Pro-American = Anti-BushCo
By Cindy Sheehan
I (and every single other individual on this planet working for peace and justice) am often accused of being "anti-American" for dissenting against my feral government that has gone wild with lawlessness and greed; even though dissent from our government is as American as apple pie. Some people believe that if one is critical of the Bush criminal regime, then one is anti-American.
I steadfastly believe that to be anti-BushCo means being pro-American; pro-life; and most of all: pro-peace.
In a recent article in the Boston Globe (Sun, April 30) the Bush regime is blamed for breaking or giving itself permission to break over 750 laws. George is the only sitting president to have admitted to breaking laws and for openly disdaining the constitution as an "old scrap of paper." How can we peaceniks be accused of being anti-American when the squatter in the Oval Office has no respect for the supreme law of the land? But of course, 9/11 changed the world and we are a nation "at war" so George thinks he can do whatever he wants even though he is the one who made us a nation at war with his lies and deceptions. I will stipulate that the constitution is a deeply flawed document, but the founders realized this and gave we future generations ways to amend it and one of the ways to amend it is not just "cuz the president says so." He may be the decider but he is not the amender.
Extreme rendition and torture are being authorized from the top and carried out in the name of the American people. A recent Amnesty International report calls torture "widespread" for people in US captivity. CIA trained black operatives have even bragged how inhuman and brutal that water-boarding is and gave a high level terrorist his persecution props for being able to last over two minutes. In this particularly lovely form of torture, a person has cellophane wrapped around his mouth and nose and tipped at an angle so water pours over his face--thus creating the feeling of drowning--so to avoid choking, the prisoner succumbs. Our own torturers, who have to go through the ropes, can last for only a few seconds in this torture. Add the sexual depravation practiced on the prisoners with the tormenting of some prisoners by flushing the Koran and so forth: then not only is the humanity of the tortured broken, but the torturer also becomes lower than an animal. I used to watch a lot of Animal Planet but I have never seen nor heard of a four legged creature torturing another four legged creature. However, as long as we Americans condone this behavior from the ones who authorize such viciousness from the top, we are the torturers also. We become the thing that we abhor.
George, Condi, Rummy, Dicky, Wolfie, Colin, et al., went on a media blitz of propaganda before the invasion. We all know now that they were lying and knew they were lying when they told us that Saddam had wmd and would use them on America--he had a fleet of remote control planes that could be deployed to the US at a moment's notice--the smoking gun could come in the shape of a mushroom cloud—Powell pointed out where the wmd were hidden on the map—Saddam was trying to buy yellow-cake uranium from Niger—on and on and on. By the time that the US military began to use wmd on the people of Iraq, we all knew that BushCo were full of camel manure and we watched in horrified, near silence, as the people of Fallujah were burned beyond recognition by white phosphorous and enhanced napalm.
Not withstanding the crimes against our own constitution and the crimes against humanity that BushCo have executed, the assassins with a governmental seal of approval attached, pay lip service to being anti-abortion. The people who run things into the ground for us are nothing about being pro-life. I wonder how our fellow citizens who say that they are pro-life reconcile the fact that their government has massacred thousands of innocent Iraqis, many of whom are mothers, children, babies and unborn babies. These harmless victims have not only been killed by bombs, bullets, shrapnel, but they have been killed by a lack of clean water, medicine, and basic medical care. We can't expect the people who bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors to care about the babies of Iraq and will even say: "we have to fight them over there, so we don't fight them over here," but I have to believe that the average American, warnik or not, has to have compassion for the suffering of Iraqi citizens whose only crime is to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Iraqi woman that I have met here in the states is a doctor who works in the Baghdad morgue, she told me that at least 1600 bodies come through her morgue per month. This is just in Baghdad.
Many of my friends voted for George in the 2004 election telling me that he is "pro-life," My answer to them is that George is "pro-birth" and once the baby gets out, he has no problem with subjecting them to inadequate education, health care, clean environment, jobs and, then to boot, killing them in war. If George was truly pro-life, Casey and legions of people would still be alive. Life is life: born and unborn. The corporations in Iraq are the things that need to be aborted. Bring the war profiteers home, save the children.
Dr. Martin Luther King said that if we do not practice non-violent co-existence, we will have to suffer mutual annihilation. With Bush being such a lame duck and under threat of the domino theory of indictment, I shudder to think of the continued war in Iraq and the future wars that he will begin just to bolster his sense of failure and lack of self confidence to insanely insure his place in history. Even he must know that he will not be judged kindly by future historians. It is terribly frightening to think of what a person like this is capable of especially when there are so many bad men with their hands in the profitable cookie jar who are pulling his strings and when he is willing to go along as a willing puppet with the neocon PNAC flow and as a corporate whore to the war profiteers.
If we want to have a viable future to leave as a legacy to our children and the children of the world, BushCo must be stopped, not supported and funded by a Congress who is getting their strings pulled by the same malevolent puppeteers that pull the chains of corporate greed of the executive branch.
We need to shut down the war machine and realize that to feed that monster our country has to be, and has been, at constant war with some country or the other, especially since WWII. It is a fact of life, whether Republican or Democrat in power, we are suppressing and killing other people to make the world safe for our corporations. To help facilitate the spread of the contaminated semen of "Planet America" the leader of every country that stands up to the corporate America are being demonized and are ripe for BushCo to bring them "freedom and democracy" which is really just a Trojan Horse carrying genocide and destruction.
How do we throw a monkey wrench into the war machine? We join boycotts, such as the one against Exxon/Mobil. We buy gas from President Chavez and Venezuela's Citgo to help him in his struggle against corporate America—not against Americans. Hugo Chavez has done more to help the less fortunate citizens in our Northeast and Katrina victims than BushCo who have shown themselves quite adept at fiddling while the world is burning and enriching themselves in the blood soaked process.
Unfortunately, BushCo does symbolize everything that America is about, but they do not have to. We the people of the United States in order to secure a more perfect union need to vociferously and with everything we have stand up to the traitors in power and redefine, if not reclaim, what it means to be Americans. For me, it means living in a country where health care, education, human rights, jobs, peace and prosperity are readily available, not just to the rich white ruling class, but to everyone! This is pro-American. Torture, committing atrocities on a helpless people, and honoring and protecting the life of corporate America above human life are not.
And by the way, if an imminent attack on Iran does not frighten you, think WWIII.
Be pro-American. Urge your congressman, whether he/she is Republican or Democrat, to stand up for our country by supporting articles of impeachment against BushCo. November will be too late for too many people.
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