Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Cowardly Hillary, Sen. Diane Feinstein - take on Flag-burning?? IGNORE vote fraud, war lies, Katrina corruption, BushCo thuggery????

OK, it is easy to caricature Cindy Sheehan. Some would argue that she has gone beyond 'obsessive" clear to manic-compulsive about the death of her son, Casey Sheehan, in the early stages of the Iraq war. There are the questions of her divorce from her husband, and also the question "where is Cindy's attention to her other children?" since she took up the cause of opposing the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan is way ahead of her time, like Martin Luther King, and, as with Rev. King when he was in jail or organizing some hopeless protest against murderous White supremacists, it is easy to focus on Cindy's weaknesses or political shortcomings.

THAT SAID, WHY is Cindy Sheehan, almost ALONE, taking on the LACK OF OUTRAGE in America to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney SQUANDERING of American lives, and BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars, in their folly in the Iraqi desert and here at home in the USA?

Contrary to months worth of Repuglican Bush-Cheney media PROPAGANDA, the Iraqis did not welcome us with open arms and flowers - as the video of American tankers pulling down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad illustrated, for most Iraqis it was a question of "down with the old boss, now meet the new boss."

Yet if Iraqis didn't embrace America with open arms, they were willing to at least suspend judgment until they could find out what America really had in store for their "land between the rivers." (For centuries, Iraqi culture has been defined by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and the ancients called that land "Mesopotamia," Greek for 'land between the rivers.')

Within a very short time, Iraqis had their answer: the US military posted guards on the Iraqi ministry of oil - - - and left the rest of Baghdad UNGUARDED, open to looters!

This lack of guards, order, and police was a DIRECT RESULT of Secretary Rumsfeld's DISBANDING of the Iraqi military, which men and officers would gladly have guarded their own homes and businesses had the US military provided even a modicum of support or legitimacy. But clearly Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney were out to HUMILIATE the Iraqi people - as Secretary of Rumsfeld said at the time (re LOOTING in the conquered capitol) "STUFF HAPPENS."

(And American elections are stolen, and the American treasury looted, and the president insists on a ONE-MONTH vacation as terrorists plot to attack American cities; and five years later America's chemical plants are still as vulnerable to sabotage or terror attacks as they were before 9-11.) STUFF HAPPENS!

The looting of Baghdad and post-invasion chaos in Iraq were NOT accidents or happenstance - they were the direct results of policies of NEGLECT and HUMILIATION by Secretary Rumsfeld, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney. You know, Mr. Bush's jingoistic sneer to Iraqis who might try to harm American troops "BRING IT ON!"

Indeed, another side of the "looting" story demonstrates just how awful, how atrocious, how pathetic was the American game-plan for post-conquest Iraq, for at the same time individual Iraqi looters were pillaging the great museums, hospitals and offices of Baghdad, teams of Iraqi insurgents were LOOTING UNGUARDED AMMUNITION BUNKERS of TONS of high explosives and explosive artillery shells. Some of those bunkers contained the NUCLEAR WEAPONS-GRADE EXPLOSIVES that were under seal by international weapons inspectors - yet Secretary Rusmfeld made NO EFFORT to secure those complexes!
(search for "Al Qaaqa ammunition complex")

Nothing illustrates THE LIE that America went to war in Iraq to find WMDs there better than the fact that Secretary of War Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and President George W. Bush WERE NOT THE LEAST BIT INTERESTED IN SECURING SADDAM's ammunition complexes, the locations where any such WMDs would have been stored!

Indeed (as fanciful as this sounds), the International Inspectors BEGGED the US military - both in Iraq and in Washington, D.C., to SECURE THE AMMUNITION BUNKERS. A request the Department of War under Donald Rumsfeld REFUSED to even consider, much less act upon.

For this ONE glaring case of leadership incompetence, alone, Secretary Rumsfeld should have been FIRED two years ago.

Instead, Iraqi insurgents carted off TONS of explosives to be used in their future insurgency - explosives that are NOW KILLING AMERICAN servicemen and women!

And the American Press, Media, public - and even informed Democratic Party 'opposition' 'leaders' - act as if "YAWN! IT IS PERFECTLY *NORMAL* TO DO NOTHING AS INSURGENTS CART OFF TONS OF EXPLOSIVES to use in future attacks to kill American soldiers and Marines."

