Bring Regime Change Home By David Swanson

[Guest guest]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020406Y.shtml

 

 

 

Bring Regime Change Home

By David Swanson

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Saturday 04 February 2006

 

 

 

Remarks prepared for World Can't Wait rally at White House,

February 4, 2006.

 

There are protests outside at least two houses today, the White

House and Bush's luxury estate near Crawford, Texas. Bush can run, but

he cannot hide.

 

He tries to hide behind fear, our fear. The only tool in his bag

is making us afraid. We have to resist becoming afraid, but we have to

be able to talk about the fact that Bush and Cheney have made us much

less safe. They have turned world opinion against us. They have turned

Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists. They have turned

Afghanistan into a drug production kingdom. Terrorist incidents are up

so dramatically that the Bush Administration no longer publishes those

statistics.

 

The danger these criminals have put us in with their illegal war

and their bellicose rhetoric is a reason to oppose them, not a reason

to cower behind them like children. Their own strategists see few ways

that they can regain any credibility or popularity other than another

terrorist incident in this country. But if the American people have

learned anything, it is that another such incident – should it occur –

should only erode what's left of Bush and Cheney's pretense to leadership.

 

Let's not wait for that. Let's remove them from office before we

suffer another 9-11, another Katrina, another war like Iraq.

 

Toward that end, I have a favor to ask of everyone here. Last

Spring the Downing Street Minutes appeared in the international media

as a smoking gun, providing authoritative proof that this war had been

based on lies. The efforts of hundreds of thousands of Americans

forced that document into the US media. You Emailed. You phoned. You

faxed. You protested. You reenacted the Downing Street Meeting outside

media outlets, or inside their offices.

 

On June 15, the Washington Post wrote an editorial in response to

your efforts explaining why they would not report the story. They

claimed that " The memos add not a single fact to what was previously

known about the administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that:

They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002. " Well, I

went and checked all the Washington Posts back to July 2002 and before

that, and they had never reported what was in those minutes – in fact

they'd been trumpeting the lies that the minutes debunked.

 

But you didn't let up on the Post. You kept hammering them with

Emails and phone calls and protests in front of their office. And on

June 28th, they printed a lengthy front page article detailing the

contents of the Downing Street Minutes – with nothing in there that

they couldn't have run weeks earlier.

 

Here's the favor I want to ask. I want to ask you to do the same

thing you did for the Downing Street Minutes with the new White House

Memo. Because we have another smoking gun on our hands. This latest

memo has been reported in a short and misleading little Associated

Press article, but most US media outlets – in contrast to media

outlets outside the US – are not doing their own reporting on this.

Last spring they did, following a full month of pressure. So let's set

a goal of putting the White House Memo in the US corporate media by

the end of February. For guidance on doing so, go to

AfterDowningStreet.org

 

What this latest memo tells us is the substance of a meeting that

British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with Bush at the White House on

January 31, 2003, months before they publicly pretended to have just

decided to go to war, and the same day that the NSA sent around an

internal top-secret memo with plans to bug the phones and Emails of UN

Security Council members.

 

At the meeting, Blair told Bush " A second Security Council

resolution would provide an insurance policy against the unexpected

and international cover, including with the Arabs. "

 

Bush told Blair that " The US would put its full weight behind

efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even

threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military

action would follow anyway.''

 

Blair replied that he was " solidly with the President and ready to

do whatever it took to disarm Saddam. "

 

We already know from the Downing Street documents and dozens of US

sources that the Bush Administration did not believe Saddam Hussein to

be a threat, and that Bush and Cheney were lying about the weapons of

mass destruction and the ties to 9-11. What the new memo tells us is

some of the wackier ideas that popped into Bush's head for ways to

manufacture a cause for war.

 

The one that really makes you wonder whether Blair had brought the

cast of Monty Python to the meeting is this: " The US was thinking of

flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq,

painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach. "

 

So, we were going to paint planes to look like UN planes and then

fly them unnecessarily low in hopes of getting shot at, and then

presumably try to tell the UN that it possessed some planes it hadn't

known about. In fact, we already know that the US increased flights

and bombings in hopes of being shot at. As far as we know, none of the

planes had been painted with UN markings.

 

Does this sound like how one behaves toward a nation that is

threatening us with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons,

long-range missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and support for a

global terror organization? But Bush put those claims in a March 18,

2003, report to Congress, and it's a felony to lie to Congress. And

he's still sitting in office. So, we all must just be mistaken, right?

Everything must be OK, after all. The Washington Post says so.

 

It's easy to get frustrated. 420 members of the House of

Representatives have not cosponsored a bill to end funding for the

Crime in Iraq. 365 of them have not cosponsored a bill to ban

permanent US bases in Iraq. 410 of them have not cosponsored a bill to

let the Iraqi government vote on whether it wants the occupation

ended. 370 have not signed onto a bill to end the occupation some day

in the future. And 338 congress members have not cosponsored a bill to

redeploy forces from Iraq as soon as that's " practicable. "

 

We have a trillion-dollar war, and Bush wants $439 billion for the

military on top of that.

 

It's easy to become frustrated. But look at what we have achieved.

We have educated a strong majority of Americans to understand that

this war is based on lies, while the war is still in progress. The

understanding is not thick enough for everyone to understand that a

war on Iran would be based on lies. But we're moving in that direction.

 

We have US veterans of this war returning, suffering from post

traumatic stress disorder, and getting up to speak about it in order

to oppose this war through their tears. We have parents who've lost

their kids in this war speaking against it. We have young soldiers

refusing to fight. We have activists, young and old, going to jail

through acts of nonviolent resistance.

 

Daniel Ellsberg wrote in a statement supporting this rally that

courage is contagious. It certainly is within this movement. We just

need it to catch within the Capitol. There are Democrats there who

still fantasize about working cooperatively with Republicans – it's

their way of hanging onto a belief that they are serving some purpose.

We need to give them a different purpose to serve, the purpose of

courageously opposing the rise of fascism. We need to do that through

meetings and through protests. We need to protest in their offices and

on the front lawns of their houses.

 

And we must do so with the strongest force on earth: nonviolence.

Anyone imagining we can create a democracy or anything else through

violent resistance to this government has lost all moral and strategic

sense. We need to reassert the rule of law, not tear it down further.

We need to prosecute these war criminals, and before that we need to

impeach them.

 

Demand that your congress member sign onto John Conyers' bill to

create an investigation that will make recommendations on impeachment.

Demand that your congress member introduce articles of impeachment.

Demand that the legislature of your state, or of DC, send impeachment

charges to congress.

 

And tell your congress member what your policy is going to be for

supporting candidates in this year's elections.

 

The Nation magazine has said it will not support any candidate for

national office who does not make a speedy end to the American war in

Iraq a major issue in his or her campaign. ImpeachPAC is a political

action committee with this requirement for endorsement: " Incumbents

must have introduced or co-sponsored Articles of Impeachment for

George Bush and Dick Cheney in 2005 or 2006 - Challengers must

publicly demand the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. "

 

We must combine those two criteria, opposing the war and

supporting impeachment, into this one idea: Bring Regime Change Home!

 

David Swanson is creator of MeetWithCindy.org, co-founder of the

AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a writer and activist, and the

Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of

Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council

of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as

a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs

including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential

campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications

Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN,

the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson

obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of

Virginia in 1997. His website is www.davidswanson.org.

 

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