Toronto Star - Saturday, March 1, 2003 Why Does Bush Push to Silence Free Speech? by Ramsey Clark
Former U.S. attorney-general Ramsey Clark met with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein last Sunday. He wrote this commentary exclusively for the Toronto Star.
Should a free person be afraid to meet with a demonized "brutal dictator"?
If not, how do we hope to learn, understand, act to avoid violence and war? If our (U.S.) government says, "You will only be deceived and used, a dupe, if you meet," doesn't this reveal an intention to exercise arbitrary control over information on which public opinion is formed that might affect government plans?
Why did the White House object to the interview with President Saddam Hussein by Dan Rather, seek to interject rebuttal and rebuke at different points in the interview, and then complain that a person who lies should not be allowed to speak in the media?
Because I believe in individual freedom and that the truth can set us free, I will never accept the command "thou shalt not" reason together.
At this moment, U.S. anger over meetings with Saddam Hussein reflects Bush administration fears that opposition voices might begin to ask, "Who are the real aggressors, the greater threats to peace, the most dangerous terrorists?" Once a person is able to hear all sides and is informed, the answers cannot be controlled by government propaganda.
During the barely two years of his presidency, George W. Bush has revealed an unprecedented, uncompromising obsession for war that threatens peace and economic stability around the world.
He is the head of government of the sole superpower on earth. Its military is capable of destroying any nation without ever setting foot on it and, incredibly, President Bush has threatened to use nuclear weapons.
The U.S. has less than six per cent of the world's population, with vast wealth concentrated in corporate control and personal fortunes that have created the greatest — and growing — gap between rich and poor, and economic policies that contribute to the same growing gap worldwide.
Bush proclaimed the right and initiated a war of aggression against Afghanistan, causing thousands of deaths, many civilian, and installing a government of his choice in Kabul.
He has authorized daily military flights over Iraq which have resulted in frequent, and in the last few months, daily aerial assaults that have killed hundreds of people in Iraq without a single U.S. plane being hit or seriously at risk.
He has proclaimed his intention of "regime change" by military force in Iraq with an unavoidable consequence of thousands of civilian deaths. U.S. regime changes in the past brought to power the Shah of Iran, Mobutu in the Congo, Pinochet in Chile and dozens of other repressive governments subservient to U.S. interests and power.
Reverberations from President Bush's bellicosity threatening war, even nuclear assaults, have been heard from India, Pakistan, North Korea ... Colombia, the Philippines and occupied Palestine.
If Bush's promise to make Iraq a paradise of democracy, "liberty plus groceries." as the Depression-era Texan congressman Maury Maverick defined it, ask how the people of North Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan fared after direct U.S. interventions in the last half-century.
President Bush has authorized and approved assassinations, summary executions and murders — and boasted of them, in his State of the Union message in January. "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate ... let's put it this way, they are no longer a problem for the United States and our friends and allies."
He has authorized and condoned bribery, coercion and retaliation to obtain his war ends.
Fundamental human rights and civil liberties protected by international law and the U.S. Constitution have been violated within the United States against both citizens and aliens and abroad by illegal arrests, secret detentions, false criminal charges, and interference with rights to assemble, protest and speak.
He has drastically undermined U.N. authority, threatening it with irrelevancy, coercing it to follow his command and acting independently and in defiance of the U.N. Charter.
For Iraq, Bush has authorized a plan of attack called "Shock and Awe," a massive aerial and missile assault in the first hours and days against a defenseless people. Any one of the 300 to 400 cruise missiles, which will strike Iraq the first day, is far deadlier than all the alleged excessive-range missiles — (with ranges) less than 200 kilometers — that Saddam has been ordered to destroy.
The world has been told "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad ... The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
How are the people of the world to accept these threats? Are they terrorism as prelude to genocide?
President Saddam Hussein told Dan Rather, "We will die in Iraq."
If death is by U.S. violence, what will come after?
International human rights activist Ramsey Clark was U.S. Attorney General from 1967-69 under president Lyndon Johnson.