And you don't even know what I'm going to say. How do you know. Do you mind if I start by taking a poll. Would you reply honestly to the poll. Will you. That's enough for me. How many people here support the bombing as a solution for what is going on? Okay. How many are absolutely opposed to the bombing? Well this is strange, but where am I. All the polls say ninety percent support, I guess you are not the ninety percent. But I like to talk to people who are the ninety percent. What do I have to say to you. I'll say it anyway. But maybe some of you are too shy to raise your hands, but in the discussion periods you can argue with me right.
Let me first talk about the necessity to speak out, to speak your mind. What ever your mind is, whatever you think, but the necessity to speak out. Because in a time like this, in a time of war, it becomes a time of war as soon as the president says it's a time of war, as soon as the media says it's a time of war, even if congress has not declared war, as the constitution requires. The constitution has been ignored for too long, it doesn't matter anymore. Law does not matter anymore. I use to teach a course called law and justice in America. The theme of the course was, it doesn't matter what the law says, it matters who has the power. The constitution can say congress must declare war, but it doesn't matter. Ever since the end of World War Two we have been in war after war after war without congress declaring war and it's okay. As they say we are a nation of laws. I'm concerned with our taking initiative to speak out even though a certain blanket of intimidation has been spread across the country. I mean am I aggregating? Isn't it intimidating when everyone, everyone in high political circles, and the people who are in the higher reaches of the media, when they all cry for unity and supporting the president, and where editors of the New Republic say "the people on the left who oppose the war may be considered as a fifth column"?
Do you know what a fifth column is? It goes back to the Spanish Civil War, and the fifth column was a column of traitors, people working from inside to overthrow. People may be considered traitors for speaking out. And so the word is unity and support the president, and major television commentators all talk in that way. And the television programs are festooned with flags. Now I know flags can mean something nice and gentle and good, they can. But there are times when flags have a kind of unmistakable aura that bespeaks drums and bugles and war, and support for war. There's something intimidating about that omnipresent symbol.
Then you have Dan Rather, anchor man. What is he anchored to? He's anchored to the establishment. That's what an anchorman is. He says on national television, "Bush is my President, when he says get in line, I ask, where?" Oh well! This is strange. He here is, independent journalism. The idea of journalism is to be an independent voice, an independent critic, not a handmaiden of government but a, yes someone who represents the public and the government, and does not immediately say, "Yes, we're together". That's what happens in a totalitarian state, not a democracy. A kind of spurious unity.
And Gore, do you remember Gore? Gore said, "Bush is my Commander-in-Chief". Really? He hasn't read the constitution lately. The Constitution says that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, not the commander in chief of us. It seems to me the essence of democracy for people not to get in line if they don't want to get in line, not to listen to the president as if he's our commander in chief, but to think independently and do independently what we want, that's what democracy is. That democracy is being attacked on all sides by this great atmosphere of intimidation that's created.
Now I spoke about two weeks ago at John's Hopkins University in Baltimore to a crowd not quite as big as this, cause nothing is as big as this. It was a big crowd, but Baltimore is not Burlington. My talk there had been planned months before, part of a series of talks, with different speakers. The speaker just preceding me was Oliver North. The theme of the series of lectures was about multiculturalism, it was titled, A Nation Divided. Multiculturalism. Oliver North speaking about multiculturalism? Well I didn't ask. A Nation Divided... But by the time I got there, they had gone over every printed program and had crossed out the word divided and put in the word "United". Yes, they say in times of war the nation must be united, which of course begs the question, but why must we be at war?
We have a long tradition in this country of stifling dissent exactly at those moments when descent is badly needed. That is, when it's a matter of life and death. Congress passes a sedition act in 1798, and then again in World War One passes an espionage and sedition act in 1917, 1918, and sends one thousand people to jail. Historically that's what happens. Not only does congress pass such laws, but the supreme court affirms them, which is very odd, because the job of the supreme court, or at least I learned this in junior high school.
You learn in junior high school what democracy is. Democracy is what we have. Democracy is the three branches of government. Democracy is checks and balances. In fact they put democracy up on the blackboard. They make a diagram with legislative, executive, and judicial. Then they draw you the lines and show you the checks and balances, and you're sitting there as a Junior High School student feeling really good and proud. So it means that if one branch of government does something bad it will be checked by the other branches, and that way nothing bad can happen.
