Mikael of ImpeachforPeace Empowering citizens to hold our elected (or otherwise in power) servants accountable

UPDATE: September 21st: On the heels of Hugo Chavez’ appearance at the UN, his calling ‘resident Bush a “Devil” and talking about still smelling sulfur… I must admit…

Chavez might not be the devil, but he is definitely as socially inept as our ‘resident.

Taking the high ground might be difficult when referring to the worst President in the history of the United States of America, but even I am repulsed by any foreign leader talking smack about our country’s misleader. He’s The Decider, after all!

Here is an interview by Greg Palast with Chavez that give a little international perspective on the Venezuelan leader:

CHAVEZ’ COMMENTS: STRATEGY OR RAVINGS OF MADMAN?

Anywhat… back to my previous post:

(This was originally an e-mail response to someone who told me that Hugo Chavez was a bad man and that I should boycott CITGO because it is owned by the Venezuelan government)

Hugo Chavez was freely elected by the Venezuelan people.

Hugo Chavez was freely elected on a platform of, among other things, standing strong against the American/global oil corporation imperialism that would take away Venezuela’s oil profits. Chavez is committed to insisting that Venezuelan resources be used to profit the Venezuelan people rather than American and multi-national corporations.

Are you against Venezuelans profiting from their own resources?

Hugo Chavez recently sold millions of dollars of heating oil to elderly and disadvantaged American citizens at huge discounts. Admittedly, it was a political stunt, but those who stayed warm last winter would like more political stunts like this – especially from their own government. This while the oil barons currently controlling our nation have overseen all-time world record profits by EXXON/Mobil in each of the last three quarters while overseeing the jump of the price of gasoline from $1.27/gallon in January of 2001 to over $3.00/gallon in 2006. Other multi-national oil and military corporations are also rolling in never-before-seen riches fueled by a total lack of governmental oversight and billions of dollars in fuel usage by our military. In addition, our occupation of Iraq leading to American control of the Iraq oil reserves has increased our ability to manipulate market prices in collaboration with our Saudi Arabian “friends” – the country that provided 15 of the 19 alleged 9/11 skyjackers as well as CIA-trained and American financed Osama bin Laden.

Billions of gallons of crude oil was pumped out of Iraq in the chaotic months following our invasion. We will never know how much. We will never know who got it. Billions of dollars of our tax dollars allocated by Congress to the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure has “disappeared” as well. Why has there been no investigation into either? The decision-makers in the Senate and House are enablers of all of this, and many profit from and/or were put into office by these same profiteers.

Gas prices in America dropped a dollar a gallon just in time for the upcoming mid-term elections didn’t they?

Chavez saying “Enough of imperialistic aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire. We have to bury imperialism this century” does not mean that Chavez is calling for the United States to be overthrown. What it does mean is that he wants the United States government to cease bullying the rest of the world, initiating wars of aggression and stealing the resources of other nations. Down with “imperialism” and down with “empire” is different than “down with the U.S.A”. I am also against American imperialism and want an end to American empire building – but not in a seditious way – I just want our country to learn to take care of ourselves without stepping on others. In this, I am in total agreement with President Chavez.

And I am tired of seeing pictures of Iraqi mothers and fathers watching their children burn to death in their arms of a fire they cannot put out – that of burning irradiated uranium used in nearly all U.S. weapons in Iraq now.
And I am tired of hearing about the deaths and maiming of U.S. soldiers in this war of choice – now long after our secondary stated goal of removing Saddam from power was achieved.

I am an anti-war activist (against this specific war and any other war of aggression) and would be happy to appear on television with President Chavez.

Cindy Sheehan, (who it would seem you are unhappy with) is a Gold Star mother who has chosen to devote her life to ending a war she disagrees with and criticizing a White House administration she disagrees with. For this she has been a primary target of the “swift boat” attack machine – primarily funded by those that profit most from war, of course.

Are your children serving our nation through the military? If so, thank you. If not, then you should thank Cindy Sheehan.

If you hate her because you were told to hate her by FAUXNews, then you have abdicated your intellect and are letting Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes tell you what to think. If you don’t know who they are, then you have some googling research to do. If you hate her because a pompous, drug-addicted, five-time divorced, chronically lying partisan hack, “family values” talk radio millionaire who likes to vacation where sex with minors is legal told you to, well…

I am not a Gold Star parent, but I have disagreed with this war and this White House’s initiation of it since before it started because I was paying close enough attention to know that we were not being told the truth. At all. By any of them.

Ask Colin Powell.

I also have been paying close enough attention to know that the Bush Administration planned to invade Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11 and conveniently got the “New Pearl Harbor” they needed in order to sell it to the American people. If you don’t know about the Project for a New American Century then you cannot know why we are in Iraq, Afghanistan and may soon be attacking Iran, the ultimate imperialistic prize that lies between those other two formerly sovereign nations. It is incredible to me how many Americans have been led by the nose into support for this war of aggression without even being aware of the PNAC’s clearly stated goals and the abundant evidence of preparation for these two invasions long before 9/11.

PNAC signers included: Rumsfeld, Cheney, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowicz and a short list of Defense Industry and Oil Industry profiteers. Some are still in the private sector making millions of dollars from this war, others are crony appointments, like John Bolton, to key Bush Administration posts.

If you still think that our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were reactionary, then you are deceived and under-informed. This is your own responsibility as adults and as U.S. citizens to investigate. If you simply settle for spoon-fed propaganda then you fall short on both of those responsibilities.

