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about two weeks ago. Maybe 100 people. Big ovation when I was done. Beautiful church with members willing to hear the truth.
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Good morning. Before I begin my remarks, I have some important introductions to make. These are people you need to know.
His name was Antanacio Haromarin, and he was from Baldwin Park, California. Haromarin was an American soldier manning a checkpoint in Iraq. His unit came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. Haromarin was killed in this exchange on June 3. He was 27 years old.
His name was Branden Oberleitner, and he was from Worthington, Ohio. Oberleitner was an American soldier returning from a patrol in Iraq when he was fired upon by a rifle-propelled grenade. Oberleitner died of his wounds on June 5. He was 20 years old.
His name was Doyle Bollinger, Jr., and he was from Poteau, Oklahoma. Bollinger was an American soldier on a work detail in Iraq when a piece of unexploded ordnance detonated and killed him on June 6. Bollinger was 21 years old.
His name was Jesse Halling, and he was from Indianapolis, Indiana. Halling was an American soldier at a military police station in Iraq which came under fire from rifle-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Halling was fatally shot in this exchange on June 7. He was 19 years old.
His name was Michael Dooley, and he was from Pulaski, Virginia. Dooley was an American soldier who was manning a traffic control point in Iraq when he was ambushed by two individuals who drove up requesting medical assistance. They shot him to death on June 8. He was 23 years old.
His name was Gavin Neighbor, and he was from Somerset, Ohio. Neighbor was an American soldier who was resting in a bus after guard duty in Iraq when an attacker fired a rocket-propelled grenade at him from a nearby house. Neighbor died of his wounds on June 10. He was 20 years old.
His name was Shawn Pahnke, and he was from Shelbyville, Indiana. Pahnke was an American soldier on patrol in Iraq when he was fatally shot on June 16. He was 25 years old.
His name was Robert Frantz, and he was from San Antonio, Texas. Frantz was an American soldier on guard duty in Iraq when someone threw a hand grenade over a wall at him. Frantz died of his injuries on June 17. He was 19 years old.
His name was William Latham, and he was from Kingman, Arizona. Latham was an American soldier who participated in a raid at a suspected arms market in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on May 19. He was hit with shrapnel. Latham was evacuated back to the United States where he died of his wounds in Walter Reed Army Medical Center on June 18. He was 29 years old.
His name was Michael Deuel, and he was from Nemo, South Dakota. Deuel was an American soldier ordered to guard a propane distribution center in Iraq. He was shot on June 18 while performing this guard duty and died of his wounds. He was 21 years old.
His name was Paul Nakamura, and he was from Santa Fe Springs, California. Nakamura was an American soldier, part of an ambulance crew in Iraq transporting an injured soldier for medical attention on June 19 when the ambulance was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Nakamura was killed in this attack. He was 21 years old.
His name was Orenthial Smith, and he was from Allendale, South Carolina. Smith was an American soldier whose convoy was ambushed by small arms fire in Iraq. He died of his wounds on June 22. He was 21 years old.
These are the American combat casualties in Iraq from June 1 to June 22. Added to this list for that period are Michael Tosto (age 24), Andrew Pokorny (age 30), Joseph Suell (age 24), John Klinesmith, Jr. (age 25), Ryan Cox (age 19), Travis Burkhardt (age 26), Cedric Lennon (age 32) and Jonathan Lambert (age 28), who were killed in Iraq by non-combat related mishaps like car wrecks and accidental weapons discharges.
In the last few days, at least five more American soldiers have died in Iraq, along with six British soldiers. Two American soldiers have gone missing, possibly abducted, possibly dead. This averages out to more than one US soldier killed a day. If this rate keeps up, we can expect 228 more dead American troops by Christmas.
Why?
Donald Rumsfeld was asked this question on a March 24 edition of the CBS news program 'Face the Nation.' He said, "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established."
That is a profoundly specified statement. Not only did Rumsfeld claim that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, not only were those weapons in place to be used on the battlefield, not only were those poisons weaponized for maximum lethal effect. Rumsfeld stated bluntly that he knew of one case where permission to use these weapons against American troops had already been given.
This was nothing new. For seven months to that point, Rumsfeld had been in good company making claims of this nature. Every day since September of 2002, we heard from Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Fleischer, Rice, Powell, and several times from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, that Iraq's weapons program represented an immediate and severe danger to the American people. The shadow of September 11 loomed long and dark over these statements, and the approval ratings for combat indicated that Americans were willing to believe these Bush administration claims rather than accept even the most remote possibility that Iraqi weapons could be used on the home front.
