Day of the Dead: Mourning the Victims of Empire

Cindy Sheehan | Counterpunch, May 25, 2009

I was on an airplane flying to Orange County from Sacramento to attend the al-Awda Conference; which is a Palestinian Right’s Conference. Al-Awda translates to “The Returning, ” when the Pilot’s voice filled the cabin to make an announcement that I think went unnoticed by most of my fellow passengers, but I heard it.

As the plane was on the approach to John Wayne airport, the Captain came on the intercom to remind us all to “remember our brave troops who have died for our freedom.” Even in this post 9-11 paranoid paradigm, if I wasn’t belted in for landing, I would have popped out of my seat at 13D and charged up to the cockpit to let the pilot know that my son was killed in Iraq and not one person anywhere in this world is one iota more free because he is dead.

As a matter of fact, the people of Iraq, the foreign country thousands of miles away where my oldest child’s brains, blood, and life seeped into the soil, are not freer, unless one counts being liberated from life, liberty and property being free. If you consider torture and indefinite detention freedom, then the Pilot may have been right, but then again, even if you do consider those crimes freedom, it does not make it so.

Continued >>

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At Last We Have A Chief Executive Who Isn’t A Raving Coward

For the first time in nearly a decade, we have a chief executive who isn’t a raving coward.

And not a second too soon. President Obama made it clear on Tuesday that America is no longer in the business of selling-out the legacy of our Founders and the mandates of the Constitution for the sake of a little bit of extra security. From the president’s inaugural address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. […] Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

In short: the national security of the United States is no longer going to be conducted by raving cowards. Not anymore. Contrast those historic words against the viral cowardice — the frightened pee-pants dance of the men who somehow infiltrated our highest levels of political power:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” –Senator Pat Roberts, R-KS

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” –Senator “Big John” Cornyn, R-TX

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” –Rush Limbaugh

Never mind that you can’t “suck dirt” if you’re dead, either. But we’ll let that one slide because it was a figure of speech, and because Limbaugh was probably stoned at the time and hallucinating a trio of dirt-sucking zombies named “Zilch”, “Zero” and “Nada” wandering through his studio in search of brains. Regardless of how the remarks came about, they fully exemplify the national security policy of the old crowd: the guiding theory that a frightened population will and should acquiesce to the slow dissolution of civil liberties in the face of ambiguous threats from faceless (and mostly brown-skinned) villains.

As we’ve all observed, the easiest solutions — the most “expedient” solutions, as the president underscored in his inaugural address on Tuesday, are the most despotic ones. One of the most disturbing trends of the Bush years was the pervasive willingness at all levels of American life to abandon not just our liberty, but also our national reputation, in exchange for the illusion of safety.

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