Letters to the Editor for Tuesday, July 22, 2008
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Published: July 21, 2008
Writer: Indict Bush for U.S. war crimes
In 2003, the United States launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.
Click to sendAfter the U.S. occupied Iraq, its troops protected only two places in Baghdad: the Oil Ministry, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, and the Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the ousted regime’s secret police. Hospitals, schools, the national museum, the national library, power plants, waste treatment plants, military and research installations, ammunition dumps and the like were all thoroughly looted throughout the country while American soldiers passively looked on or, even in some cases, encouraged the looting. This was well-documented by Agence France-Presse (AFP), World Socialist Web Site at http://www.wsws.org and United for Peace and Justice (Web site: http://www.unitedforpeace.org).
The al-Tuwaitha site (where the 550 metric tons of yellowcake were suddenly “discovered” after sitting there for over 17 years!) was well-known to everybody, from United Nations inspectors to the CIA and the U.S. military, and yet was not protected for several weeks. Iraqi villagers, not knowing any better, stole barrels full of radioactive yellowcake, emptied them and used them to store food and water. Greenpeace went there to retrieve the barrels and other contaminated equipment. But, it was already too late. Iraqis are now dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning, as documented by ARP and Greenpeace.
Recently the International Criminal Court charged Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, with war crimes and crimes against humanity. An article titled “First al-Bashir, next … Bush?” by Mark Levine, professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, commented on those charges. Not surprisingly, it was not published by any of the so-called “liberal” media, but by Aljazeera.Net.
That article states, in part: “For Americans, however, the ICC indictment should offer a moment of somber reflection not merely for our relative inaction with regard to years of mass murder in Sudan. It is equally disturbing that much of the al-Bashir indictment could just as easily be applied to George Bush, the U.S. president. It is clear to most Iraqis that the chaos being reaped by the U.S. in their country was in fact deliberately sown by the U.S. to create a situation that would make any U.S. withdrawal almost impossible to pull off. While the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — for which Bush and along with him, the American people who twice elected him, are responsible — is tragic, it should not be understated that the invasion itself was a crime against humanity.”
Let us hope that al-Bashir and Bush will have a chance to meet in The Hague soon!
FRED GRYZBOWSKI
Lynchburg
Some civility, please
As we move into the final months before a very close presidential race, there are letters and editorials filled with opinions and information that are increasingly negative and polarizing. This is true for supporters of both candidates.
Can we ask for a political climate that challenges each of us to do his or her homework, without resorting to inflammatory? It is vital to vote in November for the candidate of one’s choice. Disagree with the one you don’t support, talk up your own candidate, but base your choice on information from reliable sources and “in context” common sense. The candidates deserve this — they are both very good men.
LIBBY JARRETT
Lynchburg
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Reader Reactions
Posted by ( NAReader2 ) on July 22, 2008 at 11:29 am
Fred, you can’t comment on your own letter!
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Posted by ( luv2bliberal ) on July 22, 2008 at 9:35 am
JackSin PoleLock,
If I understand your posting correctly, then the only smart african-americans are the ones that believe the same as you? Why you trying to hold a brother down? So minorities are only acceptable to the DNC when they believe as you would tell them to? How prejudicial, how closed minded can one get? Why are you so intolerant JackSin? Is it harder to deal with persons out in the real world rather than being in tOTAL control of your students in your classroom?
I, unlike you, watch all of the news outlets. I WATCH FOX NEWS!!!!!! Does that make me a bad person? I watch FOX for balance, I watch CNN to see what is important to the left, and I watch MSNBC to see what the socialist academia are getting ready to whine about.
Peace. Shalom. Gay rights. Kill a baby. Save the snail darter. Don’t drill. Tax the miserable rich. Sit in my condo and complain. Buy a car made in Japan. Don’t build a refinery. Blame it on Bush and relieve us of any responsibility at all.
