Duty to Warn

This piece is excerpted for Father's Day from Harvey Wasserman's A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT, available from http://harveywasserman.com.

My Dad
a businessman
was
in his way
a real revolutionary
fighting the Big Guys
the way we fought the Pentagon
to end that damn war.

He always supported me
in those efforts
and when I came
back to Columbus
and to his business
and saw what he
really did
I was equally proud.

We did have our differences
mostly about computers
which he understood
a shade less than I.

We also argued
over finance and strategy
he liked to pick fights
from time to time
to test the limits
of my mettle.

But by and large
for ten full years
we got along
grew together
activist and businessman.

My mom kept the books
my sister sold gifts
somehow
it worked.

Today
is the day
my father
will pass away.

The shoe guys
are offering
such a deal
a special buy-out

The following text is the Introduction to the 767 page: Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents. You can buy the book here.

This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the reader, with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.

Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often the argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of crucial source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to correct that problem.

Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here are some news accounts that followed this election, which was among the most bitterly contested in all US history:

There's at least one man recently convicted of homosexual misconduct with a minor, now serving a 12 to 15-year sentence, who surely received news of Michael Jackson's acquittal with a sigh of envy at the quality of Jackson's defense team and the sturdy independence of a jury that refused to be swayed by the lynch mob atmosphere that has hung over the Jackson trial like a toxic fog. I'll return forthwith to that convicted sex offender, Father Paul Shanley, but first, what lessons should we draw from Jackson's acquittal on all counts?

The not-guilty verdict for Jackson shows once again what can happen when the prosecution and defense are on at least an equal footing. Jackson had a top-flight lawyer with an unlimited budget. The prosecutors did what most prosecutors do in America: pile up the charges, on the calculation that the defendant will plead out.

Washington keeps condemning Iran's government and making thinly veiled threats. But in Iran, many people are in the midst of challenging the country's rulers, in the streets and at the ballot box.

The June 17 election for president could be a turning point or a hollow spectacle -- no one knows which -- but the Bush administration is eagerly trashing the whole thing. "The United States has not waited for the first ballot to be cast before dismissing Iran's presidential election as rigged," Agence France Presse reported over the weekend.

But Iran's election is not rigged. There is a fierce electioneering battle underway, with some significant differences between candidates. Meanwhile, hindered rather than helped by the bellicose statements from Washington, courageous Iranian activists have begun a new wave of actions against the status quo of theocracy.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Sometimes you look at the people Bush appoints to high public office and the only possible response is, "What were they thinking?"

Zalmay Khalilzad for U.S. ambassador to Iraq? Why not just send Richard Perle? Khalilzad is a second-rank neo-con with all the same credentials as the rest of those bozos -- pre-emptive war, world hegemony, Project for a New American Century ... the whole stinking lot of it. Plus, he's been a big booster for Iran's ayatollahs, the Afghani Mujahideen and the Taliban, not to mention an oil company consultant. Isn't that just jim-dandy?

What this tells us is that the administration has learned exactly nothing from the past three years of insurgency in Iraq. The 1,700-dead, $1 billion-a-week mistake will continue to be run in exactly the same way we have already proved doesn't work. We'll keep trying to put out a growing insurgency with too small an army as the country drifts ever-closer to civil war. It's like Ben Franklin's definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

There was something unsettling about Donald Rumsfeld recent tough-talk speech in Singapore in which he described his concern over what he viewed as China’s alarming weapons buildup. Rumsfeld speech was the top story next day in the Los Angeles Times, my local paper. And at the nearby Starbuck’s I saw it was also the top story in the New York Times.

The specifics of Rumsfeld’s speech were not very interesting or informative. For that one needs to consult the recent issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and an article by Jeffrey Lewis, “The Ambiguous Arsenal,” which argues effectively that China’s strategic weapons buildup has not changed significantly over the last decade. Rumsfeld held one trump card however. An updated intelligence estimate on China’s defense programs is “expected to be released soon,” according to mainline media speak. But since the Iraq intelligence debacle, who is going to take that seriously? Thanks to Bush, Condi and Rumsfeld, we now live in a time when the word “intelligence” is a guaranteed laugh-getter for Jay Leno and David Letterman.

As Mark Felt, one of the main responsible FBI officers overseeing illegal counterintelligence programs targeting the American Indian Movement and other groups in the 60s and 70’s, is hailed as a hero for catalyzing the toppling of the Nixon administration, Leonard Peltier approaches his fourth decade of unjust imprisonment.

Today, from the perspective of the U.S. government, everything is excusable in the war theatre, even as the world questions U.S. policies and actions that point unequivocally to human rights abuses. A puppet government, people murdered and terrorized, that was the climate in the Pine Ridge reservation in 1975 when two FBI agents were killed in a shootout. Leonard Peltier and fellow warriors responded to the call for protection from the Oglala Lakota people, but he was blamed for the deaths of the agents and is serving two consecutive life terms for that.

As the Senate votes in Bush's long-filibustered nominees, the nuclear option compromise is looking more rancid than reasonable. The seven Democrats who helped broker the compromise pledged not to filibuster except in the most extraordinary circumstances. But given the track record of Priscilla Owens, Janice Rogers Brown, and William Pryor, I wonder how extreme a candidate has to be before these Democrats and their seven Republican colleagues would reject them.

Would a prospective nominee have to be caught wearing white Klan robes to Sunday church? Having public sex with a live animal? Receiving videotaped bribes from Don Corleone? I suppose these actions might meet the "extraordinary circumstances" standard, but running roughshod over legal precedents to favor the wealthy and powerful clearly doesn't.

Because the participating Democrats agreed not to filibuster Owens, Brown, and Pryor, the public barely heard the stories of why their nominations crossed an unacceptable line. We heard mostly the inside baseball of legal abstractions. But their history is pretty drastic:

"I guess my vote don't matter anymore."

The shiv to the gut of democracy that occurred last Nov. 2 can be found in reams of data and volumes of eyewitness testimony, but first it's in those words or it's nowhere at all, and if we hear them and don't feel our outrage rise maybe we never will.

For those who want to learn the truth, much of the testimony is contained in two recently released publications, "What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election" (Academy Chicago Publishers) and the phonebook-sized "Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election: Essential Documents" (CICJ Books). There are also ongoing conferences about vote fraud. I just got back from Cleveland, where one was held over the weekend, sponsored by the grassroots political group Ohio Vigilance. It was there that I talked to singer/activist Victoria Parks of Columbus, a city newly notorious for the long lines at its inner-city polling places and other dirty tricks that added up to disenfranchisement for thousands of voters.