I have known the Suttons since I was a little girl, as we were members of Our Lady of Malibu together, and they are fine people. I wasn’t on that caravan, but I have participated in many peace events since I was at Samo-Hi during the Vietnam War. The events of WWII were quite different to these CIA-led incursions involving drugs and arms exchanges, assassination attempts (including hiring Saddam Hussein at age 22 for the same), supporting both sides of conflicts such as the Iran/Iraq war in which we provided quite a hefty chunk of the arms we now accuse Hussein of having, including biological agents and gasses he used against the Kurds. We have training sites such as the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, which outfitted Manuel Noriega and other of our friends in the Southern Hemispheres to put down popular, i.e. democratic, uprisings (which were supported incidentally by Catholic missionaries who were then also killed). If one read outside literature such as “Secrets,” Daniel Ellsberg’s autobiography of his work at Rand and the Pentagon, or even McNamara’s version, in which he clearly admits he lied to the American people about the mission we were on in Vietnam, or any of Noam Chomsky’s 30 books, such as “Deterring Democracy,” and “Chronicles of Dissent,” or Dr. Helen Caldicott’s “The New Nuclear Danger,” one would understand you can’t just blindly believe what the five corporations who own 90% of the news media feed you.
The U.S. is not only the largest arms-dealer the world has ever known, our sales equaling the combined total of the other top 14 countries, but we also have way more of the bombs (77,000 nuclear capacity, and growing by up to 80 new hydrogen bombs a year). Caldicott suggests we spend nearly half-a-trillion dollars yearly on weapons. “If you spent $1,000 a minute since Jesus was born, you would have just got to a trillion dollars.”
Heed: Congress “supported the troops” by voting O.U.T $26 billion of veteran’s benefits just as we shipped them off to the Gulf!
Beate Nilsen