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Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night
In his special
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and Holocaust survivor Eli Pfefferkorn. What Raul Hilberg, the
Holocaust's greatest historian, really thinks about Wiesel's
"Night". Also
in this special issue: Is Hugo Chavez Hitler or Father Christmas?
Larry Lack tells the full story of Venezuela's hand-outs to Uncle
Sam's Shivering Poor. Plus, Jeffrey St Clair profiles the Endangered
Visigoth and traces the rise and possible fall of Rick Pombo,
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Now!
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.US
for more information.
Finally
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
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