Speech to Pacific Green Party State Convention

Speech to Pacific Green Party State Convention
16 January 2010

by Michael Meo

The people in this room are well aware of the fact that President George W. Bush lied to the Congress, to the American public, and to the world, when he claimed that the United States was obliged to invade Iraq because the leader of Iraq had nuclear weapons.

There were no nuclear weapons controlled by Saddam Hussein.  There were no stocks of chemical weapons.  There were no robot planes able to fly to Europe and drop bombs.  We were aware of these facts, in part, because whenever, at the time, the Department of Defense of the United States announced to the United Nations that such-and-such a site in Iraq harbored the materials needed to fabricate so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” the response of the government of Iraq was, not only to allow immediate access to that site by the UN weapons inspectors on the ground, but also to invite in, as witnesses, members of the world press.

Broadcast media in the United States, however, owned and operated by giant corporations, found it expedient not to emphasize this fact.  Rather, the lies of the President and members of his Cabinet were repeated continuously in the build-up to the invasion: we were treated to discussion, do you remember? on the elaborate defensive measures being taken in case our invading soldiers were attacked with poison gas – of which the Iraqis, of course,  had none.

As a candidate for elective office in a corporate environment, I know I can expect from the mainstream media of this city either negative publicity or no coverage at all.  But I stand here this afternoon to share with you the fact that the present President of the United States, the Democrat, Barack Obama, has lied, repeatedly and upon solemn occasions, about the war which he has just chosen to escalate, in Afghanistan.

The Democratic Administration, pretty much a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Wall Street corporations, makes it a practice to spew any number of falsehoods in the course of their normal way of conducting business.  The Obama campaign, whose honorary chair in the state of Oregon is my opponent in this year’s Congressional election, said it was going to prohibit lobbyists from assuming powerful positions – and the very next day hired a lobbyist for just such a position.

It said it was going to put an end to the practice of hiding behind supposed “state secrets” when called to defend its actions in courts examining the violation of citizen rights – and on the first opportunity it invoked a version of the government’s right to refuse to account for its actions which was even more sweeping than that of the bad old Bush Administration.

Obama himself said that he supported a single-payer health plan -- in 2003.  But, as a candidate for national office and as President, he has swept that overdue reform “off the table,” despite support for it by a majority of practicing doctors, let alone the well-known support of a majority of the voting public.

In this last bit of Democratic Party doublethink, the President is joined by my opponent in this race, who admits that a single-payer health plan is “best” (his choice of word).  He won’t vote for it, however, because “it won’t pass” the Congress.  Could he more clearly define himself as a rubber-stamp?  His vote is cast, not in the interests of his constituents, not in the interest of the best possible system for the citizens of the country, but solely in favor of what others tell him will succeed.

Candidate Obama promised change – but intervened in the Senate race in Connecticut to promote Joe Lieberman, a right-wing politician rejected by the Democratic voters, over a progressive candidate who won the Democratic Party primary.  Candidate Obama pledged to filibuster in support of requiring legal accountability of telecommunications corporations which violated the privacy rights of millions – and then promptly voted in favor of giving those companies immunity from any legal accountability.

It got worse after Obama was elected.  People complain today about the friendliness of our present Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, to the wealthy bankers.  But who hired Geithner?  At what point in time?  Why?  As Matt Taibbi wrote in last month’s issue of the magazine Rolling Stone,

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup – Michael Froman – before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering.  In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

That was two weeks after Obama had been elected.  As soon as he became President, in January of 2009, Obama announced that he was outlawing the practice of torture upon prisoners of the U.S. armed forces.  It was, he said, in violation of U.S. and international law.  And the criminals who committed those crimes, under U.S. and international law?  Quote, “It’s time to look ahead, not back,” unquote.  Just as with the telecommunications violations which the Democratic Senator so deplored, the Democratic President cannot be bothered actually to demand accountability.

