Dissident Veteran For Peace: 935 Bush Lies & Are Palestinian Collaborators Jewish?

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

935 Bush Lies & Are Palestinian Collaborators Jewish?

Below are the two lead paragraphs from "False Pretenses" by Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of The Center for Public Integrity. They are not so crass as to refer to the "935 false statements" as lies but I am. I think any reasonably thoughtful and intelligent person realized at the time that Bush and pals were telling lies. That, of course, rules out most of the mainstream media and Congress.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

I was reading an article from an Israeli newspaper entitled "Palestinian collaborator: Terrorists only understand force". These two paragraphs from the end of the article shine an interesting light on why some people think some Palestinians collaborate (emphasis added):

Attorney Nathan Schreiber said he receives many requests for help from former collaborators who live in Sderot.

"Naturally they're very concerned about the situation. They may ethnically be Palestinians but there is Jewish blood in their veins. In my talks with them they keep saying that Israel is not doing enough to stop the Qassams. They follow the strife inside Gaza and have said that in their opinions – the rocket attacks will only stop once the factional violence in Gaza ceases."

Labels: Iraq, Israel, Palestine, War