Building an Empire

The other day the Fox News Channel's show The Independents ran a segment on "costs of another conflict abroad and the inner workings of the military". Trying to advertise the segment they posted to social media a blurb and photo showing a map. This map had every country represented that the US military had a presence and the very few that had no presence at all. It was a stark reminder that even today empires are being built, they are being expanded.

There are many people who dismiss the idea that what the United States Government and by extension its arm of force, the military, are in essence building and expanding the largest empire in the worlds history. Larger the Attila the Hun's, Larger than Cleopatra and the Egyptian empire, even larger than the Roman and Persian empires. So what does it take for some to see it for what it is. 

Defined by Merriam-Webster it is "(1) :  a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority; especially :  one having an emperor as chief of state 

(2) :  the territory of such a political unit

 :  something resembling a political empire; especially :  an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control

 :  imperial sovereignty, rule, or dominion

capitalized [Empire State, nickname for New York] :  a juicy apple with dark red skin that is a cross between a McIntosh apple and a Red Delicious apple."

Under these definitions it should be easy to recognize how some see it as an empire. The US Government makes it a point to be the hand of Aid, humanitarian or militarily, or it makes a point to be a main aggressor in affairs in an attempt to gain favor and control from other governments and its own people.

When under the rule, and in this case the threat of violence or better stated annihilation, the entire world is set as an empire under the United States. The US engages, first in the humanitarian aid and relief efforts for various nations, takes on health related issues abroad, engages in wars, intervention, removing political leaders and general mayhem making around the world, all with the implicit approval of the American Taxpayer, who is the wallet and bank for such ventures.

But why?
Why do other nations put up with embassies, military presence, intervention, despotism and meddling in international affairs? Money is one answer. Foreign monetary payments, meant for aid, is the bribery most governments accept for these actions. Fear is the another answer. The US has an aura of violence, of brutality, of annihilation. The world witnesses this day in and day out, yet most don't even bat an eye. The world watched as the US dropped the only atomic bombs to ever be used in warfare on largely civilian population in Japan in World War 2, and then gave them the ability to determine who could and couldn't have such weapons.

It doesn't take much to realize that the US is an empire, though I assume most would rather not believe it or accept it as so. We live in a dangerous time, in a dangerous place and with dangerous people. 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles"

Although Eugene Debs was an Anti-Capitalistic Union Socialist, rising to run for President of the US many times, he had a certain truth about War. It is never those that declare war that are required to fight it, Why?

This is a quote from a speech in Canton Ohio speech in 1918.

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact — and it cannot be repeated too often — that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

"Yours not to reason why;

Yours but to do and die."

That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.
If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace."


http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs.

Ultimately this speech would lead to the imprisonment of Debs for his active opposition of the United States Government's use of conscription to fill ranks and boots during its intervention into World War 1.


"On Sept. 14, 1918, Judge D. C. Westenhauer issued his sentence, sending Debs to prison for ten years. An appeal by Debs to the U.S. Supreme Court failed and in April 1919 he entered the Moundsville, West Virginia, state prison (which housed some federal detainees) to begin serving his jail term. Two months later, he was transferred to the Atlanta federal prison from which he ran his fifth and final presidential campaign. In the 1920 election, Debs captured his highest vote total ever (913,664), but the Socialist party's total vote percentage dropped to three percent.

On Christmas Day in 1921, the man who defeated Debs for president, Warren G. Harding, commuted his sentence to time served and Debs returned home to Terre Haute. Debs continued to speak and write for the socialist cause during the next few years, but was in poor health due to his prison experience and the effects of his grueling work schedule throughout his adult life. He died in Lindlahr sanitarium just outside of Chicago on Oct. 20, 1926." via The Anarchist Encyclopedia.

*NOTE*

I do believe it is in the best interest of people to be aware of those that fought against the issues we are still seeing today. I do not, in any way, agree with Mr. Debs on his notion or belief that Socialism is a better social and/or economic system than Capitalism,but I do acknowledge his work in the Non-Intervention, Anti-Conscription, and Human Rights Causes. We may not agree on everything 100% of the time but we should recognize those that put effort into beliefs that we do hold in common.

Independence Day has become In Dependence Day

Another favorite Nationalist holiday is here. Independence Day or the day America officially broke away from the hold of England and its King. This day is one of the most celebrated inaccuracies in American History. To be sure, this day will continue as long as the lie of American Government remains in the place of power over people, and so long as people allow Government the power over them. Those that formed this new form of sluttish slavery in disguise of freedom, and those that seek to reinstate the old ways of republics and democracies have no more authority to write, sign, and decide the futures of people other than themselves.


The present state of affairs is not much different than it was in 1776, and as the Declaration of Independence was drafted and approved by those wishing to form a new government, a new form of subservience, it is now that we, in our time, must thrust the chains of servitude from our backs and necks, we must secede from the tyranny of Government. Though much smaller and contained to what we are under now, the King of England and his henchmen reminded the citizens of the 13 original colonies of their servitude to the crown and its dictates, decrees, laws and taxation. And today the American King is in the despotic attitude of the Kings before him.

  

The many counts against the King set forth in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 can be seen today, not just in the sitting president but in all aspects of American Politics. The same acts that led to the separation of ties between England and the Colonies are in full view and full practice as it was then. Trade restrictions, overreach and subverting laws, holding large militaries and protecting them from prosecution of actions deemed criminal to the citizen populace.

To set ourselves differently from our predecessors we do not enact to bring new government from the old, we do not hold that any government would in fact be a good or moral government; we do not believe that a small government would remain small and their powers concentrated. From the past we work for the future; that future is freedom and no amount of government can give you or even allow you unconstrained and absolute freedom. 

Americans are dependent on their belief in government. They are unable to see the ways which every action of government can be accomplished in peaceful and voluntary ways. They are dependent on a system of theft and redistribution. They are dependent on a system of forced security and compulsory welfare. They are dependent on the destruction of foreign lands and the brutality and empire spreading. They are dependent on regulations and restrictions, licencing and fees. They are dependent on drugs while criminalizing the very nature that they come from. They are dependent on the new form of government they have allowed to run rampant over them. They are dependent on Corporatism and blame the effects on Capitalism. They are dependent on the altar of Government, sacrifices to Government, and unrelenting subservience to Government. 

