Friends:
I will send my own analysis when I write it, but I thought it appropriate to send you some sentiments that express the situation clearly. The first is by Ralph Nader and is about Lebanon. The second is a rumination on what Tom Paine would have said about George Bush. Hm, at the time the despot was George III of England. I think Georgie is our third President named George. The first was O.K., so far as I can tell, but the last two – well, maybe it’s about time to stop letting people named George run things.
P.S.: I understand, from Public Radio International, that bird flu is still rampaging Indonesia, death toll reaching 47 this year, so be careful!
Finally, comments are welcome!
*ZNet | U.S.*
*Bush -- "Take Your Time"*
*by Ralph Nader; August 23, 2006*
Open letter to President George W. Bush:
The widespread destruction of a defenseless Lebanon -- its
civilians, its life-sustaining public services, its environment
-- is a grim and indelible testament to your consummate cruelty
and ignorance. Nearly two weeks ago when your tardy Secretary of
State met with the Israeli Prime Minister, the message she
carried was summarized in a large headline across page one of an
Israeli newspaper, "TAKE YOUR TIME."
Yes, take your time, says George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing
refugees in cars full of families, bombing apartment buildings,
hospitals and the poor huddled in large south Beirut slums.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, in destroying bridges,
roads, gasoline stations, airports, seaports, wheat silos,
vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked ambulances taking
the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory .
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while shelters are
demolished with bodies of little children together with their
mothers and fathers buried in the rubble.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while the number of fleeing
refugees nears one million Lebanese, many exposed to hunger,
disease, lack of potable water and medicines. All this in a
country friendly to the United States, which played by your
rules, protested the Syrian army back into Syria and was trying
democratically to put itself together.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while he speeds more
supplies of precision missiles containing deadly anti-personnel
cluster bombs which will claim the lives of innocent children
for years into the future. The phosphorous bombs laying waste to
fields growing crops and horribly burning innocents come from
the U.S.A. under your direction.
Do you think the taxpayers of America would approve of such
shipped weapons were they ever asked?
Are there words in the English language suitable for the
impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in
committing not only in Iraq but also now through your
encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli
government?
Are there words to describe your strategic stupidity which will
further increase opposition and peril to the United States
around the world and especially in the Middle East? Your own
Generals and former CIA Director, Porter Goss, among others in
your Administration, have declared that your occupation of Iraq
is a magnet attracting the recruiting and training of more and
more "terrorists" from Iraq and other countries. And so now this
will be the case in Lebanon. All this is a growing "blowback,"
to use the CIA word for a boomeranging foreign policy, that is
endangering the security of the United States.
The calibrated Israeli terror bombing of Lebanon comes in three
stages. With its electronic pinpoint precision bombing and
artillery, the Israeli government goes after civilians, their
homes, cities, towns and villages.
Then after telling some to abandon their neighborhoods, it cuts
population centers off from each other by destroying
transportation facilities into and inside Lebanon, making both
refugee flight and delivery of emergency relief efforts either
impossible or very difficult. Then its planes, tanks and
artillery endanger or destroy what food, water and relief
efforts manage to get through to the injured and dying.
Warehouse food supplies are incinerated. About four hundred
small fishing boats north of Beirut on the oil-polluted
coastline were demolished as well.
All the above mayhem and much more have been reported in the
U.S., European, Lebanese and Israeli media. The bulk of the
fatalities in Lebanon have been civilians. The bulk of the
fatalities on the Israeli side have been soldiers. Very
fortunately for the Israelis, the Hezbollah rockets are very
inaccurate, the vast majority falling harmlessly. Unfortunately
for the Lebanese, the precision American armaments of the
Israelis are very accurate, which serves to account for why the
total casualties and physical destruction are 100 times greater
in Lebanon than in Israel.
Most of these accurate munitions come from your decision to send
them. Knowing they will be used for offensive purposes,
including the lethal demolition of a long-established UN
compound, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which you
have sworn to uphold, places the responsibility of being a
domestic law breaker squarely on your shoulders.
There is another law that is not being enforced -- the
Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act of 1996 sponsored by then
Republican Senator Robert Dole. Foreign aid is supposed to be
cut off to any nation that obstructs the provision of
humanitarian aid to another country. As one example, press
reports that two tankers, each with 30,000 tons of diesel fuel
critical for operating Lebanese hospitals and water pumping
stations, are idling in Cyprus from fear of the totally dominant
Israeli navy and air force.
