Yes, take your time, says George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing refugees in cars full of families, bombing apartment buildings, hospitals and the poor huddled in large south Beirut slums.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, in destroying bridges, roads, gasoline stations, airports, seaports, wheat silos, vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked ambulances taking the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory .
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while shelters are demolished with bodies of little children together with their mothers and fathers buried in the rubble.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while the number of fleeing refugees nears one million Lebanese, many exposed to hunger, disease, lack of potable water and medicines. All this in a country friendly to the United States, which played by your rules, protested the Syrian army back into Syria and was trying democratically to put itself together.
Take your time, says George W. Bush, while he speeds more supplies of precision missiles containing deadly anti-personnel cluster bombs which will claim the lives of innocent children for years into the future. The phosphorous bombs laying waste to fields growing crops and horribly burning innocents come from the U.S.A. under your direction.
Do you think the taxpayers of America would approve of such shipped weapons were they ever asked?
Are there words in the English language suitable for the impeachable serial war crimes you are intimately involved in committing not only in Iraq but also now through your encouragement and supplying of the once again invading Israeli government?
Are there words to describe your strategic stupidity which will further increase opposition and peril to the United States around the world and especially in the Middle East? Your own Generals and former CIA Director, Porter Goss, among others in your Administration, have declared that your occupation of Iraq is a magnet attracting the recruiting and training of more and more "terrorists" from Iraq and other countries. And so now this will be the case in Lebanon. All this is a growing "blowback," to use the CIA word for a boomeranging foreign policy, that is endangering the security of the United States.
The
calibrated Israeli terror bombing of Lebanon comes in three stages.
With its electronic pinpoint precision bombing and artillery, the
Israeli government goes after civilians, their homes, cities, towns and
villages.
Then after telling some to abandon their neighborhoods, it
cuts population centers off from each other by destroying
transportation facilities into and inside Lebanon, making both refugee
flight and delivery of emergency relief efforts either impossible or
very difficult. Then its planes, tanks and artillery endanger or
destroy what food, water and relief efforts manage to get through to
the injured and dying. Warehouse food supplies are incinerated. About
four hundred small fishing boats north of Beirut on the oil-polluted
coastline were demolished as well.
All the above mayhem and much more have been reported in the U.S., European, Lebanese and Israeli media. The bulk of the fatalities in Lebanon have been civilians. The bulk of the fatalities on the Israeli side have been soldiers. Very fortunately for the Israelis, the Hezbollah rockets are very inaccurate, the vast majority falling harmlessly. Unfortunately for the Lebanese, the precision American armaments of the Israelis are very accurate, which serves to account for why the total casualties and physical destruction are 100 times greater in Lebanon than in Israel.
Most of these accurate munitions come from your decision to send them. Knowing they will be used for offensive purposes, including the lethal demolition of a long-established UN compound, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which you have sworn to uphold, places the responsibility of being a domestic law breaker squarely on your shoulders.
There is another law that is not being enforced -- the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act of 1996 sponsored by then Republican Senator Robert Dole. Foreign aid is supposed to be cut off to any nation that obstructs the provision of humanitarian aid to another country. As one example, press reports that two tankers, each with 30,000 tons of diesel fuel critical for operating Lebanese hospitals and water pumping stations, are idling in Cyprus from fear of the totally dominant Israeli navy and air force.
There are only a few days left of fuel in Lebanon, which is heading for a larger wave of secondary casualties. They and other critical suppliers need safe passage which the U.S. Navy in the area can readily provide, should it receive orders from the Commander in Chief.
You heard high Israeli officials accurately say on the day the massive bombing of Lebanon began, followed not preceded by Hezbollah rockets, that "nothing in Lebanon is safe." That huge over-reaction to the recent Hezbollah border raid, in addition to many more previous air, sea and land border violations by the Israeli government, certainly put you on public notice.
Since you view yourself as a reborn Christian, and since you have the power to stop the Israeli state terror assaults on Lebanon, you may wish to reflect on Leviticus 19:16 "Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor." Lebanon was a friendly country to you and you have stood by not just idly, but willfully aiding and abetting its devastation.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082106M.shtml
An oil slick caused by Israeli bombing has begun sinking to the floor of the Mediterranean - blanketing marine life with sludge - according to a Greenpeace video
that shows dead fish along the sea bottom.
Lebanon's Month-Old Oil Slick Sinks
by Lauren Frayer
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/082306EA.shtml
If America were like the little pig who built his house of bricks, the nation would be getting ready for the post-carbon world. But we are the pig who built his house
of straw, scoffing at the existence of the wolf of scarcity who is coming to blow our house in. Cuba offers us the example of a different approach.
_____________
E.
from Jane Smiley :
23 Auust 2006
Alter Net
The fact is, the day Ronald Reagan was elected and the corporations decided to roll back the regulations that
limited their power, greed, and egomania was the day they doomed themselves and all of us, because it was the day they began living the lie that there are no
consequences to corporate activities.
(There will also be a DVD version available soon. We encourage people to show this and our other videos on their local Public Access Cable station. Other videos can be found at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/videos .)
Gene Bird