You are NOT free.

They are slaves to their own Ignorance, their own Apathy, and their own Complacency. They are subjects to their own Confliction in Ideology; a slave to their own Indifference, Statism, Nationalism, and Sensationalism.

They are more interested in the latest Celebrity Wedding, or Sports Star Baby, Dancing with the Stars, and Tabloid gossip. They let the media dictate what they think; the church what they believe; the corporations what they buy and what they eat.

Allowing their own self to be bound to the edicts of central planners and a superiority complex has shackled them in chains far greater than they realize. They have locked the chains on every generation to come after them and have denounced their right to prosperity and the exercise of their natural rights.

You are a slave to the belief that you are free.

“When in the course of Human events, it becomes necessary for one person to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which Laws of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”

Your Declaration of True Independence is yet to be written.


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On Constitutional Rights

Of the many different arguments on where rights come from I find the Constitutional Case the most far-fetched. It is a long held and deeply rooted belief that the United States Constitution is where the country’s citizens obtain their rights. The argument of Constitutional Rights is fallacious and easily the most wide spread and enduring myth among Americans. This argument supposes that a document signed by and ordained by people long since dead have somehow bestowed upon the subsequent generations certain acts or protections under a system of governance. The myth of Constitutional Rights is a touchy subject for most, but I will try to explain the case against the Constitutional Rights Theory. 

A piece of paper has no inherent rights. It is a product of labor mixed with resources, by humans. Lacking any inherent rights it also has no rights to bestow upon others. It does not offer any protection, as it has no means of protection, except by outside forces, notably human beings. And since men cannot endow rights to others it stands that it has no means to give those rights away. It has no voice, and is subjective to the capabilities and thoughts of those who read it. It, being paper can be destroyed by many different means and can be reproduced with almost no limit. It carries no means to hold precedence over man, and cannot be asked to define its power or even source of power.

As a document it was a contract between those that agreed to partake in its formation, contracting themselves to its supposed limits by signature. There is no reference to it being forced upon following generations, there is no clause that leads us to be ruled by others opinions and writings of a time we did not live or respect and follow a document, a contract we did not sign. This is the error in the Social Contract Theory, the basis of which is that as I did not sign into any contract I do not have to subject myself to that contract. The Social Contract Theory is dependent on the thought that one must be obligated to endure the social rules in a place he was placed at birth or else leave. This theory is particularly used when a person is found to dissent to the idea of the social rules in that area of birth. The “if you don’t like it here  you can leave” attitude in other words.

Of the many errors of those that hold a belief in Constitutionally Granted Rights is the interference in the logic of American History.

 “The members of the Constitutional Convention signed the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Constitutional Convention convened in response to dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation and the need for a strong centralized government. After four months of secret debate and many compromises, the proposed Constitution was submitted to the states for approval. Although the vote was close in some states, the Constitution was eventually ratified and the new Federal government came into existence in 1789. The Constitution established the U.S. government as it exists today.” Excerpt from the Library of Congress Website

The first thing to look at in this excerpt is the phrase, “secret debate and many compromises”. If this were to be the founding form of contract for every generation hereafter its signing why then would these debates and meeting need to be held in secret?  Why would this sort of thing be kept from those that it intended to subject? 

The next point to be taken is the phrase, “dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation and the need for a strong centralized government”. The dissatisfaction of the current form of governance grew from the inability to control the free and sovereign states and its lack of control over industry, trade and the funding of federal exploitation of other nations. The Articles of Confederation were partially successful in their ability to maximize personal freedom while offering some semblance of protection of the natural rights of the people. They were not successful in retaining power as the march of men and their power hungry ways consumed it and disregarded it.

The last point in this small quote is the last line. “The Constitution established the U.S. government as it exists today.” This is exactly the problem with the idea of limited government touted by the Republican Party, Constitutionalists, and the various tea party groups. The limit that is imposed is not by the citizenry but by the same government that gives it power. Small government is likely to grow out of this relative smallness and into the beast it is today.

The very Idea that this contract gives any person rights is easy to prove otherwise. Since the beginning of non-native conquest and inhabitation in the Americas began well before the drafting and ratification of the Constitution the question is posed; where did these Pre-Constitution people derive their rights from?  Were they privy to the Magna Carta? Hard to be since the Magna Carta did not grant rights to people but rather limited power of King John of England and stood to protect their natural rights in the year 1215. Did they derive their rights from the Articles of Confederation? The articles were an agreement among the 13 founding states that established the United States of America as a confederation of sovereign states and served as its first constitution. Again these articles did not propose to grant rights to people and would in effect limit the freedom of people inside the confines of territory of what would become the United States.

One could argue that the very basic precept of time in relation to rights clearly defines that the rights of individuals predates even the earliest form of community or government. One could also argue that if one believes in the endowment of rights by written words than the act of destroying this document would insure the decimation of all semblances of rights. If any Constitution would be destroyed today the ability and right to speak as one wishes remains; the act of defense remains the same, the right of being secure in the privacy of your own property and the right to own said property would all still be there.

Secondary questions.

Did people before any written documents not have inherent rights? Were these people somehow less inclined to the abilities of themselves and of freedom from tyranny? How would their lives be defined if not for the rights they had? Were those Native Americans here long before Europeans invaded and settled not in possession of any rights in their lives and property? Do people outside of all Constitutions or documents forming any sort of Government not have rights? Could the destruction of these documents ensure no person would have any rights to themselves or property?

Simply stated, the origin of rights is inherent on a person being alive. They are natural, they are inalienable, they are non- transferable, they are not for sale or rent, they begin the moment of life and cease with death. The idea of any right bestowed from outside forces begets the ability to restrict those rights from outside forces. The Natural ability to do as one sees fit as long as those actions do not interfere with the rights or freedoms of others is not reliant on any form of documentation, any decree, from any person or institution.  

"No one watches and they don't have a game. It's as simple as that..."

That is a line from the novel and movie The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It is a quote that I look back to as a line that must be taken in order for there to be real change in the world. If people refuse to participate, if they refuse to watch, if they refuse to allow politicians to constantly degrade human existence to rules and regulations, acts of terror and murder on a grand scale, we may be able to salvage our freedom yet.

