Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) to War If...

Call to War or Slaughter?

Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) to War If...
By WILLIAM A. COOK

American families have always responded to the call of their President to send their sons and daughters to fight on behalf of the country. The cries of alarm resound over the years: "Remember the Alamo," "Remember the Maine," "Remember Pearl Harbor," "Remember the Gulf of Tonkin." While it's true that some of these alarms have turned out to be fabricated cries that covered the true intentions of the government at the time, witness the most devastating lie that gave rise to the "Gulf of Tonkin," the American people have shown remarkable trust in their leaders believing that the values expressed in the Constitution must be upheld.

In making this sacrifice on behalf of the democracy that grants them freedoms they hold sacred, American families depend primarily on the availability of information supplied by the mainstream media, both print and television. If Americans knew at the time that the Maine blew up from an internal explosion and not an unprovoked attack by Spain, they would not have supported going to war against Spain. If McNamara had made available to the press what he knew about the situation in Vietnam, 55,000 lives would not have been lost. There can be little question that accurate, informed, and honest information should and must be supplied to the American public. But that is not the case, as the brouhaha in the White House Press Corp makes perfectly clear. When reporters need to have their reports checked by the very people they are reporting about, when CNN demands of its press corps that they can print nothing that is not reviewed by central headquarters in Atlanta, when NBC, owned by one of the major suppliers of military hardware in the country GE, fires Peter Arnett for making a news analysis report on Iraqi TV, the free press in America no longer exists. This accounts for the relatively strong support the President has received from the American people. They are the silent victims of the controlled news coverage available in the major newspapers like the administration's own voice, The Washington Times, and the corporate controlled speaking heads on TV, the Kudlow's and Kramer's, the O'Rielly's, and the Savage's. What would be the situation if Americans knew the truth? Let's ask the question.

Would you have sent your son or daughter to war if you knew that, as the CBC news reported, "Law experts around the world have condemned the war as illegal." Would you want to jeopardize your offspring to the potential of a war crimes trial not unlike that at Nuremberg?...Cont'd >

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook04052003.html

I knew all of this, and my husband deployed to war....


You see the military has NO CHOICE when the orders come... and I wish people bloody understood this.

The alternative with desertion is a court martial, and worst case a firing squad for desertion in time of war.

Now all this disucsion should have been in the open BEFORE the first comebat troops were first mobilized...

So this is the wrong way to frame this discusion.

...shouldering the brunt of this brutal, illegal colonial war. For years we've always been led to believe that the men and women of the military ALWAYS supported the right-wing, conservative candidates. We now know that is a falsehood and one of the p.r. memes. The other half of that decrepit lie is that the conservative government could always be counted on to support the armed services. It should be painfully evident to all that this conservative government doesn't give a shit about ANYONE, military included. In fact, to this neocon cabal, WE ARE ALL CANNON FODDER!

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