There is what they put on the board in junior high school, and then there is historical reality. Historically reality is that although it's the job of the supreme court to see if in fact congress has violated the first amendment of the constitution, which says that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, if it's the job of the supreme court to see if congress has violated the first amendment, well the supreme court has failed in it's job again and again. They failed in 1798 and they failed in 1917, 1918, when they put Eugene Debs and 1000 others in jail for speaking out against the war.
They amended the first amendment. Well, yes the first amendment says this ... but... There's no "buts" in the first amendment. The "but" was well if there is a clear and present danger. Well actually it sort of makes sense, I mean if there is a clear and present danger. Well maybe there are times when you can't allow freedom of speech because there is a clear and present danger. What was the clear and present danger that the Supreme Court was facing when they were making that decision? The clear and present danger was a guy distributing leaflets on the streets of New York opposing the draft. He was a clear and present danger to the nation.
After the war more people began to think, no, Woodrow Wilson was a clear and present danger to the nation. There's this irony that exactly when you need free speech, exactly when the lives of the young people in the armed forces are at stake, the lives of people overseas who may be the victims of our armed actions, there lives are at stake, exactly when it's a mater of life and death, that's when you should shut up, exactly when you need it most. So you have free speech for trivial issues, and no free speech for life and death issues, and that's called democracy.
No, we can't accept that. We have a responsibility to speak out, to speak our minds, especially now, and no matter what they say and how they cry for unity and supporting the president and getting in line. We have a democratic responsibility as citizens to speak out and say what we want to say.
One of the things we need to do is to take a look at history, because history may be useful in helping us understand what is going on. We have to take a look at history because no one else is taking a look at history. The president isn't giving us history and the media aren't giving us history, they never do. Here we have this incredibly complex technologically developed media, but you don't get the history that you need to understand what is going on today. There is a kind of history that they will give you, because history cannot only be used for good purposes, but history can be abused.
History is abused when you create an analogy, which will immediately put people on your side without thinking about it. You say, "It's like Pearl Harbor". Well since we went to war over Pearl Harbor, well now we've got to go to war. Well please; come on now, is this really like Pearl Harbor? Is there an identifiable nation out there which has attacked us, and which if attacked back will therefore stop attacking us? Is there a nation out there, which is expanding its power in Asia, like Hitler expanding in Europe? The World War Two analogy is always brought up. That's not this situation. This is different. It's funny, they keep telling us this is a very different situation, but they're not willing to recognize that this is a very different situation from World War Two.
This is a very specific and unique situation, and it has to be discussed in its specificity. But that doesn't mean to say that there are not things that we can learn from history that can throw some light on this. History can't give you definitive and positive answers to the issues that come up today, but it can suggest things. It can suggest skepticism about certain things. It can suggest probabilities and possibilities, leaving it to you then to see what applies to this particular situation. There are some things you can learn from historical experience.
One thing you can learn is that there is a history of deception of the public by the government in times of war, or just before war, or to get us into war, a long history of that. Going back to the Mexican war, when Polk lied to the nation about what was happening on the boarder between the Oasis River and the Rio Grande River, and boom-boom, they shed blood on American soil. Really, Polk wanted California and that was it. Before there was any clash on the boarder, he wanted California; he wanted a war with Mexico. He coveted Mexican Territory and in fact he fought a war with Mexico and took half of Mexico.
Again and again lies told on the eve of war. Lies told before World War Two, lies told before the Spanish-American war. The battleship Maine, they've sunk it in Havana Harbor, the Spaniards did it, boom we go to war. No one really knew who sunk the battleship Maine and then many years later, a Navy investigating team under Admiral Rickel finds out that the battleship Maine was sunk by an engine defect.
