Who Are These Men?

We are confronted with the most lawless administration in our nation’s history. So crudely are they invested in winning—from promoting their agenda to getting their candidates elected (using the word “elected” loosely)—that they seem to have lost all regard for the democratic process, if, indeed, they had any in the first place.

We have seen that there is nothing they won’t do to achieve their ends, from using rigged electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail, to redrawing the congressional maps of as many states as possible, in order to virtually assure that only Republicans can win elections. They use push-polls to slander their opponents. They lie daily and blatantly on the issues, from health care, to tax cuts, to the environment. They brutishly attack those who oppose them. They fabricate out of whole cloth reasons for wars.

Meanwhile, the President's and his family’s business connections to the Saudis and the bin Ladens, except for the brave voice of Michael Moore, and a few others, remain virtually unchallenged by the media, Congress, Democrats running for President, or anyone else.

In his just released book, Dude, Where’s My Country?, Moore poses seven questions of the President, one of the best ones being, why did his administration assist 24 members of the bin Laden family in getting out of the country after the attack on September 11th? In fact, as he points out, their private jets were actually in the air after the rest of us had been grounded. The F.B.I. was outraged that they were not allowed to interrogate family members of a key suspect of one of the biggest crimes in history.

Among other things, Moore goes on to point out that:

* After leaving office, Bush, Sr. became a highly paid consultant for a company known as the Carlyle Group, that one of the investors in the group was the bin Laden family, to the tune of a minimum of 2 million dollars. The people who run the Carlyle Group include Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, Frank Carlucci, Bush Sr.’s secretary of state, James Baker, and former British Prime Minister John Major.

* While Bush, Jr. was Texas gov, members of the Taliban traveled to Texas to meet with his oil and gas company buddies.

* The Taliban met with Unocal, the huge oil and energy giant, to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan under the Caspian Sea into Turkey. Ken Lay’s Enron was in on the deal. Cheney’s Halliburton was in on the deal. So members of the Taliban were having big meetings with the major contributors to the Bush campaign. While governor, Bush personally met with Uzbekistan’s ambassador on behalf of Enron.

* Everything was going fine till Osama bin Laden blew up two American embassies in Africa. That was enough for then-President Bill Clinton to put a stop to all dealings with the Taliban. Clinton was not about to let Unocal, Halliburton and Enron be in business with terrorists.

* The new president, Bush, continued meeting with the Taliban. They still wanted those billions from the gas pipeline. Now, they were trying to work out a deal which would involve kicking Osama out of Afghanistan. These talks continued right up until just days before September 11th.

* After that, we swooped down and chased the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. All the big shots escaped.

* We turned Afghanistan over to Unocal. “The new American ambassador to Afghanistan? Unocal consultant and National Security Council member Zalmay Kahalizad. The new American-installed leader of Afghanistan? Former Unocal staffer Hamid Karzai.”

* On December 27, 2001, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan sighed the pipeline deal.

If this President, his cronies, and his family, are in bed with the true enemies of our country, then, is it just possible that he may not be the best person for the job of Commander In Chief of our nation’s military? It certainly might explain why he may have needed to fabricate a scapegoat enemy to go to war against, instead of seeking out the real culprits of 9/11.

All we can do is go on their past behavior—that’s the way you’re supposed to bet. Will they do anything to win the next election? Count on it.

We have a problem, here. We must ask ourselves—who are the real enemies of our country? Who are the real foes of our democracy? And how do we fight them—without becoming them?

As I write, I think of this poem, by Charles Reznikoff:

I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion;
I will marshall against you
the fireflies of the dusk.