If the Constitution is to be preserved, if the rule of law is to survive, if the people of the United States are to see justice done, then there must be accountability for the massive crimes against the rule of law, against the United Nations Charter, and against humanity, of which the members of the last Administration of the government of the United States are surely guilty.

But promising reform and transparency and delivering the same old corrupt politics in defense of corporate interests of the last forty years is one thing: conducting an aggressive war against the government and people of a country that is no threat to the United States is another, and considerably worse.  As the Nuremburg Tribunal held, sixty years ago, launching an aggressive war “is the supreme crime.”  It was the primary reason for the founding of the United Nations.  It is the reason for the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, now railroaded by the U.S. into the occupation of Afghanistan.  And it is about that war of aggression against Afghanistan that President Obama is repeatedly, publicly lying.  I consider it my duty, the duty of my party, and the duty of all people of good will to repudiate explicitly the lies on which the war in Afghanistan has been and continues to be based.

In June of the year just past President Obama flew to Cairo, Egypt, to deliver an address to the Muslims of the world.  He had several “issues . . . to confront,” he said, and the first specific was the war in Afghanistan.  “The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America’s goals [in the confrontation with violent extremists], and our need to work together [“America” and “the Muslim world”].  Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support.  We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity.”

And again in December of last year, hardly a month ago, President Obama accepted the award of the Nobel Peace Prize from the Parliament of the country of Norway.  At that time he announced, right after acknowledging receipt of the prize,

[p]erhaps the most profound issue surrounding by receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.  One of these wars is winding down.  The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries – including Norway – in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

That is the lie.  We went to war because of necessity.  We did not seek war.  We are defending ourselves in Afghanistan.  That is the line of the President.  That is the line of the single prominent political party in this country, Republican and Democrat alike, the corporate political party, the War Party.

Look instead, to borrow the words of Noam Chomsky, at the historical record.  The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were followed by some two months of preparations for war.  During that time the government of Afghanistan offered to extradite Osama bin Laden to a jurisdiction of our choice, of the choice of the government of the United States.  This was reported at the time by Alan Pizzey, on CBS News, on the 25th of September, 2001.

The Afghan American retained by the United States as intermediary between the US and the Taliban government of Afghanistan was the source of that news item.  Three years after the invasion, after having provided his testimony on the efforts by the Taliban to deliver bin Laden to the US as an act of international co-operation, both to the 9/11 Commission and to the lawyers for the 9/11 families, this man, Kabir Mohabbat, detailed his effort for the writers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.  They wrote of it on the 1 November 2004 issue of the website Counterpunch.

Mohabbat, a member of the clan of the last king of Afghanistan, went to college in the United States and returned his native land to serve as a foreign policy advisor to the mujahiddeen during the 1980s, when they were fighting the armed forces of the Soviet Union and were supported by the covert services of the United States.  After the defeat of the Russians he returned to the U.S. and became a citizen, but retained his close personal relations with the winners of the Afghan civil war, the Taliban.

By 1999, Mohabbat says, the Taliban had concluded that the attacks by Al Qaeda from their training camps in Afghanistan had made bin Laden “just a damn liability.”  They asked Mohabbat to arrange a meeting with officials of the European Union, at which a means could be arrived at to hand over bin Laden to custody of European law officers.  That meeting took place in August of 2000.

On the morning of 12 October 2000 Mohabbat was telephoned by the US State Department and asked to serve as intermediary to the Taliban in the wake, that day, of the suicide attack on the US Ship Cole in Yemeni waters.  He was retained from November of 2000 until late September, 2001.  He has provided documentation of having been paid $115,000 for his services.

On 2 November 2000 Mohabbat convened a face-to-face meeting, in Frankfurt, Germany, between representatives of the Taliban government and those of the government of the United States (that is, a few days before George Bush was elected).  At that meeting the Taliban offered, in Mohabbat’s words, “the unconditional surrender of bin Laden” to the United States: he could be sent to the Europeans – as had been suggested three months before – or made available as a target of Cruise missiles.

