Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate once and for all.

The Last Letter

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry claimed they would reinstate illegal programs that have been dismissed by experts as ineffective and illegal. They have sought to foster the ignorance in the Republican party that comes with a belief in a non-thing. This non-thing is called, “enhanced interrogation”.

Each of these people continue an insult against real interrogators and other military and civilian service members who have been clear that they seek a trail to what is so, not what is previously concluded and then supported via confession. Whether it is Malcolm Nance, SERE instructor and counterterrorism and intelligence specialist, Matthew Alexander or Col Steve Kleinman, military interrogators who have clearly rejected the idea of an ‘enhanced interrogation’, Glenn Carle, Ali Soufan, the list goes on. Each of these people have come forward to denounce torture and discredit the idea of ‘enhanced interrogation’. Each of these people has direct experience with interrogation and are adamant that torture does not work, that waterboarding wasn’t the only torture happening and that it was not only ineffective but delayed information, sent agents on white noise chases, and in some cases ended in deaths of both civilians and military service members because of the bad intelligence.

OBAMA ALLOWING ACLU TO RUN CIA
It didn’t take long for right wing nonsense like “Obama is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA” to come from Michele Bachmann. If this were true, Guantanamo would be closed, many detainees would be freed, the cases pending would be underway and Dick Cheney would likely be in prison. But from a dog whistle idiot like Bachmann, this is just another tune. She has no respect for the interrogation specialists in the FBI or US military. Though I’m sure some CIA officers are familiar with interrogation now, all accounts by former CIA officers in the public sphere for the past 6 or so years have been clear that no such wing ever existed in CIA until now. At the request of the White House, contractors were used to do what officers wouldn’t. Ali Soufan was there when the shift took place from conventional and probably legal to clearly illegal and clearly values destructive.

Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul disagree. Ron Paul was determined to state that waterboarding is torture. He is correct. Jon Huntsman was even more clear that as an ambassador, he was able to tell first hand how these events shaped views of the United States and that real clout comes from moral compass not this idiot might that is so lauded by the Blind Candidates, Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Romney and Gingrich.

Now while Romney and Gingrich didn’t weigh in on the waterboarding question, to which we can predict their delightful glee at the idea, we can see that Mitt Romney is into the macho ‘kill them’ talk when it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki and even worse was Newt Gingrich. Gingrich couldn’t distinguish between a jury and a presidential finding.

WATERBOARDING AND THE NEWS MEDIA
This play to the extreme is only part of the problem. When the moderators and news junkies continue the ‘enhanced interrogation’ term, they do their viewers and readers a disservice. There is no further enhancement in harming people, even if they are bad people.

How To Break A Terrorist by Matthew Alexander

In his book, How To Break A Terrorist, Matthew Alexander describes in detail the interaction with confessed bomb makers. He is able to get past the bullshit of the front each seems to put on. He is a skilled seeker of what is So. He is looking for accurate information to put in a larger picture that will help end bombings. If he gets the wrong information, military resources will likely strike the wrong house resulting in the deaths of both civilians and service members. He is aware of this at all points. Rick Perry could care less about the truth if it would get him more votes.

Ali Soufan knows that Abu Zubaydah was speaking with them before the torture crew of Jessen and Mitchell arrived to fulfill executive orders that were illegal and were not going to get approval from FBI. Herman Cain has never heard of any of these people and wouldn’t be able to tell you the first thing about EITs or CSRTs. Yet as he disavows ‘torture’ he is clear in finding a way to say he’d endorse ‘enhanced interrogation’…as if it existed. This was dog whistle nonsense. Cain is hedging his right wing bets. As GuestBlogger from ThinkProgress noted Cain said he’d accept the wisdom of the military leaders and they have been clear that torture isn’t condone.