But it's too late. The truth is we weren't really interested in the battleship Maine. We were interested in Cuba. Not liberating Cuba from Spain, well that's a half-truth. Liberating Cuba from Spain, but not from us. Get Spain out, get us in. Then there's another lie told shortly after that when we go to war in the Philippines. In the history books you have a lot of space on the Spanish-American war because Theodore Roosevelt was involved, and Theodore Roosevelt is one of our heroes. He rode up San Juan Hill, and there were the Rough Riders, and this is what you learn in the history books. The Spanish-American war was a great, great victory and so it takes up many pages, well it was short in time, about three months.
The Philippine war takes up a short space while it lasts years and years, full of bloody atrocities committed by American armed forces in the Philippines. Not the splendid little war that the secretary of war described in Cuba, no this is an ugly and bloody war, a precursor to the Vietnam War and the massacres that took place. Lies are told about how the Philippine War started, cause there are American troops in the Philippines. You might ask, what are American troops doing in the Philippines? Don't ask questions like that. American troops belong anywhere where we want them to be. They are there so that we can take the Philippines. But the Filipinos want to take the Philippines. Sorry they're not Christians, they're heathens, they're ignorant people. We deserve to have the Philippines, so if they want to fight us, they'll have to fight us for years and years and endure maybe 800,000 or 1 million dead. Have you heard that in your history books?
War is lies and lies. Near the vary end of the Philippine war in 1906, a regiment of the U.S. army massacred 600 Muslim Moros, men, women, and children, people living in the stone age. They had no modern weapons, and they are mowed down. Theodore Roosevelt sent a message to the commanding general congratulating him on his military victory. Whereupon Mark Twain, not believing in national unity at a time like this, denounces Theodore Roosevelt for this. But their Theodore Roosevelt is up on Mount Rushmore. What can we do about that? It's hard. He's a hero. Such stuff are our heroes made. Lies told again and again.
The Vietnam War starts with a lie about the Gulf of Tokin. The statements made immediately to the American people, our destroyers have been attacked by the North Vietnamese people in the Gulf of Tokin. And zoom, Congress rushes to pass, just as they've done now. I mean congress has always been a bunch of absolute sheep when it comes to matters of war. Talk about the three branches of government, and checks and balances, and Congress acting as a check on the President, forget it. The president wants war, we go to war, and the congressmen all line up like the Supreme Soviet. I always think of congress as a Supreme Soviet when I see the president making a state of the union address, and they get up every three minutes and cheer. All of them, Democrats and Republicans, and I think democracy. No that's not it. But immediately after the Gulf of Tokin, and the President says this is what they did to us, and it all turns out to be lies. The Congress passes unanimously in the house, and two dissenting votes in the Senate giving the President full authority to do what he wants in the Gulf of Tokin, and then we are at war for nine years with fifty-eight thousand Americans dead and two million Vietnamese dead.
Now we have just seen this same kind of thing reenacted. Yes this terrible terrorist act just happened in New York, and Washington, and Bush goes before Congress, and no need to think and to ask questions about what we should do. They vote unanimously in the Senate and almost unanimously in the House, except for one dissenting vote. I thought, oh, that must be Bernie Sanders. But no it wasn't. It was Barbara Lee.
The history of deception has been going on for a long time. Some of you may have heard of the journalist I. F. Stone, he was one of the great journalists of the twentieth century. He worked for the mainstream newspapers, but then decided that, no he couldn't print what he wanted, he couldn't write what he wanted, so he set up his own newsletter, and he'd gather all sorts of information from all over that no one else was printing and he'd put them in his newsletter, until people understood that if you want to get stuff that your local newspaper won't give you and your government won't give you, go to I. F. Stone's newsletter.
He became a famous journalist of our times, and he would go and speak to journalism classes and speak to young people that were going to be reporters and he'd say, I'm going to tell you a number of things about being a reporter, but of all the things I'm going to tell you, remember two words. Governments lie. It's a good starting point.
I'm not saying governments always lie. No they don't always lie. But it's a good idea to start off with the assumption that governments lie, and therefore whatever they say, especially whenever it comes to matters of war and foreign policy, cause when it's a matter of domestic policy, there are things that you may be able to check up on, because its here and in this country, but something happening very far away, people don't know very much about foreign policy. We depend on them because they're supposed to know. They have the experts.
We learned during Vietnam what it means to depend on them in the White House, and there experts, there Phi Beta Kappas, advising the president, the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton people all around the president, I mean how could you get more intelligent then that. You must examine closely.