But is this is a pipe dream? As we have seen in the past there are always those willing to participate in the games as the rule makers and the rule keepers. Mao had loyal soldiers to enforce his rule, even if the citizens refused, the state still had it's enforcers. Hitler was also privy to the mindlessness of the authoritarians he ranked to his police and military to keep the state and its machine like authority moving in goose-step. The smallest of groups against the mass of citizens, once indoctrinated and made to fear the state, could manipulate control of the citizens.

If people realized the simple fact that in order for the State or the Government to remain in control, for it to impose its immorality and its own unjust laws, it must have willing participants. It must retain power out of fear and it can only remain in power by force and coercion. Willing and delusional authoritarians have in the past joined the ranks of oppressive governments, and if this past is any picture of the future we have much to fear and much to change.

"The Future is Too Good to Waste on Lies": Bowe Bergdahl's Moral Odyssey

Bowe Bergdahl and his mother, Jani.

“I can’t make up my mind to put the damn thing on again. I feel so clean and free. It’s like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery again….I think I’ll just walk off naked across the fields.”

John Andrews, a U.S. soldier in World War I who went AWOL, discusses his uniform in Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Trying to find their footing amid a gale-force outpouring of largely manufactured outrage, officials in Hailey, Idaho canceled their long-planned homecoming for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They were understandably intimidated by the prospect of dealing with thousands of protesters who planned to besiege the tiny central Idaho town to demand the blood of a young man they now regard to be a deserter, and a father they consider a terrorist sympathizer.

To understand the kind of welcome the War Party has been preparing for Bowe and his family, it’s useful to consider the treatment given to the family of World War I-era conscientious objector John Witmer.

A Mennonite from Colombiana, Ohio who was denied a deferment by the local draft board, Witmer died from the Spanish Flu while stationed at Camp Sherman, Ohio. Witmer's lifeless body was returned to his hometown on October 10, 1918, where the family – his father Dan, his siblings, and his fiancee, Nola – was greeted by a silent crowd heavy with sullen disapproval for the “slacker” and his family.

Like thousands of others who shared his faith, John had been kidnapped at gunpoint from his family farm through the evil practice of conscription. The local draft board had turned down John's appeal for Conscientious Objector status, dishonestly assuring him that once he had taken the oath of enlistment he would be recognized as a CO and be given a non-combat assignment.

As with everything else of consequence that emerges from the lips, pen, or keyboard of a government functionary, those assurances were lies.

During wartime, explained Bernard Baruch, the head of the Wilson Regime’s War Industry Board, all “men, money and things” within the government’s claimed jurisdiction “suddenly become a compact instrument of destruction…. [T]he entire population must suddenly cease to be a congeries of individuals, each following a self-appointed course, and become a vast unitary mechanism." John Witmer, like many thousands of others, was designated a “slacker” because he persisted in the belief that he was not the property of the State. His refusal to  undergo military training forbidden by his religious convictions provoked violent reactions from his fellow conscripts, and led to a punitive re-assignment to a CO camp – a detention facility that was also used as a holding pen for German prisoners of war.

The weather turned colder, and influenza – one of the government's chief wartime imports from Europe – propagated itself throughout Camp Sherman.  John pleaded for adequate bedding and dry clothes, to no avail. The isolated, terrified young man contracted the Spanish Flu, from which he soon died.

John's body was returned in a flag-shrouded coffin. While most Americans would regard this as an honor, the Witmer family's convictions didn't allow them to make acts of allegiance to anyone or anything but God. There is a sense in which wrapping John's body in the US flag was one final proprietary gesture by the government that had stolen the young man from the family who loved him, the religious fellowship that had raised him, and the young woman who wanted to be his wife.

The crowd that had congealed at the train station to witness the arrival of John Witmer's body was acutely interested in the reaction of his Mennonite family. Most of the spectators knew that the Mennonites didn't support the war; their principled pacifism had provoked both curiosity and suspicion.

For a brief period, the Witmers enjoyed what could be called probationary sympathy from the crowd. But they quickly learned that few things are likelier to provoke sanctimonious violence from war-maddened Americans than a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for killing foreigners whom the State has designated the “enemy.”

Slumping beneath a burden no parent should ever bear, Dan Witmer approached the coffin containing his son's body and carefully removed the flag. In doing so, he committed an act regarded as a sacrilege by adherents of the omnivorous idol called the State: Either out of innocent ignorance of, or commendable indifference to, the ritual called “flag etiquette,” Dan folded the banner as he would a blanket.

The crowd, deep in the throes of the psychosis called “war patriotism,” erupted in pious outrage.

“The mood of the onlookers turned from one of sympathy to hostility,” recounts Lily A. Bear in her book Report for Duty.

“Mennonites!” hissed one disgusted onlooker.

“Got what he deserved!” declared another of Dan's dead son.

“Traitor!” bellowed yet another outraged pseudo-patriot.

Someone hurled a stone that hit John's younger brother in the shoulder. A second stone, missing its target, landed at the feet of the mourning father. John's young sister Mary, puzzled and hurt by this display of murderous hatred, began to cry. After making arrangements for his son's funeral, Dan took his family home. This crowd, deprived of the hate objects that had given it cohesion, quickly dissipated.

This repellent spectacle, recall, occurred in a tiny Ohio town nearly one hundred years ago. In this age of saturation media and online social networking, the “homecoming” given the Bergdahl family would likely have been worse by several orders of magnitude.

“I will push for Bowe Bergdahl’s execution during the next Republican administration,” fumed South Carolina Republican agitator Todd Kincannon. “And his dad too. Those who commit treason need to die.” Kincannon’s sentiments are not an aberration.

Bowe’s detractors claim that his desertion cost the lives of U.S. soldiers sent to rescue him – a claim that plays well on talk radio but cannot be substantiated by casualty records. Given the fact that Bowe had expressed his growing misgivings to his superiors, the effort to locate him might have been less a rescue mission that an attempt to locate and re-assimilate a wayward drone who had exhibited troubling symptoms of resurgent individualism.

