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Rough, but you'll get the idea.
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Plain Old Death
True Tales of American Insanity in the 21st Century
By William Rivers Pitt
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Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I was working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
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Introduction: Limper Than A Sack Of Wet Mice
I watched a guy get his head sawed off today.
His name was Nick Berg, and what the hell he was doing in Iraq in the first place is still something of a mystery this Tuesday night. His parents said he was over there looking for work fixing antennas that were blown up in the war, or something to that effect, and that may be true. His family is suing the federal government because somewhere along the line, Nick was detained by the FBI, pretty much for being in Iraq. They let him go after a fashion, and he told his family he was heading home. Somewhere along the way, however, he fell into the wrong hands.
This past Saturday, they found his dead body on a bridge in Iraq. Today, a video of his death appeared on the internet, and the story of how he died was all the buzz on CNN and the other not-so-much-news-anymore channels. I watched the video, because that’s part of what I have to do for work. There sat Nick in an orange prison jumpsuit. Over him stood five men wearing black outfits and ski masks. The one in the center read from a prepared statement in loud, droning Arabic. Part of what he said is:
"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused. So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins, slaughtered in this way."
The man in the center finished reading his statement, and all five of them suddenly lunged at Berg. They grabbed him by the hair of his head and pressed his skull to the floor. One of them produced a large knife, and proceeded to slowly saw Berg’s head from his shoulders. Berg screamed and screamed and screamed, and then fell silent, twitching. Once his head was off, the cutter held it up for the camera. Fade to black.
A day in the life, right? I have a very large glass of scotch next to me on the desk here, but I think maybe all the scotch in the world isn’t going to get the sound of that man screaming out of my mind. He’s in there now, cemented, along with about a million other memories and facts and ideas and theories and suspicions that are the moldy bread and rancid butter of my livelihood. I’m a journalist, see. I’ve been swimming in other people’s blood for years now. When you write about something, you never forget it. There are a lot of things I am never going to forget, and maybe that makes me damned. If this is Hell, it is of my own making.
Two years ago, I wrote my first book. It was called ‘The Greatest Sedition Is Silence,’ and it was a big ball of self-righteous horseshit with a lot of good facts to support the quivering, purplish prose. I wrote it in the months after September 11, 2001. It was about the attack itself, the data behind that day which never gets reported by the fraud we laughingly call the ‘news media’ here in America, and Enron, and the tax cuts, and the PATRIOT Act, and George W. Bush’s incredibly fake Christianity, and the need to rise up, rise up! against everything that has so clearly gone haywire in this country. I finished it at 3:00 a.m. one morning in July 2002 on the front porch of my mother’s little log cabin in New Hampshire by the light of a lantern I found in the closet.
It was OK for a first try, but after a thousand radio interviews and ten dozen public appearances, I learned something important: Make the book titles easy to remember. If I had a nickel for every time some talk show host or TV personality or event MC said, “And here now is William Rivers Pitt, author of ‘Silence is the Sedition Which is the Greatest’” or “And here now is William Rivers Pitt, author of ‘Sedition is the Greatest Silence of Sedition’” or some permutation of same, I’d have a whole hell of a lot of nickels.
So I finished the book, and I printed it out, and I put it in a box, and I mailed it to my publisher, and I basked in the satisfying glow of having added something, no matter how small, to the pile. Not four days later – July 23rd to be exact - I got word that Scott Ritter, former head of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in Iraq, was giving a lecture at Suffolk Law School that night. Iraq had always been a subject of interest for me, and so I hopped on the train and went down to hear what he had to say.
Room 295 of the Suffolk Law School building was filled to capacity with peace activists, aging Cambridge hippies and assorted freaks. One of the organizers for the gathering, United For Justice With Peace Coalition, handed out green pieces of paper that read, "We will not support war, no matter what reason or rhetoric is offered by politicians or the media. War in our time and in this context is indiscriminate, a war against innocents and against children." Judging from the crowd, and from the buzz in the room, that pretty much summed things up.
The contrast presented when Scott Ritter entered the room could not have been more disparate. There at the lectern stood this tall lantern-jawed man, every inch the twelve-year Marine Corps veteran he was, who looked and spoke just exactly like a bulldogging high school football coach. A whistle on a string around his neck would have perfected the image. "I need to say right out front," he said minutes into his speech, "I'm a card-carrying Republican in the conservative-moderate range who voted for George W. Bush for President. I'm not here with a political agenda. I'm not here to slam Republicans. I am one."