Malcolm Nance has clearly issued the call to each of the previous apologists for waterboarding that he can clear up their views if they’d submit to being waterboarded. He knows and the SERE program knows. Waterboarding isn’t done to our soldiers any where near what was done to KSM, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. This wasn’t the only torture done to these men. And while one can argue how bad they are, how bad is less important when accurate is what you are looking for. A confession is quite easy to illicit. If a confession is all you want, that doesn’t take much. If you are trying to conclude with a previously ordained notion, then you aren’t looking for intelligence, you are looking to fix the narrative. This was the MO of the Cheney administration. No respect for intelligence officers, no respect for interrogators, no respect for the law, or our treaties.

This new batch of candidates seeks to bring back a New American Century as if we forgot what the last Project attempted to bring with its failed war in Iraq. In the end Americans lost, our economy is shot for quite a while, we weren’t greeted as liberators and were asked to leave and don’t let the door hit our ass on the way out. Bill Kristol predicted the war would last a few weeks opposite Daniel Ellsberg on Washington Journal in March 2003. He was cocky and sure of himself. Romney and the rest of Mt Assmore show us that they don’t really care about intelligence but to pandering to the base reactionary elements of the right wing. They don’t care that the government hasn’t been able to make a case against Abu Zubaydah for any actions against the United States. Being a terrorist somewhere in the world isn’t a US crime. Being a terrorist against the United States is no longer being alleged. There isn’t a candidate up on stage that knows any of these cases. They don’t care.

The idea of “enhanced interrogation” needs to be put to rest as a petty coward’s rhetoric about being tough when there are already real tough guys doing a good job at protecting lives on all sides. Seeking to inject further testosterone nonsense serves nothing to protecting American interests and many Pentagon reports indicate that the opposite is true; torture leads to acts of violence against American interests and increased confusion in the intelligence chain.

These candidates aren’t serious. The news centers are irresponsible and it doesn’t take long to find someone who has done this work for a while to tell you that intelligence isn’t about Jack Bauer television dramatics.  Speech writers like Marc Theissen are flat out liars when it comes to lauding their own expertise. Theissen is a tool with Michael Hayden’s hand up his ass. Frank Gaffney and the other cowardly chickenhawks are utterly discredited outside their own thinktank circle jerks.

Major Garrett and Scott Pelley should know that there is no such thing as, Enhanced Interrogation. They should have pressed these candidates to explain where they learned about these “techniques”. As supposed Journalists, they should have asked for sources of their information. Mine are easy to share, Matthew Alexander, interrogator, Malcolm Nance, SERE instructor, counterterrorism, intel, Ali Soufan, FBI interrogator, Col. Steve Kleinman, interrogator, Glenn Carle, CIA officer,  and and the vast documentation released under FOIA that clearly demonstrates torture has an adverse effect upon gaining intelligence.

These candidates represent the absurdist notions of Dick Cheney who spent his prime days with 5 deferments. He’s never been there, they’ve never been there, and yet they are always right and always claim to be the toughest. When it comes to national security, these idiots of the GOP party insult the very values established under General George Washington when he issued orders to do no harm to captured British or Hessian troops. He may have done this for moral purpose, but he clearly did it for tactical purpose. These GOP candidates have no place in the company of the founders.

(editors note: I want to thank Col. Morris Davis for letting us reprint his words here for you to share.)

My father was a 100 percent disabled veteran of World War II. He left home a healthy man in the prime of life and returned seriously disabled by a broken back during a training accident. My earliest memories are of him going to the Bowman-Gray Hospital at Wake Forest University for multiple surgeries, spending weeks at home in bed in a full-body plaster cast, his back and leg braces and crutches, and the hand-controls that let him drive without using the gas or brake pedals. Like many of his generation – and like many of the men and women I see now at Walter Reed Army Medical Center – there was never a word of bitterness over what he lost, only pride in his country and a bond with others who served in defense of democracy.

Robert Hutchins, former Dean of the Yale Law School and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, said “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”

I believe that living in a democracy is a privilege, not a right, and each citizen has a duty to do his or her part to ensure the privilege isn’t lost to future generations. That was a lesson I learned from my father at an early age. I joined the Air Force a few months after he died and served for 25 years, in part because of his example.