Like John Witmer, Bowe Bergdahl was raised in a deeply religious home. Unlike Witmer, Bergdahl was not a conscript. Like countless other young men, Bowe was lured into enlisting by a recruiter who cynically appealed to his idealistic and patriotic impulses, and offered lying assurances about the missions he would be required to carry out. Bowe was a committed and disciplined soldier who devoted what private time he had to refining his skills, conditioning his body, and feeding his mind, rather than indulging in recreational vice.
Once he arrived in Afghanistan, Bowe was immediately disillusioned by the corruption and cluelessness displayed by his superiors, the laxity and unprofessionalism of his fellow soldiers, and the criminal indifference to innocent lives that characterized the mission.

“The few good [sergeants] are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same,” Bowe informed his father in an e-mail. He decided to act on that advice immediately, explaining to his parents that “The future is too good to waste on lies.”

Bowe’s parents are Christians of the Calvinist persuasion who home-schooled him, instructed him in Christian ethics, and respected his independence of mind and sense of personal responsibility.

“Bowe was a young man with all the dangers of home-schooling – a brilliant and inquisitive mind, a crisp thinker, and someone who had never really been exposed to evil in the world,” recalls Phil Proctor, who was pastor of the Presbyterian Church attended by the Bergdahl family. “He [wanted] to determine whether the Christian faith was his own, or his parents’ and was doing a lot of exploring of ideas – never drugs or alcohol, but trying to be an outdoors/Renaissance type figure.”

When Bowe announced his enlistment in the US Army, Bob didn’t approve but also didn’t discourage him. When Bowe expressed his terminal disgust with the mission in Afghanistan, Bob offered the admonition: “Obey your conscience.”

By offering that advice, rather than rebuking his son or turning him in to his superiors as a potential “shirker,” Bob Bergdahl committed treason, according to his detractors, who insist that loyalty to the Warfare State trumps all other moral commitments.

Bowe’s parents never relented in their efforts to bring their son home. Now their relief over their son’s liberation, and their expressions of unconditional love toward him, are being depicted as evidence of disloyalty to the Regime and even hatred forAmerica.

“Bob felt (with some justification) that the US government was not going to engage with diplomatic efforts and so decided to try to free his son himself,” recounts Pastor Proctor. “He learned Pashtun and developed a lot of contacts in the Middle East. The Qatar connection is one that either originated with Bob or, at the very least, became very personally connected to Bob. Bob has, for quite some time, been saying that the closure of Guantanamo is integrally connected to the release of his son.”

In addition to placing his duty to his son above loyalty to the State, Bob Bergdahl’s offenses include learning the language of his captors and expressing the heretical view that God disapproves of death of Afghan children. Even Bob’s beard is presented as evidence of his supposed affinity for Islamic jihad, a charge that – if applied even-handedly – could justify a drone strike targeting the cast of Duck Dynasty.

Rather than being a jihadist sleeper cell, as they are being portrayed by War Party dead-enders, the Bergdahls are Christian individualists. Their moral universe is defined by the Two Great Commandments (that we love our Creator and love our neighbors as ourselves ) and biblical teachings regarding the reciprocal moral duties of parents and children. They do not place allegiance to the State above loyalty to their family – which to a statist is an unforgivable heresy.

Speaking on FoxNews, Dr. Keith Ablow – displaying the ideologically inspired certitude of a Brezhev-era Soviet psychiatrist – discerned “narcissistic” tendencies in the entire Bergdahl family. Bowe’s desire for adventure and self-directed nature indicate that “he can’t really serve the nation … because he’s serving himself.” Bowe’s individualism was a form of “addiction,” insisted Commissar Ablow, eliciting coos of thoughtful assent from the Fox News personalities interviewing him, one of whom was prompted to underscore the importance of “obey[ing] your commander, rather than your conscience,” which is a decidedly a pre-Nuremberg order of moral priorities .

Bowe’s incorrigible commitment to his conscience is to be expected, Commissar Ablow continued, given that Bowe was raised in a family displaying a tendency “to distance one’s self from institutions, to diminish the rule of law and to elevate the individual above all else.” The problem with the Bergdahls, Ablow suggested, was that they “don’t feel part of our country.” The exchange of five Gitmo detainees for “somebody who didn’t feel very American” resulted in “a tremendously psychologically dispiriting moment for our people,” summarized the putative doctor, who strikes me as the kind of person who would consider the public execution of the entire Bergdahl family to be a moment of communal healing.

For people in the grip of war patriotism, the proper role for Bob and Jani Bergdahl was described in Livy’s account of the Horatti, or sons of Horace. During one of the countless conflicts in Rome's early expansion, Horace's triplet sons volunteered to engage three brothers from a rival tribe on the battlefield. The victors would win, on behalf of their city-state, possession of a strategically crucial – and now long-forgotten -- village.

Rome’s opponents were killed in a battle that also claimed two of Horace’s sons. In the subsequent victory celebration Horace lost one of his daughters as well: She was killed by the surviving brother as punishment for her romantic dalliance with an enemy of Rome. Horace bore the losses stoically, as befitting a father who sought above all things the greater glory of the government that claimed him.

Under that model of “patriotism” – which inspired the totalitarian French Jacobins, as well as their ideological offspring in Italy and Germany – Bob Bergdahl’s duty was to chastise his errant son, and exhort him to be true and faithful in carrying out the State’s murderous errand. If Bowe were to be killed by Afghans defending their country, his parents were expected to regard their son as an exalted hero, and their irreplaceable loss as a holy privilege.

Bowe was hardly the first American soldier whose understandable disillusionment led him to quit while deployed overseas.

                                                              

“I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” wrote

Colonel Ted Westhusing, a West Point Graduate, Special Forces veteran, and devout Catholic husband and father, in a despairing e-mail to his family. “I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more.”

A few hours later Col. Westhusing shot himself in the head, ending his life less than a month before his tour of duty was scheduled to end. In the fashion of “Doctor” Ablow, an Army psychologist who reviewed Westhusing's e-mails following his suicide determined that the Colonel was “unusually rigid in his thinking” and unreasonably committed to his moral code.

 Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson was also devoutly religious, a former Mormon missionary from Flagstaff, Arizona. Like Bowe and Bob Bergdahl, Peterson had what one friend described as an “amazing” ability to learn languages, an aptitude that helped her learn Arabic at the Army's Defense Language Institute. Spec. Peterson volunteered for duty in Iraq, where she was sent to help interrogate prisoners and translate captured documents at an air base in Tal-Afar.