Yet this was a lie - Scott Ritter had come to Boston with a political agenda. Ritter was in the room that night to denounce, with roaring voice and burning eyes, the coming war in Iraq. According to Ritter, this coming war was about nothing more or less than domestic American politics, based upon speculation and rhetoric entirely divorced from fact. According to Ritter, that war was just over the horizon.
"The Third Marine Expeditionary Force in California is preparing to have 20,000 Marines deployed in the (Iraq) region for ground combat operations by mid-October," he said. "The Air Force used the vast majority of its precision-guided munitions blowing up caves in Afghanistan. Congress just passed emergency appropriations money and told Boeing company to accelerate their production of the GPS satellite kits, that go on bombs that allow them to hit targets while the planes fly away, by September 30, 2002. Why? Because the Air Force has been told to have three air expeditionary wings ready for combat operations in Iraq."
"As a guy who was part of the first Gulf War," continued Ritter, who had served under Schwarzkopf in that conflict, "when you deploy that much military power forward - disrupting their training cycles, disrupting their operational cycles, disrupting everything, spending a lot of money - it is very difficult to pull them back without using them."
According to Ritter, there was no justification in fact, national security, international law or basic morality to justify the coming war with Iraq. In fact, when asked pointedly what the scheduling of this conflict has to do with the midterm Congressional elections that will follow a few weeks later, he replied, simply, "Everything."
According to Ritter, who spent seven years in Iraq with the UNSCOM weapons inspection teams performing acidly detailed investigations into Iraq's weapons program, Iraq simply did not have weapons of mass destruction, and did not have threatening ties to international terrorism. Therefore, no premise for a war in Iraq existed. Considering the American military lives and the Iraqi civilian lives that would be spent in such an endeavor, not to mention the deadly regional destabilization that would ensue, such a baseless war must be avoided at all costs.
"The Bush administration has provided the American public with little more than rhetorically laced speculation," said Ritter. "There has been nothing in the way of substantive fact presented that makes the case that Iraq possesses these weapons or has links to international terror, that Iraq poses a threat to the United States of America worthy of war."
"This is not about the security of the United States," he said, pounding the lectern. "This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo-conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation."
It was almost funny. I had just mailed ‘The Greatest Sedition’ off to my publisher. Iraq was all over the place in the book, but only one page suggested we were about to go to war there again. Now, here was Scott Ritter ringing the alarm bell about an impending invasion. Poof, irrelevancy. I got back to my apartment, parked myself out on the back porch with my laptop, and pounded out this 4,000 word essay about what Ritter had said. It went out the next day on the news site I have been writing for, truthout.org, and was the most widely read article we published that month.
Two days later I got an email from yet another publisher, who wanted to turn my Ritter essay into another book. I reached out to Ritter, and over the course of the next two days, he and I did a long telephone interview which greatly expanded upon what he had been talking about at Suffolk. I recorded the whole thing, and in a burst of frenzied work that lasted 70 hours and left me limper than a sack of wet mice, I wrote an introductory chapter, a short history of Iraq, and transcribed my entire discussion with Ritter. The resulting chunk of paper became my second book, a little beer-coaster of a thing titled ‘War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know.’ The gist was straightforward: There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no connections to Osama bin Laden or September 11, no threat to American security there, and no reason to go to war. The publisher printed 125,000 copies of the thing by the end of September, and mailed a copy to every Senator before the October 10 vote to decide whether or not to back Bush’s push for invasion.
Fat lot of good it did. By December it was a New York Times best-seller, and I became that crazy lunatic person the talk shows reach out to when they want someone to say outrageous things on the air – “Here now is William Rivers Pitt, author of ‘War on Iraq’ and ‘Silence is the Sedition which is Silent and Greatest,’ who says there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which we all know is totally wrong, because of course Iraq has these weapons, because George W. Bush said so.” – but the war came anyway, that March, and I sat on my living room floor and watched as large portions of Baghdad were reduced to their component elements in the ‘Shock and Awe’ portion of this happy little adventure.
The days between the release of that Iraq book and today, when I saw a guy get his head sawed off, have been hectic to say the least. Scott Ritter, who was right on July 23 2002, got wrapped up in a dubious scandal involving sex with teenagers which scrubbed him from public consciousness the following February. No proof of the scabrous allegations levied against him have ever been made public, and so I believe his denials. Even if he were guilty of soliciting sex from minors, a wretched crime, he was then and is now 100% correct about the non-threat posed by Iraq. Past all that, the blazing, nitwitted optimism I sprayed across the pages of my first book carried me across more than 60,000 miles of both America and Europe as I tried to spread the word, tried to rally the faithful, tried to do whatever was in my power to put a stop to what was, when you boil it down to the nub, a glaring war crime writ large.
