*submitted by a NYU student active in World Can’t Wait*
‘The
Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a
fascist way, and for generations to come.’
The
past year has been clearly defined by a coherent and malicious agenda pushed
consistently by the President and the President’s men, kept under the radar of
the American public.
YOUR GOVERNMENT,
on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate
war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
Nobel-prize-winning author Harold Pinter has called the war
in Iraq ‘an act of blatant state terrorism) an arbitrary military action
inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and
therefore of the public.’
In the past year the Bush administration admitted what the
world knew before the war began. There
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Not only was the intelligence ‘dead wrong’, but it has subsequently been
exposed that the administration knew this before the March 2003 invasion. First, the Italian government explicitly
warned the Bush administration that claims Iraq was trying to purchase uranium
from Niger were false. Soon after, the
Defense Intelligence Agency warned the administration that the condemning
information on Iraq’s alleged WMD program provided by Ibn Shaykh al-Libi had
been obtained by way of torture.
A malicious attempt to squelch Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s
pre-war questioning of the Iraq intelligence, by outing and seriously
endangering his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, has now been linked to the
highest levels of the administration.
While this has led only to the indictment of Cheney’s chief to staff
Lewis Libby it is clear that others, including Karl Rove, were equally
complicit.
Across the political spectrum, Americans have charged the
administration with deliberately lying to the American public; with first using
torture to generate faulty information, then using that information to justify
torture in a war that has to date killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis, and
2177 US troops. Bush and Cheney have
since accused their critics of being ‘irresponsible’ in a time of war, while
simultaneously admitting this war has no foreseeable end.
It was discovered this year that to compensate for the
Iraqis’ lack of WMDs we brought in our own.
Nerve gas, mustard gas, and the internationally-banned chemical burning
agent ‘white phosphorus’ were admittedly used in the ‘battle of Fallujah.’ The administration’s claim to know of ‘no
cases where people were deliberately targeted,’ only makes some sense after
seeing the images: women, men, and children with melted faces and scorched,
deformed bodies. This war crime would
only be possible on the basis of denial of Iraqis’ humanity.
The dictator we once supported has been ousted and in his
place we have set up an occupation force of homesick adolescents who have been
coerced to torture by a homophobic, hypocritical and chauvinist military
culture as much as by high-level commands.
As in 2005 the international ‘coalition of the willing’ diminished, our
troops have been bolstered by hired mercenaries and the US has been training
what can only be termed Iraqi counter-terrorism militias (separate from the
Iraqi army and police) to battle the insurgency.
The threatened, corrupt and ill-equipped Iraqi security and
police force has recently been accused of torture in Iraqi prisons, and the US
has therefore refused to turn over the Iraqi prison system to Iraqis until it
is in compliance with the standards of international law that we ourselves
consistently ignore.
Three US officials have thus far been charged with graft in
handling Iraq’s reconstruction. Control
of Iraqi oil has been contracted out to US and other foreign corporations, and
the ex-manager of VP Cheney’s very own Halliburton has been indicted on 10
counts of fraud.
The Blackwater mercenary company has been able to profit
directly from war, with the head of Blackwater stating this year that
‘terrorists need to get creamed,’ and that ‘it’s fun, meaning satisfying, to do
the shooting of such folk.’
We have increased equality in Iraq only insofar as we have
given a broader range of Iraqis equal access to poverty and abuse. Iyad Allawi,
Iraq’s former Prime Minister, has stated that the human rights abuses today are
as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein.
Child malnutrition has doubled since the invasion, and a 2005 Amnesty
International report has stated that ‘the lawlessness and increased killings,
abductions, and rapes that followed the overthrow of the government of Saddam
Hussein have restricted women’s freedom of movement and their ability to go to
school or to work.’
In last year’s Iraqi elections, Sunni voter turnout was as
low as 2% in some areas, and while voter turnout was up across the board in the
most recent elections, there have been at least 100 allegations of election
fraud. This despite the patronizing
attempts of the US military to give Iraqis democracy-training-lessons.
