Write for God

“Mission accomplished” didn’t refer to the immoral lie that became the five-year debacle that will never end in Iraq, according to the shameless and hapless spinmeisters at the White House today.

According to today’s 1984 Ministry of Truth revision, those words meant the successful completion of a 10-month mission by the crew of the carrier where future International Criminal Tribunal detainee George W. Bush delivered his message of complete victory that existed only in his wormy mind. What a silly goof by the White House press office and the Secret Service that checks every imaginable detail of a location where the President makes an appearance many days before he actually arrives there! (PR hack to a Secret Service hack: “You moron, you forgot to take down that carrier banner before hundreds of press arrived to hear our totally manipulated message!”)

As John Lennon told Paul McCartney, “How do you sleep?”

For a look at how the New York Times and other journalists gave legs to the Bush lie, read this Editor and Publisher article by Greg Mitchell.

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month and two events in the past 15 years have certainly borne him out. On April 19, 1993, the federal government ended the standoff at Waco with a fiery blaze that killed church members of all ages and races. Two years later, a blast in Oklahoma City killed 168 people of all ages and races who had business in the city’s federal building. When the so-called perpetrators of the bombing were brought to trial, the government and the defense tied one event to the other as motive and result.If the bombing in Oklahoma City was payback for the forced end to the 51-day holdout at the Branch Davidians’ property, who ultimately lost? The federal government didn’t, even though agents tortured the Branch Davidians with a constant barrage of noises that included animals being slaughtered and cut off their food and water supplies to force them out.

Though investigations by Congress and independent reports found discrepancies, no one in the FBI or ATF was brought to trial for firing flash-bang grenades or punching holes in doors with military-issue tanks on civilian soil.  The front door at the Branch Davidians’ property—invariably called a “compound” in the message-controlled media—was the subject of much controversy. David Koresh and his followers claimed that the door showed evidence of incoming bullets by federal agents who swore fire had come from inside the building; the door was removed and has never been seen again. Like President John F. Kennedy’s brain, it has disappeared in the black hole of potentially embarrassing objects that powerful forces would never want analyzed.

Some of the Branch Davidians were charged with gun-related crimes after the siege. Families were wiped out and federal agents posed atop Bradley vehicles brought home from Gulf War I to celebrate their victory. Two years passed after the blaze that ended the impasse at Waco and then another disaster killed about the same number of little children in a day care in Oklahoma City. The sentinel image of the Murrah building bombing was the photo of Baylee Almon, the dying toddler cradled by a firefighter. For me, the mirror image of Waco was a forensic shot of another little girl who happened to be David Koresh’s daughter. The grotesquely contorted body of Star Howell—burned and bent like a backward C from the effects of the CS gas pumped into the Branch Davidians’ building—didn’t get on the cover of TIME and Newsweek and only a minority of Americans saw it. If they had, some would have blamed her painful death on the sins of her father.

The dead and mangled children at the Murrah’s day-care center were losers, simply because of where they sat on the morning of April 19, 1995. The children who survived will have major health issues for the rest of their lives. The horror of the children’s deaths in Waco was swept aside by Bill Clinton’s administration, whose order to end the siege came through Attorney General Janet Reno. Good liberals will gloss over the deaths at Waco as gun nuts gone crazy who deserved what they got. They have never seen the blood on Clinton and Reno’s hands.

Oklahoma City was a different matter. Bill Clinton’s first response was to seek the death penalty for the perpetrators, then he blamed the bombing on his political enemies on right-wing talk radio. The Southern Poverty Law Center made millions scaring Americans into thinking that gun owners equaled white supremacist terrorists. Clinton pointed to the events in Oklahoma City as the reason he had the momentum to win a second term. He also pushed through anti-terrorist legislation that no one was interested in until the dead children began to be pulled out the Murrah building’s wreckage. The events at Waco and Oklahoma City were certainly gains for Bill Clinton.

Oklahoma City was a tragedy that wouldn’t be overshadowed in carnage until 9/11 six years later, but America didn’t see any dead babies in the World Trade Center. The bombing will always be seared into our consciousness as a senseless bloodbath symbolized by a tiny, broken body in a firefighter’s arms. The image stirred revenge when it was easier to prosecute Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the crime and forget about the “others unknown” mentioned in their indictments. As long as someone was on trial, it didn’t matter if there were others responsible who were free or that two guys and a truck full of fertilizer couldn’t have created the damage at the Murrah building.

