- When did our esteemed men become such moral pygmies?
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- Whenever a nation careens from the ideals of her founders,
when her leaders heed instead the bidding of a select few, becoming indeed
a nation in service of the highest bidder, the result is a catalogue of
crimes posing as a republic. The Constitution, both bulwark and fragile
parchment, becomes a museum piece then, a remnant of an abandoned ideal
mourned by the many, yet secretly scorned and ridiculed by the few who
usurped power in her place but cynically cloak themselves in her quotable
fragments.
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- When did American statesmanship mean befriending foreign
dictators, and beholden to shadowy powerbrokers, both here and abroad?
Was it by design or default, this gradual embrace of dictators? Was it
by intention or indifference we increasingly support shadowy operations,
acceptance of lies, fabrication of evidence, intimidation of whistleblowers,
all the while obfuscating capital crimes and lauding major criminals?
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- Did it begin with the burgeoning growth of the CIA, the
decay of the FBI, or simply the capitulation of key government bureaucracies
like the <http://www.airline-crash-aviation-lawyer.com/html/ntsb.html>NTSB
? For example, the cover up of major acts of air terrorism - the shooting
down of <http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/TWA/twa.html>TWA
Flight 800 and the sabotage of John Kennedy Jr's airplane - metastasized
into something far more serious, the occurrence and cover up of the WTC
destruction and the needless murder of 3,000 American citizens.
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- Certainly the failure of the White House, CIA, FBI, NORAD
to prevent the attack, and the malfeasance at the crash site by the NTSB
to properly investigate, remains a major crime. What will the ìBlack
Boxesî of history, the secret <http://www.soton.ac.uk/~sjcd/cvr.htm>Cockpit
Voice recorders of our society tell us when opened and examined in the
future? Was this altered course only a temporary loss of control, only
a brief glitch of moral decay, or the evident, final plunge followed by
the horrendous crash of our republic?
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- What is a war criminal? Why can't we ask such questions
in our so-called, polite society? <http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm>Is
Henry Kissinger a War Criminal? Am I? By any definition, Robert McNamara,
Madeline Albright, Henry Kissinger and maybe even Donald Rumsfeld, would
all qualify as war criminals. Which of our American war criminals - honored
yet never indicted - were the worst? If we dared to ask the question, we
might not like the answer. No matter: history will ask the question for
us and, if objective, will provide the convictions if not the death sentences.
Anyway, we have all the evidence we need at the doorstep of the Senate.
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- How many more miles of black granite war memorials will
suffice to remember the fallen soldiers of failed foreign policy? Truthfully,
if an inscribed memorial wall were constructed for the foreign victims
of these same policies, the black granite monolith would encircle Washington
DC. The men who inspired the wall, however, have presidential libraries,
although few ever come to read there. Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and
both Bushes actually have a more fitting monument at <http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/cia.htm>The
CIA: headquarters where their indictment awaits. Inscribed in stone are
the Biblical words that will convict them in heaven if not on earth: 'And
ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.' For those less
fortunate, however, headstones or mass graves are their legacy.
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- Speaking of truth, why is it in such short supply? Was
it always so? From Fox to the New York Times, the media dances around the
truth but rarely alights. To which loyalty do men like Rupert Murdoch most
serve? <http://www.cofc.edu/~fennoj/RomCiv/Circuses.htm>Bread and
Circuses, Yes, personal wealth and power, evidently; but must truth be
so maligned in the process? Why do respected men like Colin Powell swerve
from the facts, serve outright liars, refuse to admit error, in the vain
hope to remain untainted? Perhaps we cannot expect much virtue or unvarnished
truth from pragmatic men like Cheney, Perle or Bush, but how much whitewash
must a man of color apply to lies before he becomes morally invisible?
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- If the business of America is doing business, then the
clearest definition of the CIA is a covert, businessmanís club.
Imagine the Masons or the Elks with far fewer morals and vastly more guns.
Rumsfeldís infamous handshake ( <http://www.war-criminal.com/>war-criminal
.com ) with the Hitlerian Saddam Hussein was simply that of one paramilitary
businessman to another. The accord signified the acceptance of bloody deeds
done with American arms and more to come. Dead Kurds and Shiites? Like
Salvadorans and Guatemalans before them, they were simply corporate assets
that had to be liquidated from time to time. Perhaps nothing better illustrates
the cynical, textbook immorality of our US government foreign policy for
the past forty years than the Reagan/Bush Iran-Contra double deal, and
the subsequent playing of Iraq and Iran against each other. The ploy worked
well. More than half a million Iranian and Iraqi men were massacred, about
the same time Saddam shook the hand of Americaís envoy. But that
was business as usual, courtesy the State Department, White House and the
CIA.
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- Let No Law, Whether of God or Man, Stand in the Way of
the Almighty Dollar. This alone should be taught at our ivy-covered business
schools; for is it not the motto of foreign policy leaders? The stolen
presidential election of 2000 was simply business as usual, the bastard
descendent of the coup dí tat that removed one leaderóKennedy--for
another, more malleable one in 1963. Let no leader arise that may--like
Hamlet avenging the death of his father--ascend to power, lest our shadowy,
<http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/world/awaken/skullandbones.htm>Skull
and Bones Society form of government find a way to remove the threat,
ìAssassination by aviationî, as those in the know would say.
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- Will history record the last half century in the following
terms: American Caesar: Fifty Years of Imperial Presidents? Those Americans
who cherish the notion of the <http://www.occis.com/cis/civiceducation/Values/Four_Freedoms/four_freedoms.html>Four
Freedoms , however quaint, should never abdicate the cause, although others
apparently have. Those who call themselves our leaders, serve other masters.
Crass men who have compromised the country and enriched themselves and
their cronies, stand at <http://www.savagenet.com/oz/>Ozymandias'
Tomb, surrounded by the wreckage they've caused and on the wrong side of
history.
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- Douglas Herman, essayist and itinerant artist and fisherman,
author of the much reprinted <http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/herman/herman3.html>Achtung!
Are We the New Nazis?, is a student of history and the use of rhetorical
questions for philosophical purposes.
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