And, like Ted Westhusing, Alyssa Peterson was driven to suicidal depression as a result of the role the regime forced her to play in Iraq.

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners,” summarized Reporter Kevin Elston, who was using the official euphemism for “torture.” “She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokesmen for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.”

Immediately after lodging her objections, Alyssa was reassigned and sent to suicide prevention training; her suicide note took ironic notice of the fact that the “prevention” training actually instructed her in the best way to kill herself.

“What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt … for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to act?” asked John Andrews, a WWI-era deserter, in John Dos Passos’ novel Three Soldiers. It’s quite likely that Ted Westhusing and Alyssa Peterson asked that question of themselves. Bowe Bergdahl’s emails to his father make it clear that he was pondering that question at the time of his desertion.

Implicated in grotesque crimes against decency, Col. Westhusing and Spec. Peterson “deserted” through suicide. They were buried with honors, and their bereaved families received sympathy, rather than scorn. Rather than ending his life, or allowing it to be wasted in the service of lies, Bowe Bergdahl sought to reclaim it on his own terms – and this is why War Party fundamentalists are seeking to not only to imprison him, but to destroy his entire family. 

This is a re-blog from Pro Libertate: "The Future is Too Good to Waste on Lies": Bowe Bergdahl's Moral Odyssey. Used with permission.

Author 

William N. Grigg

Payette, Idaho, United States

Christian Individualist, husband, father, self-appointed pundit.

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations

"...In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered outside Washington, DC and testified to atrocities they witnessed while deployed in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. This video captures the powerful words and images of this historic event.

Well-publicized cases of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire Iraqi family in the city of Haditha are not isolated incidents. Instead, they are the logical consequences of U.S. war policy.

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan preserves and honors the participants' courageous contributions in or to ensure that people arounf the world remember their stories and struggle. The 1 hour edited video features 13 veterans from three days of testimony given by over 70 men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The footage addresses such issues as the U.S. military's callous disregard for civilian life, the torture of detainees, the culture of racism that's inherent in a military occupation, gender discriminations, and the health crisis facing today's veterans..."

See also http://www.ivawarchive.org/wintersoldier

Adam Kokesh and other Veterans give their accounts of their time in the United States military in the Occupations and Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These accounts bringing these Vets to their ultimate decision of dissent from the practices of the US military in the expansion of the Empire and the ever long war in those countries. 

GORE VIDAL interview with MONICA ATTARD – SUNDAY PROFILE 20th APRIL 2003

Monica Attard: Hello and welcome to Sunday Profile, I’m Monica Attard. Tonight a special guest for this long weekend, Gore Vidal, America’s last small ‘r’ republican, now 76 and railing against what he calls the Bush-Cheney junta.

America, says Gore Vidal, has made meddling in the affairs of other nations his reason for being. Without a constant perception of threat the world’s last superpower can’t function. It is says Vidal a law of nature that there is no action without reaction.

The United States had September 11 coming, and at the end of the day it might well have been a gift to what he calls the Bush-Cheney junta, a gift which allowed the United States to go after Osama bin Laden and after Saddam Hussein, the two men it perceived as obstacles to the superpower’s imperial ambitions.

So what is Gore Vidal’s America? Believe him and it is truly an unappealing place where the state is constantly waging war not only against foreign nations but against its own citizens, where the police run wild abusing civil rights, where the infamous Bill of Rights is a fading memory of what could have been.

Gore Vidal: But I would say that that is not the United States that I write about, those are certain aspects either politically but I won’t say traditional, but certainly since 1950 when the economy was militarised and we began what I call perpetual war for perpetual peace, which was sometimes called the Cold War, now referred to as World War Three. I think this was a great mistake on the part of our leaders, especially President Truman at that time. And we are getting into worse and worse trouble, but don’t blame it on the Americans, we have nothing to do with it, it’s corporate America which owns the country and which in the year 2000 staged a coup d’etat when the popularly elected president Albert Gore was refused the presidency and the loser Mr Bush, was put in his place by a five to four majority of the Supreme Court, which was acting unconstitutionally. Now I’m a critic of this sort of thing and since I’m in favour of the American republic and I just like the American empire, I thought my position was pretty clear.

Monica Attard: What do you think of George Bush? Much is written about his capacities or lack of them? Is he a capable leader?

Gore Vidal: Well I shouldn’t think so, who knows whether he’s leading? It is assumed in Washington that what ruling is being done, I mean that in the most primitive way, is done by the Vice President Mr Cheney. Bush is just somebody that they put in the presidential chair.

Monica Attard: Thus the Bush-Cheney junta as you call it?

Gore Vidal: Yes the junta, the junta is oil and gas, money, ? America, they also own the media, which is why voices of dissent have been pretty much stifled, in every area of media. We are suddenly without any recourse, we the people. The Congress has abdicated, it has two great powers, one to declare war, the other is the power of the purse, these are written in the constitution. Each power has been abandoned, we haven’t declared war since 1941, and yet we’ve fought well over 200 wars since then, hot, cold, tepid. And the power of the purse is now entirely operated by the Executive for the benefit of the military. Now the larger the military you have the more you’re going to use it. Our founders were very intelligent and in the federalist papers great figures like James Maddison, one of the early presidents warned against even having a standing army except maybe to keep a little order here and there, that it would lead to empire and empire would lead to despotism. And that’s where we are now.

Monica Attard: Presumably though this manipulation of the administration by corporate interests is not something that has suddenly arrived on America’s doorstep. Presumably it’s something that’s been in the making for a very, very long time?

Gore Vidal: Of course it has.

Monica Attard: What marks the Bush administration out then as any worse than those which have come before it?

Gore Vidal: Good heavens, we have never had an administration that’s set out deliberately to rid us of the Bill of Rights, with USA Patriot Act number one, which passed 45 days after 9/11 and now there’s a current sequel to it, which has not yet been given to Congress but has been leaked, you can be arrested without a charge, put before a military tribunal without recourse to due process of law, to a lawyer, you can be deprived of your citizenship and you can be deported, this is a born American. It’s got some lovely language in it, you can be deported to a region or a country that has no government, which I must say at the moment sounds rather good to me.