An ABC news poll this year found that more than 2/3 of
Iraqis now oppose the presence of US troops in their country. Other polls have generated higher
numbers. Yet while Bush recently
proposed the withdrawal of a small number of troops in 2006, in the past year
the number of airstrikes in the country has increased five-fold. Our ‘exit
strategy,’ if we do in fact leave Iraq, appears to be one of simultaneous
hit-and-run.
Afghanistan had been effectively wiped from the national
consciousness by 2002, in which year we spent more money funding faith-based
initiatives than on reconstruction in that country. Post-invasion Afghanistan was reported in 2005 to have a 26
percent literacy rate and a 44 year life expectancy. A recent UN report has stated that the invasion of what is now
the sixth-poorest country in the world has led to a climate of ‘fear, intimidation,
terror, and lawlessness.’
While the war-drumming rhetoric has been employed
unashamedly in reference to Iran and Syria, the material steps taken towards
war have been less transparent. In the
past year, it was reported in the New Yorker
that secret US troops have been sent to Iran, and the US has been
covertly flying surveillance drones in Iranian airspace.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing
people, and justifying it.
‘These practices are
not just the product of a few bad apples) but very much the product of policy
decisions taken at the most senior levels of government,’ said Human Rights
Watch Director Kenneth Roth in 2005.
The Bush
administration has, in the past year, both denied our use of torture, and
simultaneously advocated its expansion.
Rumsfeld has claimed that forcing prisoners to stay standing for more
than 12 hours is not so different than his propensity to stand while working.
The lawyer of an Abu Ghraib defendant has compared US troops’ stacking naked
Iraqi men in a pyramid to the pyramids formed in cheerleading routines. Bush has said, and McClellan and Rice have
repeated, ‘we do not torture.’ If these
comments are taken in contrast to the administration’s recent push to expand
the range of acceptable interrogation techniques to include many currently
defined as torture, it’s clear that the Bush administration has set up an
effective system of 1984 doublethink.
In the past year,
the CIA, the military, and the FBI have been accused of using torture as well
as of using medical doctors to aid in the development of torture
techniques. Although an FBI report this
year concluded that information obtained by way of torture is ‘suspect at
best,’ (a finding which was blacked out in the initially-released report) we
have not only sought to expand torture’s definition, but also begun exporting
it. It has been discovered in the past year that by way of ‘extraordinary
rendititon’ we have shipped hundreds of terror suspects to countries in which
torture is legal, or to secret CIA soviet-era prisons in Europe, likely in
Poland or Romania.
The Republican chair
of the Senate Intelligence Committee opposed any investigation into allegations
of overseas CIA abuse, yet several European countries have recently launched
investigations into their own countries’ complicity in secret CIA
renditions. In Iraq and around the
world, CIA interrogations have been tied to the deaths of scores of detainees,
including ‘ghost detainees’ — those whom the US has kept in undocumented
custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
‘The principle once
believed to be unassailable–the inherent right to physical integrity and
dignity of a person–is becoming a casualty of this so-called war on
terrorism,’ the UN’s top human rights official said this year. Yet, in an expression of complete disregard
for the severity of these allegations, Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales, who
refused to answer questions about his role in justifying the policies that led
to the Abu Grahib torture scandals, to replace Ashcroft as Attorney General.
Your government
puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either
holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
In the past two weeks, the Bush administration has admitted to engaging
in a far-reaching program of spying on US citizens. Yet the most recent revelations were only the last in a long
chain of executive civil liberties violations to which we seem to be becoming
desensitized.
The year began with what was described by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon
as ‘a huge leap without even a congressional hearing’ — measures allowing
information to be more readily shared between the FBI, the CIA, and the
Pentagon, which would allow any one of those agencies to begin compiling a file
on any individual.
By this year, the number of submitted national security letters, which
can be used to force businesses to hand over information about citizens not
directly related to a terrorism investigation, has increased from 300 to
300,000 annually.
It has been revealed recently that, despite Congress’s explicit
prohibition of government wiretapping of domestic phone calls without the
approval of a FISA court (a court which has rejected fewer than 1 percent of
the warrant requests submitted to it since its inception), the Bush
administration has been secretly wiretapping without judicial oversight. This revelation led FISA Judge James
Robertson to resign in protest.