I’ve read the transcripts of the McVeigh and Nichols trials and I am amazed at how weak the prosecutors’ arguments were, but no one cared. There were holes large enough to park a Ryder truck in; a detailed defense document that raised questions about the evidence against McVeigh were not allowed to be presented, thanks to the judge presiding over the case. Jurors didn’t need to be confused by the evidence presented in the document, ruled Judge Richard Matsch. Someone had to pay at the first high-profile trial after O.J. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict. Nichols managed life in prison and McVeigh was sentenced to death, which was carried out in record time six years after the crime and four years after the trial.

There were dead in Waco, dead in Oklahoma City and dead in the federal penitentiary where McVeigh was executed by lethal injection three months to the date before 9/11. The culture of violence demands its sacrifices on a public altar. More dead followed at the World Trade Center and many times its toll dies in Iraq every year that the obscenity of “mission accomplished” disintegrates into “morass accomplished.” It’s no accident that the Texas Governor who presided over more judicial deaths than any other became the American President whose bloody neocon agenda slaughters civilians without impunity.

Are we better off as a nation because the FBI and ATF killed civilians at Waco or because the Bush-Cheney coven kills civilians and military personnel in Iraq? Our nation’s pride in being the beacon of liberty and human rights is forever tarnished. Hundreds of billions of our dollars will fund the blood spilled in Iraq. Little victims there will grow into angry terrorists who will multiply many times over to create more death in the years to come. For what?

I clearly remember the morning that Timothy McVeigh was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. As I was settling into my desk at work, two co-workers were gleefully discussing with each passing minute after 8 a.m. on the morning of June 11, 2001 how certain chemicals would be ending his life. They laughed and cheered as the end got closer in much the same way that others might count down the end of the old year on December 31. Their bloodlust curdled my stomach and I found my coffee, breakfast and lunch that day ruined. I could never look at the two the same way again after that glimpse into their perverse joy at someone’s impending death. I could find no cause for celebration in the death of one of God’s children, no matter his sins. That was an issue for McVeigh, the Roman Catholic priest who administered Last Rites and absolution and God. None of us can have the moral authority to override God’s power to judge.

Pope John Paul II railed against our modern culture of death. Through Waco and Oklahoma City over the past 15 years, we’ve seen death in April. Long after T.S. Eliot termed the month the cruelest, it remains the bloodiest.  

Forty years ago this month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis with a rifle shot that tore half his face off. The great preacher of nonviolence against racism that had so often turned violently ugly in America died instantly.

As with many other obscene crimes in the second part of the 20^th century, a lone assassin was quickly identified. Our great disasters—the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, 9/11—have been perpetrated by a very small cadre of crazed individuals, it seems.

From knowing there was a change in the Dallas motorcade’s route to having a John Doe 2 conveniently disappear to orders from on high to have jets stand down as passenger planes were hitting New York’s tallest buildings, the incongruities in official stories only puzzle us “conspiracy nuts.” Everyone else hears a story that has more questions than answers and accepts only the answers.

There aren’t many Americans who remember that James Earl Ray was never actually tried for Dr. King’s murder, although he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. End of story? Not in the eyes of the King family, its close associates of, of course, those conspiracy nuts.

David Ray Griffin, a professor of religion who writes brilliantly about the problems in the official version of the 9/11 story, has been tarred with that label. In The New Pearl Harbor, Griffin discusses the easy use of the term “conspiracy theory” in his introduction,

“It seems almost a requirement of admission into public discourse to announce that one rejects conspiracy theories of all sorts. We accept a conspiracy theory whenever we believe that two or more people have conspired in secret to achieve some goal, such as to rob a bank, defraud customers or fix prices. We would be more honest, therefore, if we followed the precedent of Michael Moore, who has said, “Now I’m not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true.”

On April 4, four decades to the day of the murder, CNN aired Eyewitness to Murder, a documentary examining Dr. King’s death. To CNN’s credit, it raised the issue of James Earl Ray’s not firing the deadly rifle shot and included an interview with attorney William Pepper, who makes the case in Orders to Kill that Ray wasn’t the gunman.

The King family, including the late Coretta Scott King, and the civil rights icon Andrew Young, had endured FBI harassment and J. Edgar Hoover’s covert wiretaps by the time that James Earl Ray was supposed to have fired a single shot into Dr. King’s head. Hoover’s campaign of intimidation included surveillance of Dr. King’s infidelity and the threat to send the tapes to Mrs. King.

