Article 20616 of alt.conspiracy: Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.activism,alt.society.civil-liberty,alt.individualism,alt.censorship,talk.politics.misc,misc.headlines,soc.culture.usa Subject: Part 12, LURE TO WAR: Bush Sucks Saddam Into Kuwait [Stockwell] Message-ID: <1993Feb18.172046.14296@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Followup-To: alt.conspiracy Keywords: LURE TO WAR: Bush Sucks Saddam Into Kuwait [Stockwell] Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: UVA. FREE Public Access UNIX! Lines: 158 The following transcript is of a tape-recorded broadcast by NO-commercials, NO-corporate-influences, listener-funded, beacon-of-truth Pacifica Radio Network station of the People: WBAI-FM (99.5) 505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl. New York, NY 10018 (212) 279-0707 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (continuation) JOHN STOCKWELL [former CIA official and author of THE PRAETORIAN GUARD]: Now the soldiers that we have over there today are volunteers. In Vietnam, a lot of them were draftees. This is a significant difference, although I would certainly agree that they were seduced into this thing, as I was at a comparable age. But I also note, when I start saying: "Okay, I support the soldiers," (you know) "but not the war," -- but then I say: "But what about the Iraqi soldiers, and what about the Iraqi People and the Kuwaiti People, and all the others?" And then I also look back in my own history, when I was a determined member, an energetic member, of the "White male killer establishment," as Helen Caldicott calls it. And I would come home and my friends would embrace me and love me and support me. They would say: "We don't know what you're doing. We're not sure about it over there, but we support you." And I would go back feeling supported, as we got drunk, as we got raunchy, as we organized the killing of people. Now, I've analyzed carefully and even written a book about what made me change. And there were four people whom I can remember, who significantly altered my thinking. And they were people who punched me in the intellectual belly. They were close friends who said: "What you're doing with your life is dead wrong! You are participating in EVIL! And you DO have a choice, and you CAN redirect your life." And I raged. I hurt. I was upset. I had insomnia. It was painful, but they had made me think, and the thinking led me to break away. It's called "tough love." I AM NOT GOING TO WEAR A YELLOW RIBBON! [applause and cheers] In a lecture in L.A. last week, Ron Kovic [paraplegic Vietnam War veteran, whose life is the subject of the movie, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY] was there, and a couple of people took me on. Richard Macer[sp] stood up and said: "I want to feel GOOD about this war." And I said: "You know -- I don't feel good about anything about this war." But you know, so I'm a hard-ass. So, Ron Kovic -- afterwards, I asked him, I said, "Am I off-base?" He said, "NO, you're ABSOLUTELY right. We have to stick these people who are over there. They DO have a choice, and they have to be reminded that what they're doing is WRONG! [We should] not embrace them with war and love. They're going to come back ten feet tall, with all the drums beating and the media and the bands playing. And what is that going to do to the ten-year-olds who see this happening? They're going to want to join the Army, and they're going to be begging for a war so they could have fun like their uncles did." The losers today, in this score card: The Kuwaiti people, for sure. The Iraqi people, for sure. The Israelis, who are living under the Scud missiles and the fear, and having to teach their kids about gas masks. The Palestinians, who are having to live under a 24-hour curfew. What if your baby gets sick and you can't get out, and you don't have the money and you can't go out to buy penicillin? And they are facing possible expulsion from where they're living, right now. King Hussein of Jordan, a long-time ally of the United States, is facing possible overthrow. Arab leaders, long-term allies, are facing a period of severe instability. And our Administration is now recognizing this and talking about the fact that we're going to have a massive problem keeping the peace in the Middle East, and we'll probably have to leave a massive force there for an indeterminate period of time to enforce a Pax Americana. And think about how that dynamic is going to build and make the people there love us. The environment: Remember, they [Iraq] did have a nuclear weapons development plant. And it's been bombed massively. And plutonium doesn't disintegrate when you bomb it. All of those little plutonium molecules are flipping through the environment and floating in the air right now. And they will be toxic ten thousand years from now -- fifty thousand years from now. The Persian Gulf: massively polluted. The oil fields that are burning in Kuwait -- they estimate that it will take a year to put them out, once we can get to them, and we can't get to them anytime soon. And they are dumping millions of tons of soot into the air, which is the darkest substance in the world, which is going up into the atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays again. And other losers are the United States People. I mean the below-the- 50-percent-line. WE are funding this war! The ultra-rich are NOT paying their share of the support of this society, and they're NOT paying their share of this war itself! And we have gone back under the [mass media propaganda] line of our devotion to the Military and the military budget, which is restored to an all-time high. Now you notice George Bush, in his 1984 newspeak, he announced the budget for the next year last week, and he said it amounted to a three-and-a-half percent cut of the military budget. And he said that we would address infant mortality under this program. If you just read down a little bit in his speech on the subject, it becomes clear that they're handling this war under a separate allocation, so that it [the war allocation] is not part of the military [budget]. And it also becomes clear that the Rapid Deployment [Force] ships and airplanes that they have to build to fight more wars in the Third World in the Middle East are being handled under a supplementary budget. So the budget is a cut, he says? In fact, it is an ALL-TIME HIGH [military] budget -- an all-nation, all-history forever [all- time high military budget]. Just a flat, bald manipulation of the truth is what he's done in this thing! Now, I submit to you that both the United States and the U.S.S.R. (again) lost the Cold War. What you have to understand is that in the United States, the corporations who spent the TWO-AND-A-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS building all of these missiles in a forty-one percent increase of our nuclear capability -- our so-called "defense" corporations -- ARE NOT, IN FACT, U.S. corporations. The U.S. has not profited from these things. We've had a massive welfare program in which we gave money to these corporations for a military buildup in which they made 20 to 24 percent profit, which is twice what is the norm in this society. But the key to understanding this system is that these ARE NOT U.S. corporations -- not anymore! They are multinational corporations, on a welfare dole from the U.S. taxpayers, producing MX missiles which are put in holes in the ground, which can never be used, and producing Tomahawk missiles and everything that we're pouring into the desert at a million dollars a shot, now which are not being sold, and cannot be sold to other countries of the world. Meanwhile, once again, Ronald Reagan -- when he was building this thing up and hyping it, talking endlessly about Nicaragua, a country with two elevators -- meanwhile, in that same period of time, we were building these MX missiles, and Japan was building Toyotas and Sonys, passing us by, in terms of trade balances and trade goods, so that our money was going overseas, so that we plunged into the status of massive debt as a massive debtor nation. (to be continued) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The American Public is evidently in dire need of the truth, for when the plutocracy feeds us sweet lies instead of the bitter truth that would evoke remedial action by the People, then we are in peril of sinking inextricably into despotism. So, please post the episodes of this ongoing series to computer bulletin boards, and post hardcopies in public places, both on and off campus. The need for concerned people, alerting their neighbors to overshadowing dangers, still exists, as it did in the era of Paul Revere. That need is as enduring as society itself. John DiNardo The episodes of this and other series can be retrieved via anonymous ftp from the site: red.css.itd.umich.edu Log in with name "anonymous" or "ftp" and supply your e-mail address as the password. The files are kept in the directory /poli/Essays/Conspiracy Instructions for ftp retrieval are dependent upon what sort of system the user is on. On a UNIX machine, at the command prompt, type the following: ftp red.css.itd.umich.edu This may be different on IBMs and Vax systems. Archivist: Paul Southworth, pauls@css.itd.umich.edu