One of the things I examine closely is when the government says we are only bombing military targets. That's an old story, a real old story. There's a half-truth to that. You may aim at military targets, but it's in the nature of bombing, that if you aim at military targets that a good part of the time your bombs will fall on places near military targets where people live. Sometimes even far away from military targets where people live. Maybe a mile away from military targets.
And this is with the smartest of bombs. There's no such thing as a smart bomb. Remember them telling us about smart bombs during the Gulf War. It turns out that 85 percent of them were dumb. There's no such thing as a smart bomb.
In the Vietnam War they kept saying, "we're bombing military targets." These were just blatant lies. That was even going beyond when you're aiming at military targets and your hitting other things, but they were actually aiming at things that were not military targets, because when you're dealing with a third world country that has very few military targets, you run out of military targets and you start bombing everything else. So in Vietnam we bombed schools. We bombed hospitals. We bombed everything that we could possibly see.
And then the Gulf War, military targets became the water supply. People who don't have water die. Infrastructures bombed because you run out of specifically military targets. Then there are times when the government says something is a military target and it really isn't.
There was this one point in the Gulf War, in mid-February 1991 when the U.S. dropped a bomb on an air-raid shelter in Baghdad. They could have said that it was an accident and we didn't mean to hit the shelter. 500 to 600 people were huddled there, because you go to air raid shelters to avoid bombs. If you understood that these bombs were smart and that they only hit military targets, you would not have to go to an air-raid shelter, but people have the notion that the bombs aren't only going to hit military targets.
So they huddle in this air-raid shelter and a bomb drops on this air-raid shelter, and 500-600 people are killed, and the U.S. does not say that this is an accident. The U.S. says, we bombed that because it was a communications site. What does that mean? Reporters going into the air raid shelter almost immediately after, from Reuters, and found no sign of any possible thing that could possibly be military. You have to be careful when they say they are bombing military targets, and etcetera, etcetera.
I emphasize this because we have to understand what we are doing in Afghanistan to end terrorism. Because we absolutely need to end terrorism. We have to be aimed to think about what we have to do to end terrorism. We have to think about whether bombing Afghanistan is going to end terrorism. How much thinking went into this? There are all these minds, but it doesn't matter how many minds you have, it's the quality of mind that counts, and the morality of these minds, and the understanding of these minds that there may be people in other countries who deserve to live as much as those people in the Twin Towers deserved to live.
Well people say, but you must do something. I agree. People say, you can't do nothing. I agree. You must do something. I like the logic. You must do something... therefore bomb. I don't get it. I mean that's the only possible thing you can do if you must do something?
The medical students confronted with someone who has a leg infection and they don't know what to do about it. Amputate it. The medical students take the oath of hypocrisy. You don't know what to do, something is bad, you must do something, but the first rule is, do no harm. Lets start off with that. Do no harm. We are doing great harm. And if you think we're not, try to imagine. You say, well, we're not killing that many people. We don't know how many people we're killing.
First of all because you can't believe the government, I'm not saying that you can believe the Taliban, no. All governments lie. But it's just a matter of common sense, and knowing the history of bombing, and just the little reports that come through the filter of control. There were reporters in villages in Afghanistan reporting, and there they were, right on the spot, there are these houses destroyed and there are these freshly dug graves, and there's a man who lost his wife and four kids in the bombing, and some things are admitted.
A Red Cross compound was hit on the same day that Bush is asking people to contribute to the Red Cross. Well if we're going to contribute to the Red Cross, first assure us that you're not going to bomb the Red Cross.
If you think that what we're doing in Afghanistan is not very much, consider that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan who are fleeing the cities and towns in which they live. Have you seen the pictures of Afghan refugees? It started as soon as Bush promised to bomb. There are certain American promises that they can count on, and that's one of them. So the refugees immediately began moving. And you see the pictures of these families with all there possessions, or as many as they can carry on their backs and wagons, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.
This is not a small thing, like oh, we're killing a few people and that's a price we are willing to pay. We are terrorizing Afghanistan. I'm not exaggerating. The people who are in Kabul, and other places have to live with the fear of these bombs.