CINDY SHEEHAN is about the only national figure consistently bringing up the Secretary's abject INCOMPETENCE - the callous, cruel and incompetent use of US men and women as pawns in the great Iraq oil-grab - to public attention.

SENATOR CLINTON, SENATOR FEINSTEIN - WHERE ARE YOU?

Why do YOU say NOTHING as Secretary Rusmfeld and the Bush administration lurch from one example of abject criminal incompetence, negligence, and DERELICTION OF DUTY to another? Where are YOU regarding the SADISM and HUMILIATION of the Abu Ghraib TORTURE SCANDAL? Or the use of Eastern European prisons - STALIN's GULAG - to torture and murder prisoners in American custody ????

Do YOU really believe that the naked men piled on each other... guard dogs unleashed on handcuffed prisoners.... guards mocking the corpses of dead prisoners - do you really believe all that happened at Abu Ghraib WITHOUT the orders and knowledge of superior officers?? Do you not know that then Assistant Secretary of War PAUL WOLFOWITZ personally toured Abu Ghraib, just weeks before the torture and sadism photos from Abu Ghraib became world-infamous?

How about the BILLIONS spent on post-Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans, almost all of the money being pocketed by Halliburton and other large, administration-connected contractors - WITH NO MASTER PLAN for aiding the families who must still pay mortgages on homes that have been demolished or razed since the flooding there?

Cindy Sheehan is right: it is COWARDLY of Senators Feinstein and Clinton to sign on to the criminalization of flag burning, WHILE IGNORING the use, by the Bush administration, of men and women as PAWNS to their abject incompetence, corruption, and lies in the Iraq war. Mrs. Clinton, if you are so determined that the war in Iraq is THE JUST POLICY for America as a nation to pursue - WHY DON'T YOU ENCOURAGE *YOUR* DAUGHTER to participate in it?

We can't even recall the last time we saw a photo of Americans burning a flag in protest, and since at times that flag has stood for SLAVERY, the SLAVE TRADE, and even at times the genocidal breaking of treaties with native tribes (Cherokee Trail of Tears, other ethnic-cleansing campaigns against native tribes, including their wholesale extermination from large swaths of California), we could hardly consider a symbolic burning of a flag in protest as a crime against humanity.

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<< The star spangled banner has been in the news quite a lot lately. Some "courageous" Senators, including one of my own, Dianne Feinstein and everyone's favorite left-wing liberal, Hillary Clinton, BRAVELY STUCK THEIR NECKS OUT out to support an amendment that would make it illegal to burn the flag of the USA under certain circumstances.

Heaven forbid one of these pusillanimous public servants introduce, or even support a bill, that would call for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq -- or to even require that the President set a timeline for the withdrawal of our troops from a deadly quagmire of an occupation while they are handing him more money to wage the war crime in Iraq. As our nation's children are trying to only survive in the worst of circumstances, and by surviving are committing reprehensible atrocities on an innocent population which (especially in Ramadi right now) is having bombs burst in air all around them, that our Senate would even consider taking away first amendment rights from Americans is wretchedly ironic. Call me naive, but I always thought that we elected our representatives to protect our rights, not take them away from us. >>




Bombs Bursting in Air

A Buzzflash Guest contribution
by Cindy Sheehan, Gold Star Families for Peace
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/07/con06285.html

The rockets red glare,
Bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that
Star spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free,
And the home of the brave.

The star spangled banner has been in the news quite a lot lately. Some "courageous" Senators, including one of my own, Dianne Feinstein and everyone's favorite left-wing liberal, Hillary Clinton, bravely stuck their necks out to support an amendment that would make it illegal to burn the flag of the USA under certain circumstances.

Heaven forbid one of these pusillanimous public servants introduce, or even support a bill, that would call for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq -- or to even require that the President set a timeline for the withdrawal of our troops from a deadly quagmire of an occupation while they are handing him more money to wage the war crime in Iraq. As our nation's children are trying to only survive in the worst of circumstances, and by surviving are committing reprehensible atrocities on an innocent population which (especially in Ramadi right now) is having bombs burst in air all around them, that our Senate would even consider taking away first amendment rights from Americans is wretchedly ironic. Call me naive, but I always thought that we elected our representatives to protect our rights, not take them away from us.