NBC recently exposed that, in a throwback to the Cointel Program of the
1960’s, the Department of Defense has been compiling an extensive database of
activist activities within the United States.
Most of the incidents recorded in the portions of the database which
have been released were peaceful anti-war, anti-recruitment, and anti-nuclear
groups and protests, many at schools, all of which were labeled ‘threats’ to
security.
In the wake of these revelations of government over-reaching, the
controversial PATRIOT Act was extended only temporarily, giving Congress an
opportunity to reconsider its grants of surveillance powers. While the PATRIOT Act provisions now pale in
light of the newest government surveillance revelations, one of the provisions
of the 492-page document grants the government to the right to perform secret
sneak and peek searches, and to obtain personal records without warrants,
without prior or post-fact notification of the searched.
In past week it has been revealed that 100 Muslim-owned homes, mosques,
and businesses in the DC area have been monitored by the government for their
radiation levels. Such monitoring was
also carried out in several other cities, all without a search warrant or any
sort of judicial approval.
This President is the first to have openly admitted to what is clearly
an impeachable offense, without being even remotely held accountable. Two weeks ago, President Bush stated
clearly, ‘I authorized the NSA, consistent with US law and the Constitution, to
intercept the international communications of people with known links to al
Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.’
‘It is clear,’ said Ann Beeson of the ACLU, ‘that the administration
has engaged every possible agency, from the Pentagon to the NSA to the FBI, to
engage in spying on Americans.’ Cheney has defended these measures by claiming
that ‘especially in the day and age we live in) the President of the United
States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired.’
Secret detentions, under a ‘hold until cleared policy’,
based on the legally endorsed roundup of ‘anyone who fit the profile’
(Ashcroft), have given way to a blatant and overt attempt to eliminate the
fundamental writ of habeus corpus for Guantanamo detainees, which actually
passed through the senate in a 49 to 42 vote.
This at the same time that several detainees, including Omar Khadr, a now-18-year-old
Canadian held at Guantanamo for the past three years, have been found innocent
of the crimes of which they were supposedly suspect.
The US has also detained people, including US citizens, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in other CIA prisons. Many of these detainees are held without
having been charged. It is reported
that the Pentagon has considered sending detainees currently held at Guantanamo
Bay to prisons in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
In April, when a Guantanamo defendant referenced
international law in an effort to assert his human rights, the military judge
hearing the case purportedly stated ‘I don’t care about international law. I don’t want to hear the words âinternational
law’ again.’
Your government
is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of
Christian fundamentalism will rule.
Amidst charges of fraud, deceit, and inadequacy, the
Christian Right called the 2004 presidential election a revolution, and their
time to impose a Christian fundamentalist theocratic program on society. By flagrantly abusing the concept of
‘values’, by tearing down hope and material promise, by playing the politics of
undirected fear and confusion, raising and lowering the threat level, the Bush
administration, with the help of its ‘armies of compassion’-ate conservative
pundits, is effectively seeking to erase the line between church and state, and
in doing so, to destroy the ‘values’ of both.
In a speech in New Orleans in 2004, Bush stated outright his
intention ‘to fund programs that save Americans one soul at a time.’ In total, it has been estimated that 40
billion dollars is made available each year for the funding of faith-based
initiatives.
In the past year Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan,
Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah have banned
gay marriage, the vanguard of one of the first manifestations of Bush’s
new-found political capital: an ongoing effort to amend the constitution to ban
gay marriage at the federal level.
Bush has advocated abstinence-only sex education, an
initiative that has been conclusively proven ineffective and counterproductive,
not only in the United States, but in AIDS-stricken African nations such as
Uganda, where deprivation of condoms is tantamount to mass murder. On the basis of ‘morality,’ Bush attempted
to ban all US aid to international family-planning organizations that engage in
abortion-related activities, to US and international AIDS organizations until
they pledge their opposition to prostitution, and to both US and international
groups that discuss safe drug-needle use, or that don’t back the abstinence
only sex education initiative. While
Bush and his allies toy with ‘morality’, AIDS has claimed the lives of at least
20 million people since 1981, and the number continues to grow.
