The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We're
the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our
shores.
John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That’s the
sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who,
despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in
Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are
not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes,
the Clintons lied.
Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He
said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we’ll squeeze
the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a
good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until
too recently.
Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to
Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll ?nd the same thing:
America's music, America's freedom of speech, freedom of religion
and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for
others have made the USA truly “the light unto the nations.”
Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes I ?nd that
weird, but it’s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.
We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that
all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to
point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and
monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.
America is indeed exceptional. That's not a boast, that’s a job we
have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with
that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law
signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which
the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against
any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere
in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron
Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in
Nazi Germany.
Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that de?antly
walked out of the ?rst “world trade organization,” known as the
British Empire, announcing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with
INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.”
Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or
Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born
free-and “we” are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are
“INALIENABLE”: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the
Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department
of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre- or post-
Saddam.
Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its
cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two U.S. military
lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp.
They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution.
("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Iran, these
two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush
fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in
America could that happen.
No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of
this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt?
China’s torture standard? Britain’s Secrecy Act as a standard?
Switzerland’s Nazi-money-protection standard?
Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to
protect Black school kids' right to attend class. You don’t have to
tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million
Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam
today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they
laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they
say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), “We love Americans.”
They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American.
Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some
of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But
Clinton was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza
combined because he represented that American sense of giving-
a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of
America’s Manifest Destiny.
Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which
the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land
and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of
the journalists in our shitty little of ?ces in New York and London
is to expose these motherfuckers.
Ronald Reagan said, "America is the shining city on the hill." And
he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the
helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in
the Mississippi.
Go back to Taos, New Mexico, Voting Precinct 13. What you’ll ?nd
there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the ?ag every day and
will ?ght and die for it knowing full well that the ?ght must also
be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.
Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should
be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa,
children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as
American children."
Damn right, they do. That’s what Jefferson meant by "inalienable."
And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama's
Caliphate of oil states or China’s money-crazed "Communism" nor half
of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes
installed today in Iraq by George Bush.
Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just
doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing
that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take
away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells
are sleeping under your staircase, you don't take a chance, you lose
your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear
and suspicion, an armed madhouse.
You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go
further: he’s UN-AMERICAN.
And that’s why he lost the election. TWICE.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed
Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange
Tales of a White House Gone Wild from which this is excerpted. Sign
up for Palast's investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com