When I look at the star spangled banner I think of my son who began wearing a uniform with the flag on it from the time he went into scouting at the age of 6. I also think of one of the last pictures taken of Casey when he was awaiting deployment to Iraq from Kuwait. He was standing in a tent holding a bottle of water, wearing his desert cammies with an American flag patch on the chest. When we buried him a few weeks after that picture was taken, I was handed a folded flag which reminded me of the swaddling blanket that I wrapped him in to bring him home from the hospital almost 25 years before.

The star-spangled banner, which I can now see whipping in the wind outside of an airport terminal where I am writing this from does not fill me with pride: it fills me with shame and that flag symbolizes sorrow and corruption to me right now. The flag represents so much lying, fixed elections, profiting by the war machine, high gas prices, spying on Americans, rapid erosion of our freedoms while BushCo literally gets away with murder, torture and extreme rendition, contaminating the world with depleted uranium, and illegal and immoral wars that are responsible for killing so many. A symbol which used to represent hope to so many around the world now fills so many with disgust.

When I look at that rectangular piece of cloth that has red and white stripes and white stars on a blue field, I wonder what the Iraqi people think when they see American tanks and other vehicles rumbling through their streets carrying doom with that symbol emblazoned upon them. Or, what could our flag possibly represent to them when their women are being raped and burned to conceal crimes and entire families are being killed by soldiers whose uniforms carry that symbol? I am sure that the flag symbolizes death and destruction to them which I hope they are not confusing with freedom and democracy.

I often get told that I should "love America, or leave it." This is ridiculous logic and empty rhetoric. I love the country that I was born in and I love Americans -- I am an American and so are my children. Casey was born and died a fine American who was abused by the same leaders that are abusing the world as I type. I could leave if I wanted to and, in fact, have received many offers to be an expatriate in many friendly countries. However, I want to stay and fight for my country. I want my country and the flag that symbolizes it around the globe to stand for something that we can all be proud of again.

BushCo and the neocon regime embarked on this disastrous misadventure in Iraq to prove to the world how strong and virile Pax Americana is. Their abjectly failed mission, which was evil and corrupt from the beginning, has not proven how strong our nation is, but, on the contrary, how weak. However, the neocons have managed to prove, that how, with the "mightiest" war machine in the world an insurgency in a country smaller than the state of California can hold their false freedom and deadly democracy at bay. One other thing that the neocons have proven is that America is no longer the moral touchstone of the world but is a nation that commits torture and crimes against humanity with the presidential seal of approval. BushCo has destroyed any credibility our nation ever had in the world and all of us need to fight to regain it and thereby redeem our own souls.

I implore you, while you are enjoying your potato salad and fireworks on the 4th to reflect on what the star-spangled banner means to you. If our flag symbolizes the same thing to you as it does to the neocons, then by all means, enlist and go to Iraq to let some of our soldiers come home that are tired of suffering and committing war crimes for Halliburton, Dick and Donny.

If, however, you realize that the flag no longer waves "o'er the land of the free" and you would like it to again, we invite you to come out to Camp Casey this summer and help us fight for the heart and soul of our nation. If you realize that while you are "oohing and ahing" over the pretty fireworks in your home town that there are real bombs bursting on the people of Iraq, killing them and destroying their nation for no reason other than Dick Cheney wanted to, then you need to digest your 4th of July BBQ and get out and show Dicky and the world that we mean business when we say we want our troops to come home to save them and our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

Thousands of peace loving and war hating members of the human race from all over the world are planning on coming to Crawford, TX to Camp Casey again this summer to stand, sit, or camp in the face of the neocon war machine and prove to the world that there are Americans who will courageously speak for the people of Iraq and our soldiers who have no voices but who just want to be left in peace.

Come to Camp Casey.

We have room for everyone and everyone is welcome.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is also co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and author of Not One More Mother's Child and Dear President Bush.

Cindy Sheehan is returning to Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, this summer. Help us stop the insanity. Everyone is invited to Camp Casey this summer: www.gsfp.org.

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