Volunteers for military service aren’t apathetic or indifferent about democracy. They pledge to support and defend the Constitution, and many make the ultimate sacrifice; I saw proof every morning when I drove by the white stone markers aligned in rows at Arlington National Cemetery on my way to work. We owe them a duty to do more than just passively surrender to the challenges we face; we have an obligation to participate in working towards solutions.

It says something when we cast nearly as many votes to select the next American Idol as we do to select the next American president, when more can name the “Plus Eight” that belong to Jon and Kate than the eight members of the Supreme Court remaining when Justice John Paul Stevens (Navy veteran) retires, and when Tiger Woods wrecking his marriage and his SUV is the lead story on the national news. Too many of us are too absorbed with the superficial world of celebrities and the schadenfreude of their calamitous lives.

The most basic duty of citizenship is participation, something Americans do less than citizens of most other countries. Almost all eligible voters in Australia – about 95 percent – cast ballots in national elections; typically a little more than half of eligible voters in the U.S. do the same. That’s a sad fact. There is no excuse for being uninformed on issues and there is no excuse for not voting. In my view, you forfeit the right to pontificate if you’re too lazy to participate.

I’m involved in the Coffee Party, a group that promotes civil discussion about issues and greater public participation in the political process. I don’t believe any political party or any group along the ideological spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas, and I believe we should be able to discuss issues and ideas without hurling insults and threats. We seem to lose sight of the fact that we’re all in this together.

We have the power and the ability to prove Hutchins wrong and to advance the ideal the Founding Fathers envisioned – continuing to perfect the union, doing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and passing these privileges along to those that follow – if we just have the will.

Voting isn’t the end of a process, but a sort of beginning. So why do so many voters treat it as a finishline instead of a hiring date? Imagine if employers in other fields did this. You start your job after a rigorous process with interviewers, fill out elaborate forms, turn in your resume, buy a new wardrobe and then…everyone leaves and expects you to handle everything.

When an election is finished and the oaths of office are taken, do you know which staffers are hired to do the work of writing the bills, handling constituent issues, and competing for vocal space for your pet issues?

I am by no means the perfect citizen. I do however have a facility for working with my representative’s staff and would like to invite you to considering getting to know yours. In my case, I have a representative who easy to get along with but doesn’t always vote my way on everything. But that isn’t my largest concern. I am more concerned with not knowing what to ask, how to ask it, or having a scope of what Congress can achieve when it comes to matters close to heart.

The staff at my reps office respond to me with quality information and leads. They are quick to point out when they really have no ability to help and direct me to better resources. I’ve had to consult with them about pending legislation, existing legislation, understanding the different portions of our government and how best to relate to them. In my business field, I have interests vital to growth and regulations. I know precisely which staffer to call if I want a response that helps. My Rep doesn’t necessarily know all these answers.

When we had an issue with immigration last year for a family member, the staff went into overtime to explain to us the options in this ever growing morass of immigration law. When I needed to get up to the minute information on pending legislation regarding FISA, the staff was quick to let me know what changes were happening.

I’m probably in a unique district where my representative will call me from time to time. If yours does not, then I’d hold them to that. My representative seems to have at least a sense of the employee/employer relationship bestowed by the constituents. But it is sad to say that I doubt many of my district neighbors know the hard work his staff does for us each and every day without much of a thanks.

Even if you need to hold your representative accountable for some bad deed or decision, you might also need to see what staff that person hired. Are they hiring quality staff or just ideologue buddies from their latest winger thinktank, either right or left?

Either way, if you know the staff under your representative, you’ll have a fairly complete view of Your business; the districts business as well.

SO HERE’S TO THE STAFFERS!!!
Thank you!

Congress isn’t made up of just 435 in one chamber and 98- in the other. Those staffers matter. If you can learn to talk with them, your participation in this ‘democracy’ might be more effective
Share your stories of working with staffers at our site, VeracityRadio.com

By truthtelling007 on April 7, 2008 at 12:47 PM