To display their seriousness, the Taliban shortly after the Frankfurt meeting moved bin Laden and his retinue and placed them under house arrest at a site thirty miles from Kabul.  Following his instructions from the State Department, Mohabbat went to Pakistan to receive an answer to the Taliban.  Mohabbat was advised to tell the Taliban that the US accepted the offer, but that it would be up to the incoming Bush Administration to implement it.

The National Security Council of the new administration notified Mohabbat of his retention as liaison to the Taliban government in the middle of November.  Shortly after that he was provided with a letter to the Taliban, asking for a delay – until February, 2001 – for the White House to make its decision on which way to proceed.

This letter was the first of a series.  Incompetence, inattention, or intention may variously be regarded as the cause of the repeated delays.  They lasted for more than six months.   In any case, a few days after the disaster of the destructive attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon, in September 2001, Mohabbat arranged a meeting between Taliban officials and US officials in Quetta, Pakistan.  The two sides agreed to the immediate arrest and delivery of bin Laden to the United States, the extradition of all foreign Al Qaeda members back to their home countries, and the closing of all Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.

In other words, the leaders of Afghanistan made a reasonable offer.  There was no follow-up by the government of the United States.  When in October – after the CBS broadcast of a carefully-worded report of the Taliban offer – the Taliban, through Mohabbat, repeated their willingness to send bin Laden to the US and close all al Qaeda camps, they were advised, in the words of the US State Department official who spoke to Mohabbat, “the train had moved.”  The bombing of Afghanistan began a few days later.

The train has moved.  It has left the station.  As much as Mohabbat’s impeccable documentation, and as much as his being called to testify to the 9/11 Commission, contribute to his credibility, that phrase rings true.  That was the Bush Administration’s way of expressing itself.  The war against Afghanistan, in other words, was a war of choice for the United States.  It was a war undertaken against a government perfectly willing to surrender the author of the crime of September 11th.  It has never been, and it is not now, a war of self-defense.

And it is this war, this aggressive war, that the Democratic Party is escalating today. 

The plain fact is, that the Democrats do not disagree with the Republicans about whether or not this country should bully the rest of the world, by force, into satisfaction of the demands of the corporate sponsors of the government.  The Democrats can do it with a more pleasing profile.  They use sweeter phrases, platitudes such as those of Barack Obama before the Nobel Prize Committee:

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.

The world, of course, does not support our brutal massacre of innocent civilians and of opponents of our occupation of Afghanistan.  The attacks by Muhammed Atta and his confederates were not senseless, but were undertaken to extract revenge for the gruesome invasion of Lebanon by Israel.  They said as much, in written statements made before their deaths.  And the recognized principle of self-defense could never endorse the criminal invasion of a country that attempted to co-operate in the arrest of Osama bin Laden and the suppression of Al Qaeda. 

Rather, the recognized principle of self-defense validates the violent resistance on the part of the citizens of Kabul and Kandahar to the armed forces of the United States which occupied their country  seven years ago and continue to occupy it today.

Let us begin to practice peace, and stop mouthing bloody, hypocritical pieties accompanied by drone missiles dropping explosives on unarmed and innocent men, women, and children.  Let us put away the bombs, withdraw the troops, and close the seven hundred bases of the United States military forces around the world.

Those military forces of this country follow the orders of the civilian politicians of our government.  The civilian leaders of the government enter elections on a regular basis.  It is the voters in the final analysis who have the power to redirect the power of the government from warmaking to better health, better education, and better social and economic co-operation, if they know the truth and act on it. This election is at least an opportunity to make those truths known.

And those voters are open to the facts.  The Democratic Party of the United States is escalating a war in Afghanistan, not in defense of any threatened security of this country, but in a grasp for political power in the Central Asian region.  It is true that the Republican government of George Bush began this war.  It is impossible to deny that the Democratic government of Barack Obama, supported by a Democratic Congress of which my opponent is a prominent member, is compounding that tragedy.

Let us back up our many professions of good intention with actions.  Let us end the war.