There are only a few days left of fuel in Lebanon, which is
heading for a larger wave of secondary casualties. They and
other critical suppliers need safe passage which the U.S. Navy
in the area can readily provide, should it receive orders from
the Commander in Chief.
You heard high Israeli officials accurately say on the day the
massive bombing of Lebanon began, followed not preceded by
Hezbollah rockets, that "nothing in Lebanon is safe." That huge
over-reaction to the recent Hezbollah border raid, in addition
to many more previous air, sea and land border violations by the
Israeli government, certainly put you on public notice.
Since you view yourself as a reborn Christian, and since you
have the power to stop the Israeli state terror assaults on
Lebanon, you may wish to reflect on Leviticus 19:16 "Neither
shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor." Lebanon was
a friendly country to you and you have stood by not just idly,
but willfully aiding and abetting its devastation.
*ZNet | U.S.*
*What Might Tom Paine Have Said About George Bush?*
*by Sherwood Ross; August 23, 2006*
Peculiarly, a lot of what American patriot Tom Paine wrote in
1775 about the British Crown seems to apply to President Bush today.
For example, Paine believed, "any excuse can be made to serve
the purpose of malignity when it is in power." And when ever was
there a more deceitful example of this than Bush's lie that Iraq
had WMD?
As historian John Keane wrote in his excellent "Tom Paine: A
Political Life" (Little, Brown and Co.) despots --- as Paine saw
them- plunder "the pockets and lives of their subjects, since
that is the most effective way of raising and feeding armies and
making their subjects afraid, obedient, and willing to pay
taxes. Wars between despotic states thereby tend to increase
rulers' lust for power over their own populations. War, wrote
Paine, is 'the art of conquering at home.'" (Original italics.)
And so we are, indeed, conquered at home. We live under a regime
that can arrest and imprison any of us for as long as it likes,
one that denies our privacy, scraps our international treaties,
and shreds our Bill of Rights.
Having been given no honest reason for launching the war on
Iraq, the real reason most probably is oil, just as Paine wrote
the reason King George III made war on America was because "her
crime is property."
As President Bush confiscates our taxes for Iraq, and squanders
the lives of our troops, let's recall Paine's words about the
crimes of the Crown: "Hath your property been destroyed before
your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie
on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by
their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor?"
These words ring true in thousands of American homes tonight,
where loved ones have been killed or maimed in Iraq; where
millions of people are sliding into poverty as a result of
Bush's anti-compassionate policies; and where 40-million people
have no health coverage. The bell tolls even louder for millions
of Iraqi families whose nation Bush has turned into a veritable
charnel house.
And what would Tom Paine have made of the wanton cruelty that
George Washington forbid his soldiers to engage in but can now
be described as "routine" under Commander-in-Chief George Bush's
military?
"It is time to have done with tarring, feathering, carting and
taking securities for their future good behaviour," Paine wrote
charitably of British sympathizers. "Every sensible man must
feel conscious shame at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show
about the streets." What Paine might have said of men stacked in
human pyramids or hung from chains until dead!
Paine inveighed against the death penalty. Condemning the
excesses of the French Revolution, he said, "as France has been
the first of European nations to abolish royalty, let her also
be the first to abolish the punishment of death, and to find out
a milder and more effective substitute." What would he have said
about the ever-sizzling Texas electric chair under Governor Bush?
As for all citizens bearing government's burden equally, Pain's
view was very different from President Bush's call to ditch the
"death tax." According to Keane: Believing as Paine did the
earth is "the common property of the human race," it followed
"the propertied have an obligation to help the poor, not by
charity alone, but by accepting a government-administered
inheritance tax system designed to redistribute and equalize
income."
As for Bush's boasting about "freedom," let us recall these
words by Paine: "When it shall be said in any country in the
world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to
be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets
of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not
oppressive'--- when these things can be said then may that
country boast of its constitution and its government."
With two million men in jail, and the poor growing by the
millions, Bush has precious little to boast about. Speaking of
jails, when do you suppose Bush might pardon the hundreds of
thousands of Americans imprisoned on flimsy marijuana
convictions while he, who tramples the law of nations, whose
tongue spills lies, and whose hands drip with the blood of
hundreds of thousands, enjoys the run of the White House?