Monica Attard: Of course there’s the men still in captivity in Guantanamo Bay that have yet to have their status dealt with?

Gore Vidal: Oh I don’t think they’ll ever be let go, they have nothing against them but they enjoy the power of holding them.

Monica Attard: But surely they can’t be kept forever?

Gore Vidal: I don’t see why not, I mean it is a dictatorship, it’s a dictatorship with a lot of ventilation, we still have many of the signs of the old republic are still there. That was the genius of Julius Caesar when he set going, he had Augustus, the Roman Empire, they strictly maintain all of the republican machinery having two consuls, having a senate, having this, having that, while they concentrated all power in the principate(?). So in theory the Emperor was just sometimes an acting consul and sometimes he was just somebody living in the country, but all power was to him and then of course they couldn’t work out the succession, so due to a series of wars of succession they fell apart. But that’s what we have done now, we keep the forms of the republic and we have an imperial system and something of a police state.

Monica Attard: Now Mr Vidal this dictatorship as you call it, did it have September 11 coming?

Gore Vidal: Well yes, it activated a lot of things that had been in the works. Example, after the bombing in Oklahoma City the country was duly shocked by what McVeigh and the group of what they call, call themselves ‘patriots’, may or may not have done, we still don’t know much about it, nothing was ever really investigated. But suddenly Oklahoma City they blow up a public building, immediately Clinton signs a terrorist act bill, which really it goes after many of the rights of due process of law and so on, habeas corpus, which we expect under our system. They were not annulled; they were nudged toward obedience on the part of the citizens. Then comes 9/11 and a few weeks afterwards there’s a 342-page USA Patriot Act, which is enormous detail but it certainly wasn’t thought up in 30 days since 9/11 as a response to a terrorist attack. It had been prepared and it was sent to Congress, Congress was then so overwhelmed by the media and the horror that had befallen us by wicked Arabs or whoever it was who did it, they passed it without reading it. Now we’re stuck with the damn thing, Congress at last is sitting down and realising what they wrought, and they’re reviewing some of the aspects of it, which are violently anti-democratic if one can use that phrase.

Monica Attard: Mr Vidal do you think that the United States brought the devastation of September 11 upon itself though, do you think it was a simple as a payback?

Gore Vidal: Well nothing is of that nature is ever terribly simple, no nation ever begins anything in a state of innocence, nations have pasts, they’ve done good things and bad things and have enemies and allies, indifference. There are many things we could have done, should have done, did not do, and there are many things that we did in other parts of the world, which caused resentment. The President is a born again Christian, it means he’s a protestant from the south and believes and rapture and wants to be a sunbeam for Jesus, well he’s going to let in so Washington says, I can’t believe it he’ll do it, but he will let in, in theory anyway Christian evangelicals into the Muslim world. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an American Christian evangelical but run, no matter what you yourself may be in the way of religion, I mean these are very, very primitive people, and they’re absolutist and they know that God has chosen them to convert everyone else. To have a bunch of them loose in the Middle East I said is asking for even more trouble than what we’ve got.

Monica Attard: But given the United States reaction to September 11, the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq, the rolling back of American civil liberties, who in your view represents the more dangerous evil? Is it Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush?

Gore Vidal: Well it’s Bush we have to deal with, bin Laden is a gangster, that should have been treated not like a war with a country. Osama bin Laden is not a country, he is something like the mafia, he’s head of a bunch of religious zealots, he’s a thug, he’s a terrorist indeed. Now how do you handle that normally in a normal country? What you do is you call out the police, you get to Interpol if he’s international, you turn to other countries to help you find him and his allies. And you might even go to the United Nations if you were not eager to supersede it yourself, that’s what should have been done. Instead Bush pretends there’s a war, but you can’t have a war without a country. Terrorism, you can’t have a war against terrorism, it’s an abstract noun, you can’t fight an abstract noun.

Monica Attard: But you’d have to argue wouldn’t you Mr Vidal that attempts had been made to flush him out, particularly under the Clinton administration. And yet all of those attempts have failed, he’s a very elusive character?

Gore Vidal: Well he’s literally elusive, they can’t find him, but then again we don’t know if they’re looking for him. When our generals first arrived in Afghanistan, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, the Taliban as such had nothing much to do with it, they were a bunch of chaotic people that we had put in charge of the country at the time of the wars with the Soviets, and they were becoming crazier and crazier. But in the interests of establishing a pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Sea down to Karachi in Pakistan, we decided to go in there and replace the Taliban and using Osama bin Laden, who had been in and out of Afghanistan, as an excuse. As soon as our general on the spot got there he gave an interview, I’m sure he got into a lot of trouble, somebody said well when do you think you’re going to get Osama bin Laden? He said, we’re not looking for him that’s not what this is about, and then he had to come back with a statement that said well, we’re against Al Qaeda, and then he had to explain what that was. But what it was really about was UNICAL, Union Oil of California which had a contract to put a pipeline from Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan down through Pakistan to the port of Karachi, where the oil would then be sold to China, we had already made a deal.

Monica Attard: So is it possible then that September 11 was potentially a preemptive strike in response to what the Arab world might have interpreted, correctly or otherwise to have been a possible US threat to Afghani strategic interests, oil interests?

Gore Vidal: Oh I think that it is now fact, one doesn’t know in a world of so much rumour and this and that, but Osama bin Laden got word that in October Clinton had a plan to hit his camps up in the hills in the eastern part of Afghanistan and to attack Afghanistan, maybe with a full invasion. This was Clinton, who was our kindly liberal president. Osama bin Laden gets wind of that and the next thing that we know we’ve got 9/11, which is a preemptive strike against us. That I think is current wisdom around Washington, not in certain circles obviously where he must be forever a mad demon and I’m sure he is a mad demon. But if he knew an attack was coming in October and he hit in September one sort of sees the logic of that.

Monica Attard: Now you also talk of the United States’ need to always manufacture an enemy. If it’s not terrorists it’s its own people, pedophiles, drug lords etc. Do you believe that it was necessary for the United States to have one individual to focus anger upon after September 11? That is Osama bin Laden?