The encroachment of fundamentalist Christianity on all
spheres of government has made leaps in 2005. The White House holds regular
prayer sessions, and key leaders of the Christian Right like James Dobson or
Pat Robertson keep close connections with the administration. ‘Justice Sunday’
rallies brought together fundamentalist leaders with powerful politicians like
Bill Frist and Tom Delay to demand that the courts become appendages of theocratic
rule. The storm around Terri Schiavo saw Congress snapped back into session in
an attempt to impose fundamentalist religion over a brain-dead woman’s wishes.
From the courts to congress, from the military to the White House, the
government is increasingly turning into a theocracy.
Your government
suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic
agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
As part of an effort to promote the agenda of the Religious
Right, Bush last summer posed with a baby produced from a frozen embryo in an
effort to oppose potentially life saving embryonic stem cell research on a
purely religious basis. While the 400,000 stem cells currently held in US
fertility clinics could not possibly all be transformed into babies happily
ensconced in loving families, the potential scientific advancements from using
these cells for research could save hundreds and thousands of human lives now
and in the future.
Recently, the battles over the teaching of evolution versus
creationism in the public school system have reached a new level. Conservative groups have attempted to
reintroduce creationism ( which was banned from public schools by the Supreme
Court ( under the new name of ‘intelligent design.’ This transparent effort to cloak a conservative religious agenda
in ‘scientific’ clothing was roundly rejected by a Federal Court in a case
involving the schools of Dover, PA. It
was also rejected by the voters of Dover, who refused to re-elect the school
board which had planned to insert ‘intelligent design’ into the science
curriculum over the unanimous objections of the science teachers. Nonetheless, Pat Robertson, a close friend
of Bush, threatened the citizens of Dover by saying, ‘you just voted God out of
your city.’
Your government
is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth
control and abortion.
While the Bush administration advocates a supposed ‘culture
of life’, the past year has seen devastating losses for women’s rights.
A woman’s right to choose is clearly under attack. Already,
the House this year passed a bill making it a crime for an adult to help a
woman under the age of 18 to cross state lines to receive an abortion without
the help of the woman’s parents.
Over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a birth control drug, have been
banned, and pharmacists have been allowed to refuse to sell patients birth
control pills on the basis of their own moral judgments.
These measures are only precursors. Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to replace
Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, an appointment that, if approved by
the Senate, will tilt the court significantly towards the extreme religious
right. Hearings on the nomination will
begin January 9th. Alito has, in the past, made statements in
blatant opposition to Roe v. Wade, saying that ‘the Constitution does not
protect a right to an abortion,’ and has expressed support for any and all
controls on a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, including a Pennsylvania
law requiring women to notify their husbands before deciding to get an
abortion. Alito has also advocated that
businesses be allowed to fire HIV-positive employees at will.
And now presiding over this Supreme Court is none other than
John Roberts, who argued in a 1990 legal brief ‘we continue to believe that Roe
was wrongly decided and should be overruled’. Despite this telling quote, in
addition to Roberts’ record of anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, and
overall extremely conservative judicial views, the Democrats allowed Roberts to
become the new Chief Justice with only the most petty and insignificant
opposition. Meanwhile, Bush and the Christian Right have made clear their full
support and approval for Roberts.
Your government enforces
a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.
The majority of respondents to a global poll believe the
Bush administration’s policies are making the world less safe. Those policies have killed thousands in the
name of national security, and stripped those both here and in Iraq of basic
human rights. Iraqis are now forced to
live in what analysts have called the newest training ground for international
jihadists. Meanwhile, citizens of the
United States have not received the real protections from terrorism that they
were promised after 9/11. Thomas Kean,
president of the 9-11 Commission has called the Bush administration
‘distracted’ and its failures to provide security ‘shocking.’