It has become agonizingly clear that the Bush administration deliberately trumped up dire stories of Iraq's weapons capabilities in order to galvanize the American people behind war. They lied every day for months. Worse, the Bush administration deliberately used the horror of September 11 to justify war against a nation that posed no threat to American security.
On June 15, former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark appeared on 'Meet the Press' with Tim Russert. A wretchedly revealing exchange came from the interview:
GEN. CLARK: I think there was a certain amount of hype in the intelligence, and I think the information that's come out thus far does indicate that there was a sort of selective reading of the intelligence in the sense of sort of building a case.
MR. RUSSERT: Hyped by whom? The CIA, or the president or vice president? Secretary of Defense, who?
GEN. CLARK: I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.
MR. RUSSERT: By who? Who did that?
GEN. CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, "You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein." I said, "But-I'm willing to say it but what's your evidence?" And I never got any evidence.
Mr. Russert, predictably, did not follow up on this astounding claim during the interview. The import of these statements, however, is clear. General Clark was asked by the White House, and by those working for and with the White House, to connect Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the attacks of September 11. He was asked to do so on that terrible day, while people were still dying and while the buildings were still burning.
The tactic was effective. A poll by CBS and the New York Times taken just before the war began showed that 45% of the American people believed Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the attacks of September 11. A previous poll taken by Princeton Survey Research Associates showed that 50% of the American people believed that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.
In a country with a news media that can provide data in an unrelenting stream 24 hours a day, millions of Americans believed in a connection that was completely and totally wrong. How can such a gap in comprehension be explained? Simply put, the Bush administration put forth a staggering array of lies and exaggerations, and the American media chose to repeat them ad nauseam instead of verifying the veracity of the claims. These poll numbers must be factored into those taken during and after the war which appeared to show American support for the attack.
It also begs the question: If the rationales for attacking Iraq were so strong, as Bush and his administration claim, why was it necessary to manufacture evidence to support the war?
It has been almost three months since Baghdad fell to American forces. The United States military has invested virtually every corner of Iraq in that time. No evidence of chemical or biological weapons has been found. No evidence that these weapons had been dispersed for combat usage has been found. Nothing weaponized has been found. No evidence that command and control orders were given has been found. No connection between Iraq, Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists has been even minutely established.
The best they have come up with? Two ‘Mobile Weapons Labs’ labeled by Colin Powell as “Winnebagoes of Death,” which were in fact platforms for the filling and launching of weather balloons, which were in fact sold to the Iraqis by the British. That, and they found a ‘gas centrifuge’ buried under a rose bush that purportedly indicates an Iraqi nuclear program. Never mind that the thing was buried there twelve years ago. Never mind that centrifuges become metal paperweights if they get dust in them, much less dirt and condensation and rust from being buried under a shrub.
That’s it. That’s everything.
After roughly 280 days worth of fearful descriptions of the formidable Iraqi arsenal, coming on the heels of seven years of UNSCOM weapons inspections, four years of surveillance, months of UNMOVIC weapons inspections, the investiture of an entire nation by American and British forces, after which said forces searched "everywhere" per the words of the Marine commander over there and "found nothing," after interrogating dozens of the scientists and officers who have nothing to hide anymore because Hussein is gone, after finding out that the dreaded 'mobile labs' were weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the British, George W. Bush and his people suddenly have a few things to answer for.
You may recall this instance where a bombastic claim was made by Bush. During his constitutionally-mandated State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Mr. Bush said, "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." Nearly five months later, those 500 tons are nowhere to be found. A few seconds with a calculator can help us understand exactly what this means.
500 tons of gas equals one million pounds. After UNSCOM, after UNMOVIC, after the war, after the US Army inspectors, after all the satellite surveillance, it is difficult in the extreme to imagine how one million pounds of anything could refuse to be located. Bear in mind, also, that this one million pounds is but a small part of the Iraqi weapons arsenal described by Bush and his administration.
Balloon labs and decrepit remnant technology from a nuclear program long since destroyed is not good enough. Not by a long chalk.
Along with the Americans who died at the altar of these terrible lies were thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Associated Press attempted to do an accounting of the civilian dead after the war, and came up with 3,240 killed. This number, however, only represents casualties that took place between March 20 and April 20, and depends upon records from hospitals that were badly overwhelmed by the carnage. A variety of groups from around the world that are also evaluating the data put the casualty numbers closer to 7,000 killed, and some estimate that the number of dead is actually in the neighborhood of 10,000.
