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<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><b>Watchfires of Freedom --- Burning a President’s Words<o:p></o:p></b></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Ninety years ago a small group of women led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns set an urn in front of the White House and in it burned the words of President Woodrow Wilson. They called their action <i>Watchfires of Freedom</i><span style="font-style:normal">. Wilson had been extolling the great benefits of democracy brought to the world by the bloodbath of World War I. If this were true, the women asked, where are our rights? What respect does anyone’s words --- especially a president’s --- deserve when they are based in hypocrisy? When there is no accountability in either the media or the courts for the distortions and lies of elected officials, how are citizens supposed to express their disdain?<o:p></o:p></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">On December 17<sup>th</sup> at 5 pm in front of the Federal Building in Bangor a group of citizens will burn the words of President Barack Obama from his speech justifying the escalation of the War in Afghanistan. We will not act to advance the agenda of any political party. Our agenda is democracy and truth. It’s an old truism that the first casualty of war is truth. It might equally be said that the first casualty of untruth is democracy. Democracy is a sacred trust. That trust must burn with the pure, transparent clarity of a flame. If a democracy is really to be <i>of, by and for the people</i><span style="font-style:normal">, the people can only take on its responsibility if they know everything their elected officials know. How else, then, can they make decisions to devote their precious lives and resources to solving their common problems?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Elected officials who employ fear, patriotism, propaganda and false history to mislead their own people have betrayed democracy. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">President Barack Obama in his speech of December 1, 2009 calling for the escalation of the War in Afghanistan, used multiply duplicities about the present and the past to make his case for expending more blood and money.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">We will enumerate and denounce those lies and distortions, burning them as a metaphoric act of destruction, purification and transformation. Our acts are ritualistic --- demonstrating immense respect for life and an equal abhorrence of deceit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While the style of our president is articulate and persuasive, his content is hypocritical and purposely misleading. Our intent is to burn the lies and shed light on the truth. George Orwell said, “When deceit becomes universal, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>If truth is war’s first casualty, then telling the truth must the harbinger of peace and justice.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">President Obama said, “The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It does not bear repeating because the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>fundamental, though unacknowledged, “debate” was not about going to war, but about whether to commit a war crime or not --- whether knowingly, by lying to the American people and the world’s people, precipitate a crime against humanity, a crime designated as such by our own Constitution and our binding treaties. And our president has used his persuasive power to insist that this real debate should never take place. And that those guilty of plotting the crime not be held accountable.<o:p></o:p></p> <div class="MsoNormal">President Obama justifies the war on Afghanistan by the actions of 9/11. He says the US attacked Afghanistan only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden. This is not true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The Guardian reported in October of 2001 that three times the Taliban offered to surrender bin Laden and, each time, was rejected by the Bush administration. The Bush administration was more intent on war than justice.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Whereas Obama asserts we have no interest in occupying Afghanistan, that’s difficult to square with the invasion of troops, contractors, CIA agents, and advisors and the construction of an enormous embassy in Kabul and over 80 very permanent-looking military installations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">The president says, “We did not ask for this fight,” a statement that is disingenuous at best. The great Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” None of the 9/11 terrorists were from Afghanistan. And we are being asked to forget that during the 1990s many prominent figures of our military industrial complex spoke of the urgent necessity for finding a reason to attack Iraq and Afghanistan --- long before 9/11. The reasons for wanting war involved control of oil and gas supplies and the enlarging of the US’s sphere of imperial power. Perhaps we did not ask for this war, but we surely wanted it. Nothing about that situation has changed except that what was once a hypothetical desire is now a reality.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">Obama said the U.S. has underwritten global security for six decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We would ask, “Where does the history of Vietnam and the 2-3 million lost lives fit in that vision?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How secure might the people of East Timor, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Ghana, the Congo feel after our meddling in those countries?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And has Obama forgotten what he admitted in his speech earlier this year in Cairo --- that our CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 and brought back the repressive Shah in order to preserve western oil interests?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">Most astounding, Obama says, “Unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The facts are otherwise: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>a military budget equal to if not larger than the rest of the world’s combined, over 1000 foreign military installations (while all other countries may have 200 total), and a substantial U.S. military presence in over 100 countries, including Japan, South Korea, Germany, Columbia, Italy, & Iraq. The Pentagon calls their plan for military control of the world <i>Full Spectrum Dominance. <o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%">Truth telling is the only path to political and cultural sanity. Without truth telling there will be no democracy, no peace, and no justice. Our goal is not to tell truth to power, but to insist, as we all must, that power tell the truth. We burn lies to feel the warmth of truth.</p> <div class="MsoNormal">The Nigerian writer Ben Okri says<span style="font-family: Arial">, “</span>Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.” <br style="mso-special-character:line-break"> <br style="mso-special-character:line-break"> <o:p></o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; line-height:160%"> <o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment--> </div></body></html>