A year to the date that Dr. King was assassinated, he delivered one of his most rousing speeches at New York’s Riverside Church. Titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence, it took a courageous stand against the moral shame of the war. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam,” he said.

During Hoover’s campaign of intimidation, where was James Earl Ray? When powerful supporters of the escalation in Vietnam were outraged that Dr. King had spoken out against it, where was James Earl Ray? It seems that James Earl Ray was only there when he needed to be at the cheap boarding house opposite the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.

I watched CNN’s report with our 12-year-olds. Our son, who’s been known to march to a different brass band instead of just to a different drummer, asked me why Ray had left his rifle, bedspread and the underwear laundry tag that had his name on it in a bundle on the sidewalk. “Didn’t he know he was going to get caught if he left his stuff there?” asked my son. I had to answer that no one would be that dumb unless he or someone else wanted to make sure he was identified. It’s amazing how even a 12-year-old can become a conspiracy nut just by asking the right question.

To Dr. King’s family and Andrew Young, the idea that a lone gunman and not the powerful interests that had more to lose if Dr. King continued speaking out was the guilty party seemed incredible. While CNN had to respect the integrity of these honorable people by raising the issue that Ray didn’t actually fire the fatal shot, it didn’t have the guts to end the program with that question.

A hack government prosecutor laughingly dismissed the notion of a conspiracy by using the old saw that it’s impossible to keep a plot a secret if several people are involved. Hundreds of people knew about the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb during World War II but no one spoke out until the “destroyer of worlds “ as Dr. Robert Oppenheimer termed atomic power in a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita, obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the publication of the Pentagon Papers, how much would still be hidden about Vietnam? If whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst hadn’t spoken out about the failures of the FBI Lab, would it still continue manufacturing evidence to build faulty cases?

James Earl Ray maintained that an operative who went by the name Raoul had manipulated him into buying the right kind of rifle and checking in at the right boarding house. Given the intrigues of the MKULTRA experiments that the CIA conducted to study mind control and its COINTELPRO program of widespread spying on American citizens in the 1960s, the notion that Dr. King’s death was the result of dirty tricks isn’t farfetched.

Peace groups and anti-establishment organizations have always been harassed. In the 1990s, the FBI had a VAAPCON task force that investigated abortion clinic bombings. Roman Catholic groups such as the US Conference of Bishops and Dr. Jerry Falwell were among its surveillance targets. It wasn’t until Freedom of Information Act requests revealed the surveillance that the public knew about it.

Dr. King’s standing as a moral force against the Vietnam War would have had a devastating effect on the decision to send more of America’s black and white poor to die overseas. Immediately after his death, cities burned, riots erupted and black and white communities grew further apart in fear instead of coming together to end an unpopular war.

Racist cops had turned pressure hoses and dogs on black teens marching peacefully. White men could beat 14-year-old Emmett Till to death and Viola Liuzzo could be shot with other civil rights workers. Judges could make a mockery of justice by not punishing crimes against black people. Yet no one targeted the nation’s foremost advocate of racial equality until a freshly released convict named James Earl Ray decided to take him out and then leave incriminating evidence on a Memphis sidewalk to be found by police. Who’s a conspiracy theorist now?

The pattern of injustice inflicted on black people by white people protected by the law had existed for hundreds of years before James Earl Ray supposedly silenced Dr. King by himself. On CNN’s report, a black police officer spoke regretfully about being told not to protect Dr. King during his time in Memphis. A white police officer spoke of personnel from the 11^th Military Intelligence Group who had been to the roof opposite Dr. King’s motel room before his visit. Add CNN to the list of those spreading conspiracy theories.

Cui bono is a Latin phrase that means “whose benefit.” When someone is found murdered, detectives ask themselves who would have benefited from the death. Spouses who have taken out large insurance policies on a deceased husband or wife would benefit by cashing in. A business associate whose theft would have been discovered by the deceased would benefit, too.

In the assassination of Dr. King, cui bono? A petty criminal named James Earl Ray or more powerful forces who would have found it convenient to have a moral voice silenced? CNN didn’t have the gumption to follow through on the questions raised in its own report, but that doesn’t mean those questions should be ignored in favor of another lone gunman theory.

In memory of Dr. and Mrs. King, we should have the courage to ask them.

No less a moral force and prophet of nonviolence than Father Daniel Berrigan affirms that all life is precious.