- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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!
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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).
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The illegal, disastrous (to both Iraqis
and Americans) Iraq war is now almost three years of quagmire old. The
chaos and bloodshed are worsening.
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- 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.
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