Gore Vidal: We’ve always done it, we personalise everything because that is the style of the country, that’s the style of the media. You immediately focus on an individual of great good and beauty or a great evil and ugliness, and you just go on and on about them and you never go on about what the battle’s really about, because we want to talk about good and evil, which gets back to President Bush’s deep religiosity. He keeps talking in theological terms about good and evil, politicians ought not to do that, particularly politicians with the United States, a country in which we built what I thought was a big solid wall between the church and the state, between religion and politics. And he’s been breaking that well down too; I mean there’s a good deal to object to.

Monica Attard: Do you think that the United States, Britain and Australia had any justification for what they’ve done in Iraq?

Gore Vidal: Not really no, I think it could have been done quite differently. First of all Saddam Hussein was of no danger to the United States or England or Australia. He might be of danger to a next-door neighbour, but he didn’t even show much sign of that. The last war we had with him was 1991, well he doesn’t anything between ’91 and now.

Monica Attard: But do you accept that the people of Iraq would never have risen up themselves, that they weren’t capable of such an uprising?

Gore Vidal: Don’t you think that’s their problem? That’s not your problem and that’s not my problem. There are many bad regimes on earth, we can list several hundred, at the moment I would put Bush regime as one of them, but I don’t want anybody to attack the United States. Just send Bush back to Texas.

Monica Attard: Can you not conceive of any good planned or coincidental to come from this military campaign?

Gore Vidal: Well the first law of physics is there’s no action without reaction, so for all I know they will discover a cure for cancer because of what they did in the desert. That we can say is a good result. What we have done is we have torn up the old blueprint that came into being around 1950 in which we were in command of Germany and Japan and we were restoring them to their former glory really, and we had established NATO to help Europe, we had the United Nations to arbitrate, we had Bretton Woods, which was going to take care of the world finances in our favour but it was favourable for just about everybody. That world has been totally destroyed in the last two years, there’s nothing left to them. We have not honoured any of our arrangements, whether it’s the Hiro(?) Accords or the environment. We’ve tried to kill the United Nations several times by not paying our dues, by ignoring its orders, we have changed the world’s balance and I am amazed that you people, you people is a generic word for everybody else on earth, haven’t done anything about it and haven’t brought it ?/ attention, this is radical, this is the most radical regime since the 30s.
Monica Attard: You mentioned that the United States has essentially usurped the United Nations, or is attempting to. Another casualty of the war is the relationship between Europe and the United States, always tense but now it appears to be irretrievably damaged. Is that how you see it, you’ve lived in Europe, you still live in Europe for part of the time, what do you make of that relationship?

Gore Vidal: I don’t think it’s irretrievable; this administration will vanish without a trace one day. I just don’t want it to vanish in a nuclear cloud of some suicide bomber, because I see that they’re making all kinds of trouble for themselves that they don’t understand the extent of it. I don’t want war and I don’t want anything violent to happen.

Monica Attard: But what do you make of the descriptions?

Gore Vidal: Europe has moved on to another sphere and there are those I know rather good economists who maintain that with the creation of the Euro that removes the power of the dollar, and it’s only the power of the dollar that we’ve been able to build up this vast military, because we could print as many as we want and it’s a sovereign currency, and it’s considered safe. So any time there’s a war being threatened they buy American securities, American treasury bonds, so that’s how we finance our nuclear weapons and so on. Well Saddam Hussein threatened, it was his first threat that I think got to us, that he was going to shift over to the Euro and not the dollar, which meant that people with Euros could buy Iraqi oil, which they can’t do much of now or then, but they will one day. And that would destroy the power of the dollar to determine world values; particularly the value of oil, and this was enough to give our people a great headache.

Monica Attard: So do you think then if that scenario is correct that France and Germany would have had just as much incentive to indulge in decision making for the wrong reasons as Washington?

Gore Vidal: Well it would, they did, they embraced the Euro. They don’t love the United States, I think that should be quite clear, nor is there any reason why one country should love another anyway. President Washington who was a great statesman has said that nations should not have special friends or special enemies, nations should only have interests, and that to me is good statesmanship.

Monica Attard: But that’s precisely what Washington’s doing isn’t it, acting on its interests?

Gore Vidal: It isn’t, it’s invented interests that it doesn’t have, it pretends that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and he was going to do it again if we didn’t go in and smash him. He had no plans and we went in and smashed him anyway. Why? Because he has the second largest oil reserves on earth.

Monica Attard: Mr Vidal if we look at the so-called coalition forces, you’ve got George Bush, you’ve got John Howard of Australia, they appear at least to have behaved as expected. That is to say we’re not really surprised by their action. When you look at Tony Blair, a British Labour leader, steadfastly supporting George Bush on this issue of Iraq what do you make of that? Why do you think he did it?

Gore Vidal: I think there’s something very creepy going on, now I’m giving you an opinion. Bush was an alcoholic and he became AA and part of AA is you find Jesus or God of something, and that helps you have the strength to cease to be an alcoholic which he said, he found God, a very primitive sort of fundamental Protestantism, believes in Armageddon, believes in the end of the world, believes that this world is nothing and only the next matters. Tony Blair is equally religious, obviously in a more sophisticated way, but he’s in a funny position, he’s Prime Minister of England, he is responsible in a sense for the Church of England, he appoints bishops for the sovereign to install. Well it is said that he’s become a Roman Catholic, now the two boys can see themselves as crusaders fighting for Jesus against the Infidel, against the heathen, against all Muslims. This to me is perfectly looney, it is nothing that I would do or you would do or most people would do since this kind of religious zeal went out of the western world quite some time ago. It did not go out of the Middle Eastern world, but we could live with that, it isn’t going to hurt us, particularly unless we make them very angry. So I think they see themselves as two Christian crusaders.

Monica Attard: Do you think that Tony Blair’s zeal will eventually see him falling in behind Washington if Washington makes a decision to extend this war and go after Syria? He says he won’t but do you think that’s possible?

Gore Vidal: Well I’m sure he says that but what he will do is a different thing. I think he’s got himself in pretty deep and I don’t think he’s worked out enough of an exit to get out of it because they are going to go into Syria.

Monica Attard: You believe that?

Gore Vidal: I know that and also Iran has been marked too. I hope it isn’t going to happen, I hope that the American people will wake up and stop the junta.

Monica Attard: How do you know that they’re going to go into Syria or Iran? Why do you say you know that?