I spoke to crowds large and small in churches and town halls and parking lots and fields. I went to Missoula and Seattle, to San Diego and Boulder, to San Francisco, Manchester, Asheville, Greensboro, Phoenix, Houston, Manchester, Albany, Evansville, Kent, New York City, Indianapolis and Christ only knows how many other cities and burgs in this country, and then hopped on a plane and went to Amsterdam, Antwerp, back to Amsterdam, the Hague, back to Amsterdam again, Berlin, Oxford, London, Paris and back to Amsterdam again in an effort to rally American expats and European allies to do whatever they could to stop this madness that had been unleashed. All in all, I did this European rip in ten days. I gave them the facts, because that is what I do, and if I may say so, I do it well. My homework is completed each night, no matter where I happen to fall asleep.
I write for a website called truthout, as I said before, and I serve the organization as Managing Editor. I haven’t written a book in two years because truthout and my speaking appearances eat up pretty much every available moment I have to give. What we do at truthout is pretty straightforward: We are a non-profit news distillation service that provides, several times a week, very good original content. Most of my job involves reading between ten and thirty newspapers a day, newspapers from all over America and the world. The other editors and I decide which ten stories are most important, which ten stories our readers need to see, and every day we put an edition together. More often than not, an essay by myself or one of the editors, or by one of the incredible writers we know, is part of the mix. Ten stories a day go out to our massive email newsletter list. We register, on average, about two million readers per month. When you account for the other websites that grab our essays and republish them entirely, providing a link to the original that seldom gets clicked because the whole text is right there, it is safe to say that our monthly readership is actually three million readers per month. Not bad for an organization that was started in 2000 by a surfer from Los Angeles.
The dark side of this, of course, is what I know about America, about George W. Bush, about the Iraq invasion, about the laughable “War on Terror” as a whole. If you had the time to read thirty newspapers a day, if you had the time to research what you read and connect the dots, you’d be pretty messed up, too. You don’t have the time, and so I do it for you. This is what I mean by being, perhaps, in Hell. A few months ago, I interviewed a man named Ray McGovern, who was a senior CIA analyst for something like 27 years. He was in charge of the Soviet section during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and so was neck-deep in the Afghanistan proxy war that was raging in that period. It is well-known that we supported the crew that became the Taliban against the Soviets during that war, because it served our Cold War purposes. McGovern said four words to me during the interview – “Osama was our guy” – that have robbed me of many hours of sleep since.
I have received dozens and dozens of letters and emails from the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, wives, husbands and friends of men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan while wearing the uniform of the United States military. To a person, they denounce George W. Bush, and demand of me that I tell the truth, the real truth, they demand of me that I sing the song of their fallen loved ones and make sure this war is stopped, that no one else die for lies. I do the best I can, but I don’t sleep so much anymore.
The purpose of this book is three-fold: 1) To follow up on what I wrote in my other two books; 2) To catch you up on everything that has happened since those two books came out; and 3) To try and figure out where to go from here. I have met, and spoken to, millions of Americans in the 700+ days since my first book was on the shelves. I have written hundreds of thousands of words for truthout detailing the mudhole we find ourselves in. I have come to one unavoidable conclusion: George W. Bush and his goofy, benightened crew are only part of a much larger problem. If the larger problem did not exist, George and his Merry Fools would never have come to be. Bush & Co. are an extrapolation of a fundamental error in the program, a virus that has to be purged from the hard drive of this country. Solving that problem, purging that virus, is something that will take me, and you, an entire lifetime to perhaps accomplish, but probably fail at. Things have gone so far.
I watched a guy get his head sawed off today. According to the man with the knife, it was retaliation for the deliberate torture, by Americans, of Iraqis in a prison that Saddam Hussein once used to torture Iraqis. Somehow, in two years, we became the moral equivalent of the Butcher of Baghdad. We invaded a country that was no threat to us, we tortured Iraqis, we raped Iraqis, we killed 10,000 Iraqi civilians who were no threat to us, we gave Osama bin Laden a recruiting poster to die for, we annihilated our reputation across the planet. We, we, we. I’d like five minutes alone with the guy on that video with the knife, because I’m pretty certain I could shove that knife straight up his ass for making me watch what I watched today. What would that make me? I suppose it would make me vengeance incarnate, or, in other words, a good American.
How did we get here? How did we come to this? Let me tell you about it. Have a glass of scotch handy. This is not a happy story.
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