Have you lived under bombs? Can you imagine what it's like when you're in a very backward, technologically undeveloped country, and there are these monster machines coming over with this ferocious noise and lights flashing and explosions. Yes, we are terrorizing people in Afghanistan.
It's not right to respond to the fact that we have been terrorized, as we have, by terrorizing other people. And furthermore, it's not going to help. You might say that maybe it's worth doing because it will end terrorism. How much common sense does it take to know that you cannot end terrorism by indiscriminately dropping bombs on Afghanistan. But you here, we have now destroyed three of their camps. Who are you kidding? How many hours does it take to set up a training camp? How easy is it to move from one place to another?
The history of bombing is mostly a history of futility. There is a book that came out recently called The History of Bombing. I was a bombardier, and they say that technology has improved, but even then they claimed that bombs are smart because we're using this special bomb sight, this Norton bomb sight. They really believed that, we even believed that, because we bombed at 4000 feet and 11,000 feet and we got close to the target, then when we flew on missions we were bombing at 30,000 feet, and the bombs went all over the place. They killed an awful lot of people; all sorts of people and it didn't matter.
I say it didn't matter because these people were ciphers. I mean who were these people. I didn't even see them. You bomb another country and you don't see these people. Our planes are bombing from high altitudes because they want to escape anti-aircraft fire. You don't see anything on the ground, you see flashes and explosions and you may take pictures, but you don't hear screams, you don't see blood, you don't see severed limbs, you don't see any of that.
We saw that in New York. We saw those scenes in New York, and that horrified us. We saw people in panic running, running from those explosions and that enormous pile of debris, and we were horrified. These were real people to us. But then when we bomb other countries those people are not real to us.
One of the things I thought of after I got over my initial horror of the events in New York, I thought hey, that must have been what it was like when I was bombing in Europe, and I didn't even know it. These people were ciphers to me, and then I thought maybe to these terrorists that's what it is for them. Six thousand human beings, they have a mission, a goal, they're not human beings to terrorists, as people in other parts of the world have not been human beings to us.
If there is anything that we might get out of this experience, it's that we might take that horror that we have felt looking at those scenes in New York and the compassion that we have felt for the people who have endured this and their families, and extend this to people in other parts of the world who have been enduring this for a very long time. That does mean examining the U.S. and our policies. When you do that and suggest that maybe we ought to look at ourselves, and our policies, people say, oh you justify what happened. No absolutely not. To explain is not to justify. But if you don't want to explain anything, you will never learn anything. You have to understand. You have to explain without justifying. You have to dig down and see if you can figure out what is at the root of this terrorism.
Because there's something at the root besides irrational murderous feeling. Yes, this was murderous fanatical feeling, but these were not simple madmen, like people who just go berserk and kill everyone in sight. We have seen that in our country. Terrorism is not that sort of thing. There's something underneath that fanaticism which may have a core of truth to it. That is, there is something in the core belief of these terrorists, which may also be at the core belief of millions of other people in the world who are not terrorists, who are angry at American policy, but who are not fanatic enough to go and kill Americans because they are angry at our policy, but who are capable of doing that if they are even more aroused, and if we begin to do even more things to anger them. You might say that there is a reservoir of possible terrorists among all those people in the world who have suffered as a result of U.S. foreign policy. I don't know if you think I'm exaggerating when I say that there are millions of people in the world who have suffered as a result of U.S. foreign policy, but yes there are. Bush at a recent press conference said something like, I don't understand why these people hate us, we are good. Look at me. I'm good. Well sometimes the U.S is good, there are a lot of good things about the U.S., and then there are times, too many times, when the U.S. has been bad. Evil really. And has carried out policy that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people. You look at our history since WWII and all of the wars we have fought, wars which were not threats to the national security of the U.S. but which in some way suggested to the leaders of our country that there was some geo-political reason for going into these wars. Oh I know they gave other reasons, like well this country invaded this country and we are always on the side of countries that have been invaded. Really. Not so. No. North Korea invaded South Korea, okay, bad. What do we do immediately. Go to war. We're accustomed to that. It's a quick solution, well