George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two top outlaws smashing our
country's rule of law and democratic liberties, are testing
the American people's resistance. Every day they are testing.
Every day they think by flaunting the words, "war on terror",
they can get Americans to concede more and more of what makes
the United States a constitutionally-abiding government under
the rule of law.
You know what? With not enough exceptions, they are right.
Day by day, we're giving up what our forefathers fought to
bequeath us since that famous Declaration of Independence of
1776. They were determined that people in this country would
not be arrested without charges and jailed indefinitely, that
they would not be tortured, or sent to be tortured in
dictatorial regimes, or deprived of habeas corpus to take
their incarceration to our courts of law, or be snooped on at
the whim of the President and his deputies or that people in
faraway lands would be destroyed in the tens of thousands due
to a fabricated war-invasion-quagmire.
They instituted a constitution so that people would not be
jailed without "probable cause", or be lied to about taking
this country and its soldiers to war, or have shoved aside
the checks and balances represented by American courts and
the Congress. All these are being done by two pro-Vietnam war
draft dodgers!
What does all this tell you about all of us out there in the
great United States of America? A giant yawn of "who cares"
by citizens, nearly two-thirds of whom now have turned
against these two White House fabricators in poll after poll
regarding the war, the surrender to Big Business, the gross
incompetence in managing taxpayer dollars and the Katrina
disaster.
But listen, the rumble of resistance and opposition is
getting louder and not just from the increasing number of
public demonstrations around the country.
A new Zogby poll reports that 72% of American soldiers
serving in Iraq think the U.S. should get out within the next
year, including 58% of the Marines! Three-quarters of
National Guard and Reserve units support withdrawal within 6
months. Every month, more former high-ranking military
officers, intelligence officials and diplomats are declaring
their opposition to the war.
For a few examples of many: Retired four-star General, Joseph
P. Hoar, who commanded the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf
after the 1991 war, described the Iraq war as "wrong from the
beginning". Similar tough criticism has come from John
Deutch, former head of the CIA, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national
security advisor to President Carter and Brent Scowcroft,
national security advisor to the first President Bush.
Retired General William Odom, former head of the National
Security Agency and security adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote
that the Iraq war "is serving the interests of Osama bin
Laden, the Iranians, and is fomenting civil war in Iraq." He
describes the Iraq war as "the most strategic foreign policy
disaster in U.S. history."
More recently, internal memos of criticism or dissent,
Inspector General reports from Defense the Justice
Department, and former highly-positioned staff within the
Bush Administration, like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief
of staff to Colin Powell, are taking apart the public
relations sheen concocted by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triad.
Now comes the conservative American Bar Association--400,000
lawyers--whose House of Delegates has overwhelmingly approved
a task force report accusing President Bush, in polite legal
language, of violating both the Constitution and federal law.
ABA President Michael S. Greco sent it to Mr. Bush with a
cover letter dated February 13, 2006 (see
www.abanet.org/op/domsurv for the full report).
The mass media, which has finally produced many exposes of
the Bush war, ignored the significance of this condemnation
by the nation's largest body of lawyers, written in part by
attorneys who have served in the FBI, CIA and NSA. It should
have been page one news.
There comes a tipping point, however, when the opposition of
the establishment, the public opinion of the citizenry, the
disgust of the soldiers--their spreading casualties, diseases
and mental traumas - and the corruption of the large
corporate contractors to whom much of the military's
functions have been outsourced, all congeal and overcome the
cowardliness of most members of Congress. Then a surge of
Congressional followers and allies of Rep. John Murtha
(D-PA), war veteran and leading voice against the Bush Iraq
policies, will come to the forefront.
The illegal, disastrous (to both Iraqis and Americans) Iraq
war is now almost three years of quagmire old. The chaos and
bloodshed are worsening.
It is time to make the spring of 2006 the tipping point
period for constitutionalism, justice and a sane foreign and
national security policy. More yawns must turn into growls
from outside Washington, DC. See
http://www.DemocracyRising.USfor more information.
