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International Action Center / Centro de Acción Internacional
Founded by / Fundado por Ramsey Clark
5C - Solidarity Center - 55 West 17th Street - New York, N.Y. 10011
212-633-6646 - fax 212-633-2889
IACenter@action-mail.org; En Español: IAC-CAI@action-mail.org
www.IACenter.org

In March 2006, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter posted an article online proposing that the antiwar movement learn techniques from warriors. Ritter developed the article into the recently released book "Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement." At the same time, Ritter has just posted online a new provocative article urging the impeachment movement to advocate instead for "repudiation." There is some reason to hope that this new article will not come back as a book in 2008.

Whatever Ritter writes about peace and impeachment, he has already done tremendous service through his truth telling about Iraq's lack of weapons of mass destruction. Ritter spoke up prior to, as well as during, the occupation of Iraq. He and I have spoken on panels together, and I find him a much better speaker than writer. While the peace movement is very far from victory, it has made more progress than Ritter believes, and he himself has been a significant part of that.

Dear Mr. President,

From the mind’s prison, I release you – consider your time as served. However, Mr. President, be mindful that your freedom was not earned, nor was it reward for good behavior. Rather, your freedom was granted of my epiphany, after more than six years, that a mind consumed with holding one captive is a mind itself held in captivity.

I, as the jailer, had become as imprisoned as the jailed.

You were taken prisoner when you took the presidency, winning the best out of nine despite the least out of millions. I first considered your release in the days following that bright and terrible blue sky morning in September, when the eloquence of your words and the newfound poise of your presence guided our nation through its grief. Then you misled our grief to war, waged on a people who played no part in our tragedy.

For that despicable deed I condemned you, in the court of my mind, to a life sentence in my mind’s prison, without chance for parole.

I held you in the same manner that you hold your “enemy combatants”, without due process or appeal. Shameful, that, I must now admit.

This is not a story about a woman who raised four children, sent one off to war, and collapsed one day in a fit of screaming at the news that he was dead.

This is not a piece to describe how that woman tried to stay awake for the next three days so as not to have to scream like that again after waking and then remembering that news. There will be no attempt in this piece to comprehend the maddening indecency of the overgrown frat-boy president who sent her son to kill and die for lies and still had the gall to call her “Mom” and sits day after day-- to this day --as the self-appointed, unrestrained king of the world.

This is not a piece about a woman who exposed her grief and her rawest nerves, who sacrificed a twenty-nine year marriage and time with her remaining children, to a country calloused to the daily loss of life and succeeded in stirring many to their feet, into the streets, and to the tops of their lungs.