In the face of a 427 billion dollar national deficit, this
administration’s policies have crippled the public school system by depriving
it of funds and by inflicting upon it the arguably unconstitutional and
definitively damaging and discriminatory No Child Left Behind Act. This Act distorts educational standards and
priorities, not to mention requires high schools to disclose lists of their
students to military recruiters. Bush
and his allies have proposed a national budget which cuts federal child support
funding and funding for student loans, restricts state welfare, and cuts
funding for social programs, and have instead proposed an extension of the 2001
tax cuts which benefit the wealthy, making Bush the first President in US
history to propose a tax cut in a time of war.
This year the US ranked 4th in executions, after
only China, Iran, and Vietnam. Of 3800
executions carried out in the past year worldwide, 97 percent were carried out
in one of these four countries. The US prison system now holds in excess of 2
million inmates, a disproportionate number of them African-American males.
While supposedly motivated by humanitarian concern in Iraq,
we have been mysteriously inactive with
regard to the Sudan, where at least 200,000 people have been killed, and 2
milion displaced.
While we’ve hired marketing
firms to target communities of color in military recruiting, we have made
blatantly evident the government’s disregard for the fate of the lower-income,
mostly Black, citizens of devastated sections of New Orleans. It took Bush two whole days to remove
himself from his vacation to visit the devastation caused by Hurricane
Katrina. The FEMA response to the
disaster included a shoot-to-kill policy for looters and military policing of
Katrina refugee communities. London’s Observer now reports that as ‘the waters
have receded) the mainly black, low-income citizens of new Orleans are now the
victims of rising rents, forced evictions and plans that favor the better off.’
Republican Senate Majority leader Bill Frist, House Leader
Tom DeLay, and Cheney’s Chief of Staff âScooter’ Libby, among others, have been
indicted on felony charges while the Bush administration continues to back
them.
We’ve passed laws to protect oil companies from law suits,
while we’ve consistently ignored global warming in the name of American
consumerism. The US was one of only a very small number of nations not to join
the 141 nations signing the Kyoto environmental treaty which went into effect
last February. This despite the fact
that several studies, including a 2005 study in Nature, have shown global
warming to be very real, and a greater threat than was previously believed.
Our influence in the IMF and the World Bank, as well as in
international trade agreements such as this year’s CAFTA, continues to promote
the interests of the rich at the expense of ‘third world’ economies and
citizens.
To hide all of this, the Bush administration has paid off
pundits to push its policies, generated propaganda and passed it off as news,
paid the Iraqi press to publish pro-US articles in Iraqi papers, requested that
the New York Times and the Washington Post not run stories on domestic spying
by the Pentagon, and ceased to publish its annual report on international
terrorism, which last year reported the largest number of terrorist attacks since
1985.
‘That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop you
will learn or be forced to accept.’
If you can honestly look at how far things have gone in
2005, and not be completely outraged at the whole direction of society, then
something is seriously wrong. The world cannot go another year with this
criminal regime in power, carrying out more vicious crimes and consolidating
its moves toward a fascist theocracy and brutal empire.
But something else also went on in 2005. A movement was
launched on Nov. 2nd with the aim of driving out the Bush regime.
Nov. 2 brought together thousands in protests across the country, with powerful
high school walk-outs, and prominent voices of conscience lending their
support. This beginning demonstrated that there are many in this country who
hate the whole direction of society, and are willing and determined to reverse
this disastrous course.
In the last few months of 2005, debate and opposition to a
war that is everyday turning into more of a quagmire, combined with outrage and
talk of investigation and impeachment over Bush’s NSA spying order, have caused
Bush serious trouble. Whether they are
able to rebound from all this, or whether these problems and conflicts
precipitate the downfall of this regime, is largely dependent on whether what
was demonstrated Nov. 2nd leaps forward into a powerful, broad, and
determined force involving millions of people.
On January 31, Bush will be giving his State of the Union
address, and no doubt will attempt to utilize this to rebound from a tumultuous
situation. The World Can’t Wait ( Drive Out the Bush Regime will be holding
protests all across the country that night, which aim to drown out Bush’s lies
with the demand ‘Bush: step down, and take your program with you!’ The following
Saturday, Feb. 4, this demand will be taken to the White House, as people from
all across the country converge for a mass protest in Washington DC. On more
year of the Bush regime is intolerable.
‘The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.’