His name was Brandon Sloan, and he was from Cleveland, Ohio. Sloan was an American soldier who was killed March 23 after his convoy came under attack in Iraq. He was 19 years old. He was not the first to die, and he was not the last.
When a man or woman puts on the uniform of the United States military and swears the oath, they are taking a leap of faith that their lives will not be used and disposed of by those who would deceive them into combat. There can be no worse crime perpetrated against them, against us, against this nation, than if a leader sends them off to die in the service of a lie.
George W. Bush and his administration owe an explanation to the family of Brandon Sloan, and to the families of all the other troops who have fallen and will fall in this war. They owe an explanation to the American people and to the world for the carnage they caused with their lies and exaggerations. There must be a reckoning.
When you stare into the obsidian darkness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, it stares back at you. The stone of the monument is jet black, but polished so that you must face your own reflected eyes should you dare to read the names inscribed there. You are not alone in that place. You stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead, and when those names shine out around and above and below the person you see in that stone, you become their graveyard. Your responsibility to those names, simply, is to remember. Such an awful lesson was learned in the forging of that place, not in abstractions of military theory, but in blood and tissue and life.
Consider the man himself, George W. Bush. He successfully parlayed 9/11, the worst intelligence failure in the history of the world, into a war that cost, and continues to cost, thousands of lives. The terrorism fears surrounding al Qaeda connections to Iraq and Hussein's vast stockpiles of deadly weapons played directly upon the memory of collapsing Towers and massive death that is now the collective heritage of every American. Bush used that terrible image against his own people by lying repeatedly about the threat posed by Iraq, to bring about a war that served little purpose to anyone but those who stand to profit from it.
He, and the rest of us, appear poised to be forced to relearn the terrible lessons of Vietnam.
The war itself obscured, yet again, the disastrous missteps and policy decisions which opened America to the 9/11 attacks in the first place, and furthermore has pushed to the back burner the fact that the administration has adamantly refused to release a detailed report on what happened on that terrible day. To date he has gotten away with these lies and rank omissions. The ability to pull off a stunt like that without being called to account for it might make a man believe himself capable of any lie, any fabrication, any act the mind can conceive of.
The Bush administration has opened two wars that are now far from concluded, and appears to have begun preparing for third against Iran. They have done so while actively suppressing the intelligence report on the 9/11 attacks, and while manufacturing evidence to justify their actions in Iraq. The aftereffects of these actions - a dynamic increase in terrorist attacks and recruitment, chaos in Iraq, rising chaos in Afghanistan, skyrocketing American casualties, an America that is more wide open than ever to assault - will be felt for many years to come.
When you stare into the obsidian darkness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, it stares back at you. It demands that you shout the names of the lost into the wind, where they will be carried on a slipstream of memory into the farthest reaches of time. The darkness demands that you do not forget, that you do not let leaders lie their way into butchery and failure. To this point, we as a nation have failed to fulfill that responsibility. This must change.
But we are bombarded each day with the seeming reality that people don’t care. People are willing to accept lies from this administration which result in massive death. People are willing to be lulled by brave words about protecting America, and do not care or even wish to care that the protection they hear about is actually the sword of Damocles, hanging by one hair above their bared necks.
I think people do care. I think people do not like being lied to, do not like American soldiers dying by the lot.
I think people do care. I just think people don’t know. They rely on the vapid wasteland of television news to be informed, they listen to conservative talk radio which tells them weapons have already been found in Iraq.
You have to tell them. You. Every day, as clearly as you can, you have to take up the banner of fact and carry it with you. Even a small rock makes ripples when it hits the water. Enough rocks in the water makes a big, big wave.
Is it a daunting task to consider? Of course. I find myself every day seeking inspiration, seeking hope, seeking a reason to keep shouting into the maelstrom. I have two memories that sustain me. One is of climbing through a huge cave in Arizona. There was a rock that had been worn down smoothly into a bowl in there, and I asked the guide what did that. She said it was caused by a drop of water that had fallen from the ceiling once a day for millennia. I think about that, about time, about the strength of rock against the weakness of water. I think about which prevailed.
I also remember standing with my grandmother on a beach in Florida to watch the shuttle take off. When they lit the candle, the ground beneath my small feet trembled so much I felt the vibration in my chest. As the ship paved a road of fire through the sky, I remember standing there with my mouth open thinking, “People did that. People can do anything.”