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Posted by ( JacksonPollock ) on July 22, 2008 at 9:00 am
oldman. At least Fred reads and doesn’t depend on Fox News and Rush to mold his mind. Try it . . . it could open your mind to wonderful things. And don’t be so provencial in your reading; there’s more out there than National Enquirer.
oldman . . . did you hear that McBush interview yesterday on the Today Show when he talked about the conflict on the “border between Iraq and Pakistan.“? There is, of course, no shared border between Iraq and Pakistan. If this old man, oldman, can’t keep the countries straight, how will he know which ones need to be bombed. Will it be: “oops, we bombed Iraq . . . I meant to bomb Iran.“
It is very scary to think of this man being President of the once greatest nation in the world. He would be dangerous for women (voted twice against requiring insurance to pay for birth control when they do pay for Viagra) and minorities (opposed the MLK day as a federal holiday and pushed to keep Arizona from celebrating this liberator’s life). Thinking and informed women and/or minorities will vote for Obama; this leaves uninformed women and uninformed minorities as his based, along with red-necks who can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man. Fortunately, with this base, November should provide a great landslide election for Obama, and McBush can go back to his seat in the Senate, become more moderate, and spend his waning days talking about being shot down in Vietnam to a generation that could care less.
Fred. Very good letter.
luv. <silence>
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Posted by ( Ken ) on July 22, 2008 at 8:06 am
Writer: Indict Bush for U.S. war crimes by Fred Gryzbowski. Fred, it took courage to write this letter! Yes, as uncomfortable as it may be, the U.S. is in fact “guilty” of a war crime in Iraq caused by the ignorance, arrogance and gross incompetence of Bush with his fellow war criminals Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld,Wolfowitz and Feith. Bush, as it is clearly known today, used 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq based on lies. While the Republican “neocons” say the Bush Iraq War is not the Vietnam War, the similarities of “Folly” are striking, the endless “spin” to justify the killing and wounding of our young Americans and disregard of the human cost on the part of the Iraqis, over 100,000 men, women and worse of all, children killed and thousands more wounded and millions displaced. Bush got his “dream” of regime change in Iraq but a “nightmare” of grief has descended across America. Americans in general and Congress in particular are guilty of not demanding a “Shared Sacrifice” in this war as well instead of expecting and accepting that the burden of Bush’s “Holy War” in Iraq be borne by less than 1% of our men and women and military families with absolutely NO SACRIFICE asked of the majority. The enlisted and junior officers of the U.S. Military have done everything asked of them, but the senior and flag officers have sold their souls in supporting a Bush policy they must have or should have surely questioned! From the beginning, I questioned why if U.S. contained the USSR for forty plus years why Iraq could not be recognizing that Saddam was mortal! Instead, we followed the path of hubris and invested the blood and bodies of our young men and women, our treasure and our international reputation in a policy of folly!
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Posted by ( luv2bliberal ) on July 22, 2008 at 7:39 am
Fred,
Looks like you and Betsy have a “leg up” on the rest of us when it comes to research.
Can you please research why the rest of the world is leaning towards privatization and the U.S. is leaning towards Socialization?
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Posted by ( luv2bliberal ) on July 22, 2008 at 7:34 am
Fred,
For such a short man you sure do write long posts! You didn’t put anything in there about the democRATS not doing anything about it. If Bush is guilty, why will they not do anything? Why are the democRATS afraid of the republicans? The Clintons were the ones that “eliminated” their opponents, not the republicans. Maybe Vince Foster is waiting in the wings.
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Posted by ( Fred ) on July 22, 2008 at 6:37 am
oldman66,
I suppose you get your “fair and balanced news” from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk. Is this why you probably voted for Bush, not once, but twice?
You obviously would benefit greatly from consulting “foreign” news sources.
Like I said previously I would rather be in a civilized country with intelligent people. I am here on a special assignment from my other Father, the one in Heaven. He code-named it “Mission Impossible”. The task: make Americans think. As soon as He allows, I will be gone!