Gore Vidal: I have connections in Washington and I know that this is a decision that has been made. Things do go wrong and things don’t happen.

Monica Attard: But you don’t think that Washington is just saber rattling, isn’t it possible that having now demonstrated its capacity and willingness to act in terms of Iraq that the Bush administration can actually achieve its aims through fear and threat?

Gore Vidal: It has no aims other than more oil and gas because Cheney had a study done about a year ago that by the year 2020 the entire world would be practically out of fossil fuels, they’re going to grab all of it and the biggest supply is in the Caspian area and all those countries whose names end in ‘stan’. That’s what our eye is on.
Monica Attard: You describe the three-stage process that you observe the US government employing against its enemies, abroad and at home. First there’s harassment, then there’s demonisation, then there’s attack. Is Syria now at the harassment stage?

Gore Vidal: You should read the New York times this morning, there were four major stories about the crimes of Syria, how it was really in with, they found the terrorists there and so it means that Iraq had been supporting terrorism and this and that, mostly stories are made up or it’s totally distorted. But the New York Times is a voice of the regime and a voice with a really a sort of desire for war and expansion in that part of the world.

Monica Attard: And so on your account then the terrorist link would just be extended ad infinitum and all of this on the back of one event, September 11, which looks on this account as though it might have been a gift for Bush, a truly massive widely perceived direct external threat needed in order to secure American global and oil interests?

Gore Vidal: That is one way of looking at.

Monica Attard: You believe there’s no plan to deliver democracy via regime change throughout the Middle East?

Gore Vidal: I don’t believe it’s our business to make regime changes in the Middle East, particularly when we’re under no threat from anybody.

Monica Attard: But is there a plan, is the American administration interested at all in delivering democracy to the Middle East?

Gore Vidal: Are you crazy? We don’t have it here for God’s sake, why would we export it? We talk a lot about it, our founding fathers, they had two things, one was majority rule or democracy, and the other is tyranny, which they called monarchy in those days. That’s all.

Monica Attard: In relation to this idea that the United States is not the slightest bit interested in delivering democracy to the Middle East, clearly much of the Arab world is deeply sceptical about what the United States is actually up to. But Saudi Arabia seems to stand apart from the rest. Why are they so taken by Washington?

Gore Vidal: Well first of all they are occupied by American troops, which were brought in at the time of Iraq One and then didn’t go home. Secondly deals were made that they are there to protect the Royal Family, which is generally in cahoots with our oil companies, and to protect them from the people if the people should suddenly turn ugly in a country like that. They’re in an awful position, I would not like to be one of them for anything, but we are there.

Monica Attard: Can I turn your mind briefly to North Korea Gore Vidal if I might? What do you think is the real threat to be dealt with there? Is there a real threat to be dealt with, because it’s hard to fathom the energy or financial gain to controlling North Korea for example?

Gore Vidal: Well we had an opportunity under Clinton, one of the few really good things he did in foreign affairs is he opened up fairly normal relations with North Korea. Bush coming in filled with zealotry for our Lord Jesus and knowing these were infidels and evil people, ‘axis of evil’, evil, evil, all of that again and again, these biblical words keep spouting from his mouth. He slammed the door on them, they wanted to have normal relations, they wanted all sorts of things in the way of trade, which Clinton began and he slammed the door, identified them with Iran and Iraq as an ‘axis of evil’, which is absolutely absurd, since the three countries have nothing to do with each other. Iran and Iraq were at war for eight years and North Korea is out of it, it’s on the moon. So the absurdity of even talking about such silly language as President Bush speaks to the people is to me an insult to our intelligence. It is so clear it is meaningless. Yet people say oh he’s the President, he must know something, well he doesn’t know anything or what he does know he’s not telling and he has his own plans.

Monica Attard: So if I could ask you to stare into your crystal ball yet again, what would you think is going to happen in North Korea?

Gore Vidal: I don’t think much of anything is going to happen; they’ll go on starving to death as apparently they are or at least so the media tells us. We only know what we’re told by in our case here by corporate America and they have a worldview, which is greatly filtered, distorted, altered for our benefit. I don’t see them on the march, and I don’t see them putting together an atom bomb and one night saying let’s let the Americans have it! Why? At some point somebody must be intelligent and you must find a reason for something. If you get attacked by somebody you have obviously done something to deserve that attack at least in their eyes. Well so far we haven’t done it, but it looks like Bush might try. We knew Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, I got so tired of that mantra, because if we had known it we would also know that at the first occasion he would have to use them would be at who invaded him. Now it does not take a Kosovitz to work that one out, that’s obvious. And we can’t find them and I suppose we’ll plant some there eventually, but there aren’t any now.

Monica Attard: Can I ask you one very last question Gore Vidal, what have you made of the coverage of the Iraqi by Fox?

Gore Vidal: Oh it’s disgusting, deeply disgusting, I’ve never heard people like that on television in my life and I’ve been on television for 50 years, since the very beginning of television in the United States. And I have never seen it as low, as false, one lie after the other in these squeaky voices that you get from these fast talking men and women, it was pretty sick.

Monica Attard: Do Americans believe it do you think? Do you think they fell for it?

Gore Vidal: Well the polls would say that they did, but then when you look at the way they ask the questions in the polls you’ll see they get the answers they want. We were badly hit by Osama bin Laden and only brave George Bush is going after him and he’s going to find him and kill him. Are you in favour of this? Yes, says 90 per cent of the people.

Monica Attard: But do you have enough faith in the American people to believe that perhaps they didn’t fall for that?

Gore Vidal: Some didn’t, I can tell you something that didn’t get much play but we had the mid-term elections a year or so ago and many, many Republicans were elected on the strength of George Bush’s war in Afghanistan, but simultaneously a poll got run by mistake I’m sure in the Wall Street Journal and something like 50 per cent, over 50 per cent of those who had voted for Bush in the year 2000 said they would vote for anybody else at that time, this poll was not printed anywhere else, it was only in one edition.

Monica Attard: And that was Gore Vidal, speaking to us from his home in Los Angeles in the United States. And that’s Sunday Profile for this long weekend; I hope you’ve had a peaceful Easter. Thanks to Michaele Perske and Peter Dredge, the producers of the program. I’m Monica Attard.