not really quick; three years and then no solution. At the end of three years it's the way it was before the three years of war in Korea. That is you have a dictatorship in the North, you have a dictatorship in the South, only now 2 million people are dead. A war that we carried out in Korea with napalm, with atrocities. Of course we were going to stop Communism. That was a slogan under which we did a lot of mayhem in the world. The Soviet Union was doing a lot of mayhem in the world. They were invading Eastern Europe. But using that, we then invaded other countries of the world and spread our military powers to other countries of the world and propped up military dictatorships in other parts of the world. In Central America we were responsible for not only propping up, but setting up ruthless dictatorships which in Guatemala killed perhaps 200,000 people and in Chile killed a huge number of people. In El Salvador killed 100,000 to 200,000 people. Then of course Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos, those are bad things and you can't ignore that. Then in the Middle East the immediate issue when it comes to terrorism, what have we done? Did we go to war in the Gulf because Iraq invaded Kuwait, did we go to war because Bush, Bush the elder, was heartbroken at the invasion of Kuwait? That's not why we go to War. I don't like to say this, but we go to war for oil. We go to war for the control of oil, and the control of oil prices. Then we use all sorts of other reasons, like we're opposed to the dictatorship and evil men, and Saddam Hussein is Hitler. Hitler has come in handy in all of our wars. Everybody we fight against is Hitler. Everybody on our side is Churchill. Someone on U.S. side called Diem, the dictator of Vietnam, our boy, our man in South Vietnam, called him the Winston Churchill of South East Asia. Please. We're against dictators. It was Saddam Hussein then and it's Osama bin Laden we're fighting now. You've got to have someone to focus on. Remember when we focused on Noriega in Panama. If we could only get Noriega, the drug trade. Yeah, he's the one. So we get Noriega and the drug trade has multiplied since we got Noriega. They think the American people are fools, and sometimes yes that's true. We only hope that Abraham Lincoln was right that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. People will catch on. We need to think about this way of combating terrorism, because terrorism does need to be combated, but we have to get to the roots of it and be honest and willing to look at ourselves and our policies self-critically, otherwise we will never learn anything and we will never get out of this. If we don't do that then the Twin Towers will only be the beginning of a succession of blows which we will face because we will never diminish the amount of hostility in the world, and by going to war and bombing people we will be increasing the amount of hostility in the world. People say, yes but what shall we do? If we can find Osama bin Laden and put him on trial in an international court, because that's what you do with criminals, if he is a criminal, I know we don't have to try him. Bush said, look I know he's guilty. Maybe he is, maybe the probability is that he's guilty. But we don't say well the president decided he was guilty so he's guilty. Lets say you find him and have an international tribunal, it's not just Republicans ands Democrats deciding what happens. What if you find Osama bin Laden, and 12 others around him, and put them in jail, heck, maybe execute them, who knows. Oh that ends terrorism? Really, that does it? But we're not even doing that. We're not having an international police effort the way you would. If you were looking for a murderer in the U.S. there would be an intensive police effort and intelligence work, and secret work to try and find the murderer. We wouldn't if we suspected that a murderer was hiding out in a neighborhood in the South Bronx, bomb the South Bronx. Because these are our people who live in the South Bronx. Well almost, because some of them are immigrants. Yes we can beef up security as much as we want in airports and on airplanes, but ultimately that will not really safeguard us against terrorism. But we want short-term solutions. We want quick fixes. That's what war is about. You go to war because you want to do something fast. That's what violence is about in general. You use violence because you don't want to wait, you don't want to work things out, you don't want to use your mind, your intelligence, your wit, you don't want to use those things that a human being is especially endowed with. You want to quickly fix something, boom go to war. The usual consequences of which are bad. So then you have to think about our policies, and ask what should we do to change our policies so that we can change the image of the U.S. in the Middle East and the world. The image of the U.S. is not that of a peaceful nation, we have not been a peaceful nation. We have our troops everywhere in the world. We have 19 major military bases all over the world. We have naval vessels on every sea in the world. We are not a peaceful nation. We have to think about what we can do to reshape the image of the U.S. Not just for the purposes of having a different image. This is not PR, like lets change our image but not the reality; no we have to change the reality of our policy. When you bring that up, you're treading on very delicate ground, because you're asking us to reverse the