"We hold you responsible ..."

excerpted from the article

The People Lead When Their Leader's Freeze

The Citizen's Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Action in Iraq, Tacoma Washington, January 21-22, 2007

by Zbignew Zingh

www.dissidentvoice.org, January 23, 2007

... You Republicans, we hold you responsible as the authors of an illegal, unconstitutional war based on lies and deception. You are responsible for thousands of dead American soldiers and tens of thousands of physically and psychologically crippled veterans. You are responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi human lives - most of them women and children. Your are responsible for cultural assassination. You are responsible for the murder and degradation of the Earth itself. You will bear this responsibility for decades, and certainly into the next election cycle upon which politicians are so focused.

You Democrats, we hold you responsible as the authors of an illegal, unconstitutional war based on lies and deception. You are responsible for thousands of American war casualties, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and millions of Iraqi civilian deaths over the lifetime of the Clinton "sanctions" and "bipartisan" support for this war. You are responsible for the murder and degradation of the Earth itself. You have trotted out a pantheon of retread candidates running for president. We caution you: we will not support candidates who voted for and supported the war and then act like we do not remember. We will support no supposedly "fresh face", no Madison Avenue charismatic who will not clearly delineate an anti-war and a pro-humanist agenda. We have graduated beyond party politics. We are Citizens of a country that would be great.

You generals and military officers, we hold you responsible for failing to obey your own oaths of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. You have been complicit in the meaningless deaths of your own soldiers and countless numbers of physically and psychologically crippled veterans. You have lacked the courage to resist, in word or deed, a racist, economically driven quasi-religious crusade and war of occupation. You have chosen to prosecute Lt. Ehren Watada, an officer of principal and impeccable courage, and by prosecuting, convicting and sentencing him, you officers of the JAG Corps will yourselves have violated your oaths of office and participated in a pattern of war crimes.

You ambassadors at the United Nations, you fool us no longer. We hold you responsible for the war and its destruction. We recognize that the General Assembly has no power and that everything that the UN does . . . and does not do . . . is because one or more of the five permanent nations of the Security Council vetoes or promotes it. Nevertheless, we hold you, United Nations, as an entity, responsible for the countless deaths in Iraq that, by the smallest demonstration of courage and ethics, you could have prevented. We hold you responsible for your failures throughout the world for seeming to act beneficially, while, in fact, you are enabling the geopolitical ambitions of your five permanent Security Council members. We hold you, United Nations, responsible for violating your duty to protect the weak from the strong.

You false critics from the nations of the world, we hold you responsible for the deaths of millions, the murder and degradation of the earth itself. It is not acceptable that you should criticize war, but then fly in to profit from it like vultures feasting on cadavers. If American citizens have a duty to lead when their leaders are corrupt, then you in France, in Britain, in Germany, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Jordan, in India, China, Russia, Mexico and everywhere, likewise have a duty to lead when your leaders are venal, corrupt or collaborators.

And you, brother and sister Citizens of the United States, we hold you and ourselves responsible for our collective sin of silence. We cannot criticize the occupation while we benefit from the fruits of the occupation. We cannot blame the Administration when our own engineers, lawyers, psychologists, programmers, technicians, media consultants, reporters, doctors, scientists, longshoremen, truckers and businesspeople profit from the business of war through our work, our complicity and our consumerism. The testimony of the Citizen's Hearing on the Legality of US Actions in Iraq was overwhelming. Notwithstanding the distracting drone of a media fully integrated, fully embedded with your government, the truth is, indeed, available to all of us. Either we know, or we could know with little effort, the truth and the horror that we have wrought. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed two centuries ago about democracy, a people get the government that they deserve. To get good government, it is incumbent on all of us to act and speak out like we deserve it...

Democracy in America

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