In a lot of ways, the space race itself is something that always brings to me a sense of awe and inspiration, because it is greatness and nobility forged from terrible circumstances. It began, in truth, as a byproduct of both Nazi rocket ingenuity and as yet another field of battle in the Cold War. When the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union first set their eyes to the stars, they did not have dreams of exploration in their hearts. Both wished to beat the other to that high ground for purely strategic reasons, and both used the propulsion wisdom developed by expatriated Third Reich scientists to do it.
When the Soviets launched the satellite, Sputnik, into orbit above Earth in 1957, the race began in earnest. The ante was raised in 1961 when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to pierce the veil of our atmosphere and enter the oceanic emptiness of the universe. Less than a month later, American astronaut Alan Shepard followed the trail of Gegarin, strapped into the nosecone of a missile that a lot of NASA officials sincerely believed might blow up on the launch pad.
A year later, John Glenn orbited the Earth. In 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexi Leonov and American astronaut Ed White took the first 'walks' in space. By 1968, America had finally outstripped the Soviet racketeers, who had been repeatedly embarrassing them, when astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the moon. In July of 1969, the entire planet was stilled in wondrous awe as Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another celestial body.
Somewhere along the way, it became about much more than a race for Cold War supremacy in the skies. When President John F. Kennedy gathered the cause of space exploration to himself, applying his unique gifts for rhetoric and inspirational speech, the contest for space became about far more than beating the Soviets. "But why, some say, the moon?" asked Kennedy in 1962. "Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain?"
Perhaps it was the headiness of the very idea, torn from the pages of pulp science fiction, that made our slow reach into the universe about so much more than mean gamesmanship between nations. A moment's consideration of the possibilities - some of which have already been realized with our unmanned trips to Mars and the outer planets, and our placement of the Hubble Telescope in the skies above Earth - boggles the mind.
Knowing the essence of humanity, however, it is a mission that always seemed unavoidable. As Gemini and Apollo astronaut Michael Collins said, "It's human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice, really; it's an imperative."
This, perhaps, is the rub. In this boiling cauldron of fallible human frailty and ignorance, we cast our eyes to the heavens and wondered what was there. We decided to do the impossible, to break free of the dead weight of gravity, to land our ships and our easily damaged bodies on a rock above that was utterly inhospitable to life, and we did it. We wanted to see what was on Mars, our closest planetary brother, and so our physicists executed the most extraordinary galactic corner-pocket pool shot in history by placing a probe dead-center-perfect on the surface of that red sphere.
We wanted to see what was at the farthest reaches, and so we put the Hubble Telescope into space and found that we could take pictures not only of the farthest reaches of measurable distance, but of time itself. Not so long ago, we took a picture with the Hubble called the ‘Deep Field.’ It was a snapshot of a moment in time not so far removed from that second when God snapped His fingers and said, "Let there be light."
It was good.
The challenge of space has always been a dangerous undertaking. On January 27, 1967, American astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee burned to death during a launch rehearsal, when a spark ignited the pure oxygen environment of their capsule. On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 was launched. Days into their mission to the moon, an explosion crippled the ship, and only a series of small miracles coupled with the incredible professionalism of the astronauts on board and the NASA technicians back home brought the ship safely back to Earth.
In 1981 the first Space Shuttle was launched, and five years later the world watched on January 28 when the shuttle Challenger exploded seconds into its flight. Seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, died.
We returned, in February, to the shroud. Seven astronauts - Rick Husband, Kalpana Chawla, William McCool, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon - died when the shuttle Colombia came apart while attempting to return home. The cause of the accident is unknown at this time. We are left only with the image of a new star in the sky, streaking towards Earth in a blaze of woe.
Proverbs 29:18 reads, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." It seems so often today that the world has lost that vision, and roils itself in conflict and hatred and fear. The seven astronauts who perished aboard Columbia, and those who lived and died before them, remind us of the greatness that dwells uniquely in this shabby human vessel. Such vision always comes to cost us all in blood, but it is blood shed for a cause beyond territory or resources or narrow and isolated ideologies. When men and women die in the pursuit of what is greatest about humanity, it is both a tragedy and a glorious statement of what is best in all of us. We mourn them in the deepest well of our souls, and stand in wonder that such magnificence and bravery could have ever been at all.
There is a lesson in this, I think, for all of us to ponder today. The space race began as an extension of a military death struggle. It continues in the same vein today to no small degree. Somewhere in between, however, it also became a statement about what we can become, and what we can accomplish, when we set our minds to it.
Set your mind to the task at hand. Be strong, be true, go forth with love in your hearts. Never let them see you sweat. If you do these things, and if you do them faithfully, you will save the world.
I promise.
Thank you.
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