policies of 50 years, or maybe 200 years, or 500 years, maybe going back to Columbus. I'm serious. Reverse the policy of the marauding whit man moving into other parts of the world. That's a very big order and people don't want to deal with big orders, so they'd rather go to war. We have to start dealing with the big order, even if you can't accomplish that immediately, you have to have that in mind as a goal. I purpose something as a goal. Something you might start working on right away. The goal is to change America's role in the world, from being a military superpower to being a moral superpower. Lets get those troops out of Saudi Arabia. You say, but what about oil? If you want people to die for oil; because that's what's happening. People are dying for oil. People died in the Gulf war for oil. One hundred thousand Iraqis died for oil. Maybe one million Iraqis have died as a result of our sanctions for oil. Ever since World War II American policy in the Middle East has been based on oil. So you might have to make a decision. We might have to cut back. There are things we can do right away to start the process. Remove the troops from Saudi Arabia, which is a very particular grievance of people in the Middle East, not Osama bin Ladin, though obviously it is for him. He is a Saudi Arabian nationalist. He is furious that American troops are in his homeland, the site of holy places, Mecca and Medina. But he is not the only one. There are huge numbers of people in the Middle East who resent the presence of U.S. troops in that holy land for them. Yes, withdraw the troops; stop the sanctions that are killing hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq. And also be very firm and clear with Israel, it has to use the power that it has so far used to arm Israel, of course the U.S. arms Israel, we arm the Arab states, we arm everybody. We really are the big seller of arms in the world. Years later the arms may be shooting back at us. But that's okay because we've made a lot of money in the meantime. There are things that we can do immediately. I'm suggesting that we have to go through a real revolution in our thinking and no longer think of America as needing to be a superpower. Think of our country as being a more modest country. Sweden's not worried about terrorists. Denmark and Holland and New Zealand, there are a lot of places in the world not worried about terrorists. They don't have their troops everywhere, they don't have there naval vessels everywhere. They're not bothering other people. They're not intervening; they don't have a record of massive military destruction and intervention. Lets be a more modest nation. If we decide on that then there are all sorts of possibilities that open up. There goes that 350 billion dollars that we have been using to be a military superpower, and could you imagine what we could do with that to help people. To help people in this country and to do something about AIDS. To compare the amount of money that the U.S. gives to solve the AIDS problem to the amount of money that small much poorer countries give is pitiful. Measure our humanitarian efforts. Oh well were dropping food on Afghanistan, how ridiculous can you be? Food agencies that had been delivering huge amounts of food to Afghanistan by truck say, we can't do that anymore because the bombs are dropping. We could use the great wealth that would be made free by no longer being a super military power, to really create a situation in this country of a good society. Free healthcare for all, affordable housing for all, and helping people in other parts of the world. Then we will be secure. Bombing is not making us more secure. Do you feel more secure since we started bombing? After we started bombing I saw the congressmen scurrying down the steps of the Capital like cattle to get away from anthrax. It was a strange front page of the New York Times. There on the top of the page is the picture of the Congressmen scurrying down the steps and below that was a picture of Afghan refugees fleeing our bombs. I thought of the irony of all of that. All that I'm suggesting is that we need to think for ourselves, investigate for ourselves, use history in a sensible way, appeal to people's good sense, because I think that the American people have good sense. I don't believe the 90 percent figures, except as something that will last five minutes as the people are apprised of three facts and asked two questions, because I've seen that happen already. I've seen peoples support for the government change over a period of time as it did during the Vietnam War, as people learned more about what was really going on. So we have a lot to do. We are all teachers, communicators, we all have contacts, we all have neighbors, we all work someplace, we can all write letters to the editor, we can all talk on talk show programs, we can organize rallies, we can do what was done at other times in American history when it was necessary, particularly during the Vietnam war, to build a national movement to say to the government, no, you don't speak for us, you're not doing this for us. I've talked a long time. It's yours. ution, which says that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, if it's the job of the supreme court to see if congress has violated the first amendment, well the supreme court has failed in it's job again and again. They failed in 1798 and they failed in 1917, 1918, when they put Eugene Debs and 1000 others in jail for speaking out against the war.