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Posted by ( Cosmo Wafflefoot ) on July 22, 2008 at 5:13 am
Libby Jarrett sounds like a sensible woman. She sounds nice, and quite frankly, I don’t have the heart to tell her that what she asks is impossible. She wants us to “do our homework” not realizing that we all have different text books and, as a consequence, will all get different answers. Most people get their information from TV and TV is in the advertising business. It thrives on breaking us all up into groups. Polarizing is how TV eats and “resorting to inflammatory” stories brings home the bacon. Just yesterday I saw a commercial [approved by John McCain] that flat out told me that Obama is entirely responsible for high gas prices. I bet half the country laughed to themselves and thought, “Does this guy think we are that stupid?“. Meanwhile, the other half said, “Damn Right, cuz he’s a Muslim”. Polarized Libby? Where the heck did you get that idea?
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Posted by ( Fred ) on July 22, 2008 at 2:19 am
My submission was “edited”. URLs providing supportive documentation were deleted as well as a reference to Donald Rumsfeld. Here is the original text:
In 2003, the US launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq.
After the US occupied Iraq, its troops protected only two places in Baghdad: the Oil Ministry, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, and the Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the ousted’s regime secret police. Hospitals, schools, the National Museum, the National Library, power plants, waste treatment plants, military and research installations, ammunition dumps, etc. were all thoroughly looted throughout the country while American soldiers passively looked on or, even in some cases, encouraged the looting. This is well documented in the following news release from Agence France-Presse (AFP): “Oil ministry an untouched building in ravaged Baghdad” (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/16/1050172643895.html) and the following articles “How and why the US encouraged looting in Iraq” (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/iraq-a15_prn.shtml) from the World Socialist Web Site and “U.S. Protected Oil Ministry While Looters Destroyed Museum” (http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=1574) from the United for Peace & Justice web site. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense at the time, when confronted with this shameful behavior, famously declared on April 12, 2003, “Stuff happens”!
The al-Tuwaitha site (where the 550 metric tons of yellowcake were suddenly “discovered” after sitting there for over 17 years!) was well known to everybody, from UN inspectors to the CIA and the US military, and yet was not protected for several weeks. Iraqi villagers, not knowing any better, stole barrels full of radioactive yellowcake, emptied them and used them to store food and water. Greenpeace went there to retrieve the barrels and other contaminated equipment. But, it was already too late. Iraqis are now dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning. For details, read the following news releases from AFP “Greenpeace accuses US of breaching Geneva Conventions in Iraq” (http://soundingcircle.com/newslog2.php/__show_article/_a000195-000328.htm)” and “Greenpeace Says Frightening Radioactivity in Iraqi Villages” (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0624-09.htm).
Recently the International Criminal Court charged al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, with war crimes and crimes against humanity. An article titled “First al-Bashir, next … Bush?” by Mark Levine, professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, commented on those charges. Not surprisingly, it was not published by any of the so-called “liberal” media, but it was published by Aljazeera.Net (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2008/07/20087166397881715.html).
That article states, in part: “For Americans, however, the ICC indictment should offer a moment of somber reflection not merely for our relative inaction with regard to years of mass murder in Sudan. It is equally disturbing that much of the al-Bashir indictment could just as easily be applied to George Bush, the US president. It is clear to most Iraqis that the chaos being reaped by the US in their country was in fact deliberately sown by the US to create a situation that would make any US withdrawal almost impossible to pull off. While the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – for which Bush and along with him, the American people who twice elected him, are responsible – is tragic, it should not be understated that the invasion itself was a crime against humanity”.
Let us hope that al-Bashir and Bush will have a chance to meet in La Hague soon!
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Posted by ( Fred ) on July 22, 2008 at 1:57 am
Breaking news: And Radovan Karadzic will be there, to greet them! As soon as Ratko Mladic is also arrested, they will have a foursome to play bridge, waiting for their sentencing!
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