Furious

Only 11 and I'm kicking off? Amazing, but true.

I just got back from an event up in Phoenixville where I saw Michael Berg, the father of Nick Berg, who was murdered in Iraq in May. A former school teacher, he's a small, soft-spoken man who can absolutely command a room. His message was perfectly clear: We need to stop the current administration before more of our sons and daughters are killed for absolutely nothing.

Nick Berg's death was not un-preventable. A contractor in Iraq, he was detained by Iraqi police and then transfered to U.S. Military and FBI custody, though they denied this publicly at the time. He was an American citizen, legally in Iraq, held without rights and without due process for almost two weeks. When he was released, Iraq had changed. While in captivity, the storm of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the world, including those of Iraq. Iraq had changed when Nick Berg was released from captivity, and he sensed the changes. He missed his original flight out of the country because of his incarceration and was unable to escape the country safely before he was captured again five days later. Except that the second time he was captured, it was by Al Qaeda. And he wasn't seen alive again.

So now I'll lay it out for you. Nick Berg was on his second tour of working in Iraq. Previous to Iraq, he has spent the better part of three years working on humanitarian projects in Africa. He was in Iraq to help, and he was an ardent supporter of the war. What changed when he was incarcerated by the U.S. government was that the Iraqi people saw that the United States was not the great liberator that our President claimed we would be. Our government, like that of Saddam Hussein, arrested the innocent, tortured, raped, and in some cases killed them while they were in custody.

Saddam Hussein tortured and killed thousands of innocent citizens in Iraq during his reign. With a nod and a wink, W. has condoned and accepted the torture of tens if not hundreds of Iraqi prisoners, many (if not most of them) innocent. The Abu Ghraib scandal raised the level of outrage of the Iraqi citizens enough to give Al Qaeda a firm foothold in a place where they had never operated before. A place that had been destabilized enough by war that they were free to abduct and murder good men like Nick Berg for no other reason than to feed the lust for revenge stirred in the Iraqis during the Abu Ghraib scandal.

How many more of our sons and daughters need to be beheaded or murdered or shot or maimed or blown up in Iraq before this country wakes up to realize that this war is not about freeing the Iraqis, it's not about spreading democracy, it's not about weapons of mass destruction, it's not about making the U.S. and the world safer, and it's not about the War on Terror. It's about settling old scores in the Bush family and lining the pockets of former executives of Halliburton and all of their corporate cronies. It's about power, money, and control of the most rapidly diminishing valuable resource on Earth.

Bush is in the process of mortgaging our national wealth and domestic well-being to consolidate his and his network's personal wealth and well-being. More importantly, and tragically, he is willing to spend the lives of our youth not for nothing, as I noted above, but only to get what he wants. And he has built a structure around himself that will lie, cheat, smear, kill, cover up, and lie some more to make sure they succeed.

And I'm furious about it. Deep down, so are you.

47 days...