "The U.S. is in search of an empire and it will fall
>> as the Romans did. Remember when Ali fought Foreman. He seemed asleep
>> but when he woke up he was ferocious. So will the people wake up."
>>
>> It is often said that this Administration can get away with war
>> because unlike Vietnam, the casualties are few. True, only a few
>> hundred battle casualties, unlike Vietnam. But battle casualties are
>> not all. When wars end, the casualties keep mounting up--sickness,
>> trauma. After the Vietnam War, veterans reported birth defects in
>> their families due to the Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam. In the
>> first Gulf War there were only a few hundred battle casualties, but
>> the Veterans Administration reported recently that in the ten years
>> following the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died. About 200,000 of the
>> 600,000 veterans of the Gulf War filed complaints about illnesses
>> incurred from the weapons our government used in the war. In the
>> current war, how many young men and women sent by Bush to liberate
>> Iraq will come home with related illnesses?
>>
>> What is our job? To point all this out.
>>
>> Human beings do not naturally support violence and terror. They do so
>> only when they believe their lives or country are at stake. These
>> were
>> not at stake in the Iraq War. Bush lied to the American people about
>> Saddam and his weapons. And when people learn the truth--as happened
>> in the course of the Vietnam War--they will turn against the
>> government. We who are for peace have the support of the rest of the
>> world. The United States cannot indefinitely ignore the ten million
>> people who protested around the world on February 15. The power of
>> government--whatever weapons it possesses, whatever money it has at
>> its disposal--is fragile. When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of
>> its people, its days are numbered.
>>
>> We need to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There
>> is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is
>> the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together
>> at critical points to create a power that governments cannot
>> suppress.
>> We find ourselves today at one of those critical points.
>> Howard Zinn, the author of "A People's History of the United States,"
>> is a columnist for The Progressive.
>>
>> http://www.progressive.org/oct03/zinn1003.html
>>
>> Take action: Support http://www.BringThemHomeNow.org
>> Families of our men and women sent by Bush for his oil war,
>> who we need to support by sending them back to their home country,
>> the
>> USA.
>>
>> = = = =
>> STILL FEELING LIKE THE MAINSTREAM U.S. CORPORATE MEDIA
>> IS GIVING A FULL HONEST PICTURE OF WHAT'S GOING ON?
>> = = = =
>>
>> Daily online radio show, news reporting: www.DemocracyNow.org
>>
>> = = = =
>>
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