Harry Belafonte calls President Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world”. While that may be hyperbole, it is partially based on the fact that President Bush and his administration initiated a war of aggression against a country (Iraq) that even his own hand-picked 9/11 Commission has concluded had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 nor did it Saddaam Hussein have any connections to Al Qaeda. Since the release of the Downing Street memos we have known conclusively that the Bush Administration knew that the intelligence information they were foisting on the American public and on Congress as justification for war was known by them to be flawed, and even abjectly false. Since Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame came back from Niger after being sent there by Vice President Dick Cheney they knew that Iraq had no nuclear weapon capabilities and wouldn’t for decades. Hans Blix and his teams were ordered home by President Bush (yes, that is the fact – they did not leave because Saddam ordered them out) and the invasion began despite their having not found any evidence of WMDs.

There were no WMDs in Iraq. If you think there were then you are a victim of spin. Perhaps you believe that Bill O’Reilly personally loaded them onto black helicopters and flew them all into Syria?

If you had an adverse reaction when you read Joe Wilson’s name then you are a victim of media manipulation and are not in control of your own mind. Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame served our nation for decades with courage and valor. For insisting on telling the truth that the Bush Administration was working overtime to hide from Congress and the American public, Joe Wilson’s reward was to have his active NOC CIA wife “outed” by his own government – thus endangering her, all her contacts overseas, and by extension our national security. Scooter Libby was indicted for lying to a Grand Jury and the FBI to cover up for his boss Dick Cheney’s role in this treasonous and cowardly act.

What kind of man endangers another man’s wife as an act of political retribution? A member of the mob, that’s who. What kind of man releases national security secrets? A traitor. A Benedict Arnold. A Dick Cheney.

The third initial reason we were told the Iraq invasion was necessary? That Saddam had used WMDs against the Kurds – his “own” people. Who supplied Saddam with those chemical weapons? We did during his war with Iran. They are long since inert and rendered useless, but that hasn’t stopped the propaganda machine in trying to use this to “prove” that Saddam had usable WMDs or that Iraq was close to developing them. He didn’t. They weren’t.

And now that the Supreme Court of the United States of America in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld has joined the United Nations, the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the rest of the world in making clear that the Bush Administration’s policies of denying all rights and protections to detainees and prisoners of these wars is illegal and constitutes a war crime, President Bush is fiercely fighting to get Congress to retroactively enact laws that would make their illegal actions legal after the fact.

Why?

Because the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy made clear that what they have been doing for the last 3 1/2 years could very well be eventually prosecuted as war crimes and lead to prosecution by the Hague against American military members working at Abu Gahrib, Guantanamo Bay, Baghram AFB and the former Soviet gulag facilities around Eastern Europe that were being used by the U.S. as torture camps. An international war crimes tribunal could eventually lead all the way up the ladder in the Pentagon and into the White House itself, since it is already publicly known that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and attorney and Cal Berkeley professor John Woo co-authored legal justification of torture, extreme rendering and indefinite detention at the direct behest of President George W. Bush himself.

“America doesn’t torture.”

These words, spoken by President Bush to the nation at the very time Vice President Cheney was lobbying Congress for the right to do exactly that are in direct conflict with known facts. The United States has been operating a training camp for assassins and torturers on U.S. soil for decades:

SOA Watch

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So you are scared of socialism? Our nation has had a healthy measure of socialism for decades. A dose of socialism helps balance out the cold, heartless greed of unfettered capitalism.

Socialism built our freeway system. Socialism built our national parks. Socialism built hundreds of dams. Socialism has protected millions of Americans from financial ruin due to medical hardship and paid to keep many Americans healthy, productively contributing members of our great society. Socialism has rewarded our nation’s elderly after a lifetime of tax-paying and work by letting them retire in peace and in a modicum of comfort. Socialism funded your elementary, middle and high school education. Socialism helped college educate three generations of Americans. Socialism has helped fund the arts and sciences, public radio and television and everything else good about this country.

Socialism is utilizing a portion of our nation’s tax dollars paying to serve our nation’s best interests. Socialism is investment in our future.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed a socialist revolution in this country in an attempt to save us from financial ruin and it was one of the factors that fueled the greatest economic success story the world has ever known over the next half century, creating jobs, rebuilding the infrastructure of a whole continent and creating a vast middle class that could liberally share the wealth of this great nation each and every citizen contributes to every day. Of course, it was World War II that really pulled us out of the Great Depression, and we have been progressively falling deeper and deeper into an addictive war economy since.

The removal of the percentage of socialism that has provided a healthy check on cold capitalism in America will convert us even more fully into an unchecked, voracious war machine.
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I have decided to shop only at CITGO stations until the American/Global petroleum companies match Chavez’ compassion for the poor in America and until our war of aggression is over. I may send out an e-mail to my entire list.

Thanks for inspiring me to write this.

Sincerely,

Mikael Rudolph
(612) 302-9252

Oh… and please visit my blog:

www.ImpeachforPeace.org/blog

America is a nation founded on the Rule of Law.
This President is a publicly confessed violator of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Geneva Accords and the Nuhremberg Principles.
It is a moral imperative that President George W. Bush be held accountable to his confessed and unconfessed crimes through impeachment.
This Vice President knowingly and willingly released highly classified information, thus endangering our national security.
It is a moral imperative that Vice President Dick Cheney be held accountable to this crime through impeachment.