William Rivers Pitt
A Perfectly Good Train Wreck
Mon Apr 12, 2004 11:08
67.1.138.162

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/041204A.shtml
A Perfectly Good Train Wreck
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 12 April 2004

"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious
activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal
buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field
investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related.
CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the U.A.E. in
May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning
attacks with explosives."

- President's Daily Brief, August 6 2001

Michael Speer, 24, of Iowa. Elias Torrez III, 21, of Texas. Matthew
Matula, 20, of Texas. Felix Delgreco, 22, of Connecticut. Levi Angell,
20, of Minnesota. Joshua Palmer, 25, of California. Michael Wafford, 20,
of Texas. Nicholas Dieruf, 21, of Kentucky. Christopher Wasser, 21, of
Kansas. William Harrell, 30, of California. Christopher Mabry, 19, of
Mississippi. Jonathan Kephart, 21, of Pennsylvania. Isaac Michael
Nieves, 20, of New York. Lee Todacheene, 29, of New Mexico. Fernando
Mendezaceves, 27, of Puerto Rico. William Labadie Jr., 45, of Arkansas.
Marvin Miller, 38, of North Carolina. Brent Morel, 27, of Tennessee.
John Wroblewski, 25, of New Jersey. Scott Larson Jr., 22, of Texas.
George Rentschler, 31, of Kentucky. Shane Goldman, 20, Texas. Tyanna
Felder, 22, of Connecticut. Marcus Cherry, 18, of California. Benjamin
Carman, 20, of Iowa. Kyle Crowley, 18, of California. Allan Walker, 28,
of California. Christopher Cobb, 19, of Florida. Ryan Jerabek, 18, of
Wisconsin. Moises Langhorst, 19, of Minnesota. Travis Layfield, 19, of
California. Anthony Roberts, 18, of Delaware. Deryk Hallal, 24, of
Indiana. Christopher Ramos, 26, of New Mexico. Jesse Thiry, 23, of
Wisconsin. Michael Mitchell, 25, of California. Yihjyh Chen, 31, of
Marianas Protectorate. Robert Arsiaga, 25, of Texas. Stephen Hiller, 25,
of Alabama. Ahmed Cason, 24, of Alabama. Israel Garza, 25, of Texas.
Forest Jostes, 22, of Illinois. Casey Sheehan, 24, of California.
Gerardo Moreno, 23, of Texas. David McKeever, 25, of New York. Matthew
Serio, 21, of Rhode Island. Tyler Fey, 22, of Minnesota. Emad Mikha, 44,
of Michigan. Aric Barr, 22, of Pennsylvania. Geoffery Morris, 19, of
Illinois. Philip Rogers, 23, of Oregon. John Amos, II, 22, of Indiana.
William Strange, 19, of Georgia. Doyle Hufstedler, 25, of Texas. Sean
Mitchell, 24, of Pennsylvania. Michael Karr Jr., 23, of Texas. Cleston
Raney, 20, of Idaho. Brandon Davis, 20, of Maryland. Dustin Sekula, 18,
of Texas.

These are the American soldiers who have been identified as having
been killed in Iraq in the first twelve days of April, 2004, one year
after our tanks rolled into Baghdad and knocked down the statue of a man
who had no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to al Qaeda, no
connection to the attacks of September 11, and no ability to threaten
the United States.

The man who had that statue of himself erected was a bastard, a
wretch, a blight on the skin of this world. Was he worth the loss of
these American soldiers, and the others who have died in April but whose
names have not yet been released by Central Command? Was he worth the
667 American soldiers who have died in Iraq? Was he worth the 18,000
American soldiers who have been medically evacuated from Iraq, many for
wounds so grievous that their lives will never be the same? Was he worth
the lives of more than ten thousand Iraqi civilians? Was he worth the
hundreds of billions of dollars we spent to remove him?

Was he worth even one grieving mother, father, wife, husband, brother,
sister, son, or daughter?

The family of Marvin Miller, slain in Balad, Iraq on Wednesday,
doesn't think so. "It stinks," said Miller's aunt, Annie. "The president
got us into something he doesn't know how to get out of. It seems like
the more killing that goes on over there, the more troops he's sending."
Miller's eldest son, Marvin Lee Miller Jr., was planning to join the
Army after he finished high school. "I was going into the military, but
not no more," he said. "Not after this."

According to a variety of unimpeachable White House insiders, among
them former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former Counter-Terrorism
Czar Richard Clarke, the focus of the Bush administration was on
invading Iraq from the first day George settled into the Oval Office. Of
course, they were also fully occupied with a national missile shield, a
few massive tax cuts, and the breaking of the wall separating church and
state.

Yet with Clarke and his cadre of terror-fighters sounding alarms from
one side of the White House to the other, even with FBI agents in
Minnesota and Arizona sounding alarms about suspicious men trying to
learn to fly, but not land, commercial aircraft, even with foreign
intelligence agencies all across the planet sounding alarms about plots
to hijack airplanes and crash them into American buildings, and even
with George W. Bush getting told on August 6, 2001 that "patterns of
suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for
hijackings" were happening while "surveillance of federal buildings in
New York" was being done by suspicious individuals, even with Bush being
told in the same briefing that "Al Qaeda members - including some who
are U.S. citizens - have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years,
and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid
attacks," the White House crew couldn't seem to summon enough interest
to consider al Qaeda terrorism a priority until the towers came down.

Now, the Shi'ites and Sunnis have become allies in Iraq against
American forces, a coming-together that has left many long-time
observers of Iraqi cultural dynamics in awe. Now, American forces are
required to sue for cease-fire agreements with Iraqi forces that have
taken several cities and appear able to kill America troops at will.
Now, the American people themselves are coming to see the 'leadership'
of the Bush administration for what it really is, a bleak realization
that could send American politics careening into complete chaos.

George W. Bush has given Osama bin Laden everything he could ever have
wished for. Bush invaded a Muslim country without just cause and in
defiance of practically the entire world, and delivered to bin Laden a
terrorist recruitment poster for the ages. The Middle East is coming
together in unprecedented ways to fight the United States, a crucial
step along the path towards bin Laden's desire to create a pure Islamic
Caliphate. The bloodshed spurred by the Shi'ite uprising, aided by the
unlikely alliance with the Sunnis, have left Iraq in utterly unsolvable
turmoil. American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians, continue to die. There
is absolutely, positively no good side to this situation.

Osama bin Laden need only sit back and watch everything go his way. He
is almost certainly aware of the old military rule which states, "Never
interfere with an enemy who is in the process of destroying himself." It
is unclear how that statement translates into Arabic, but the old-school
Chicago politics version is equally succinct: "Never get in the way of a
perfectly good train wreck." However you phrase it, George W. Bush is
proving these old sayings to be axiomatic, and Osama bin Laden is
smiling.


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William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h
o u t. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of
two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

• Bush/CIA/MOSSAD created Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein — Bush/CIA/NSA/MOSSAD/Mafia Mind Control Victims, Mon Apr 12 15:17