"I trained my weapon on him," Kristopher Goldsmith said. It was a little boy, 6 years old maybe, standing on a roof, menacing the soldiers with a stick. "I was thinking, I hate these Iraqis who throw rocks. I could kill this kid."

OK, America, let’s look through the sights of Goldsmith’s rifle for a long, long half-minute or so, draw a bead on the boy’s heart, fondle the trigger -- what to do? The soldier’s decision is our decision.

This is occupied Iraq: the uncensored version, presented to us with relentless, at times unbearable honesty over four intense days last week in a historic gathering outside Washington, D.C., of returning vets, many of them broken and bitter about what they were forced to do, and what’s been done to them, in sometimes two, three, four tours of duty in the biggest mistake in American history.

"These are the times that try men’s souls," Thomas Paine wrote in 1776. "The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Thank You. It is good and it is right that today, here in our state’s capital, on the fifth anniversary of our nation’s launching of the Iraq War, we are giving voice and visible testimony to both our grief about the war and our hope about the prospects for peace. By giving voice and witness to our beliefs we are declaring our determined opposition to the endless stay-the-course-and-we-can-win policies of the current administration. 

As you know, silence and invisibility are enemies of truthfulness, justice, human rights, and yes, peace. In the case of the Iraq war, those that precipitated it, those that would perpetuate it, seek to hide it from the public—no taxes are paid to fund it—, and to sanitize it—no caskets are seen to show the cost of it. They seek to hide the realities of the war in order to continue a policy that the clear majority of Americans, after sober reflection, now reject. And so it is good that we break this official silence, giving witness here and now to the will of the people.

The Iraq war, which was predicated on the existence of weapons of mass destruction, has resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 US troops and has cost taxpayers roughly half-a-trillion dollars.

As the war now enters its sixth year it's worth revisiting how prewar Iraq intelligence was cooked in the months leading up toward the preemptive strike and how the handful of dissenters who objected to Iraq policy were sidelined.

The Key Players

For the average person, the names of these behind-the-scenes policy wonks won't have much meaning. But they are the architects of the Iraq War.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 to publicize the so-called threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG was founded by Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card and operated out of the vice president's office. The WHIG was not only responsible for selling the Iraq War, but it took great pains to discredit anyone who openly disagreed with the official Iraq War story

Norman Baker is an American hero who has been detained against his will for more than three years.

His "crime": owning too much property. 


His sentence: a court-appointed guardianship on the brink of costing him everything he spent his life building.

His rights in this case: virtually none, significantly less in many ways than an actual law-breaking criminal. 


His future if this continues: long-term de facto imprisonment, followed by abject poverty, if he has anything left at all. 


A retired firefighter who once helped save a child's life, Norman Baker is not suspected of terrorism. He has never been charged with any statutory infraction, and has never been in any kind of trouble with the law. 
But he has been stripped of his right to vote and access to his own assets, which appear to have been weel in excess of $1 million as little as three years ago.