Open letter to the citizens of the United States of America

Never in the history of humankind has an election had so much at stake

by Timothy Bancroft-Hinche

Dear friends,

As a journalist who has the good fortune to write for an international journal with millions of readers around the world, I have the individual responsibility to inform you of the feeling in the international community regarding the outcome of the election on November 2nd.

As citizens of the United States of America, who have the power to endorse or to dismiss the policies of the Bush regime, you have a collective responsibility not only unto yourselves, but to the world, which will hold you accountable for your decision.

I write this letter as a citizen of this international community and as a journalist for a newspaper whose name is Pravda (Truth), I have the obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I can say for a start that the vast majority of the international community will agree with the thoughts and requests expressed in this open letter. As proof, one only has to see the opinion polls held around the world, in which only a small handful of citizens from a tiny percentage of states prefer a re-election of George Bush to regime change in Washington.

It is not for foreigners to dictate to the people of the United States of America how to vote, however since the media in the USA is controlled and since people do not have access to the current of opinion in the international community, it is an act of friendship to inform the citizens of the USA how the world feels about the state of affairs today and it is our right as citizens of the world to express our concern, for the Bush administration does not confine itself to its shores.

9/11 was a horrific event, which went against the grain of human civilization, as did the horrendous terrorist attack in the school of Beslan in the Russian Federation. However terrible these events were, it is necessary to envisage the facts with maturity and to draw the correct conclusions from them, not to use an evil event to justify another act of evil.

Unfortunately this is what the Bush regime has done. While the attack against Afghanistan was understandable in the circumstances (although such an attack had been planned well before 9/11, not because of the Taleban regime, which George Bush Senior created, but because of the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan), the attack against Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with international terrorism.

From a moral point of view, the Bush regime could not have descended lower. Lies, forgery, blackmail, bullying and belligerence became the modus operandi of American diplomacy, instead of discussion, dialogue and debate, the fundamentals of democracy, which Bush and his clique of corporate elitists threw out of the window in their haste to get their hands on the resources of Iraq, a country which did not possess chemical or nuclear or biological weapons, despite the repeated claims that it did.

The raw truth is that Saddam Hussein was the man telling the truth and that George Bush was the one who "stiffed the world".

The fundamental precepts which justified the war have since been refuted and denied, in their entirety, by the very people who stood before the cameras and lied through their teeth, saying they knew where the WMD were hidden and they knew where the evidence would be found.

These people are the members of the Bush regime, not one or two members, but all of them. It is not only George Bush who stands for election on November 2nd - it is the entire regime, including the substantially important Jewish lobby within Washington. It is not only Capitol Hill which controls your foreign policy, it is also, and with increasing importance, the Knesset in Tel Aviv.

George Bush may have tried his level best at being President of the United States of America and nobody doubts that he will have wanted to give it his best shot and do a good job. However, his background, his speeches and his skills, make it only too apparent that he does not have what it takes. Like the Texas he was born in, he is a Lone Ranger.

George Bush and his government have managed to divorce Washington from the international community. He dare not step off an aircraft in most countries and even in the home of his closest ally, the UK, he was the only visiting Head of State to have to run out of Number 10 Downing Street by the back door, because he was too scared to leave by the front, given the fury of the demonstrators against him.

Is this the image you wish to vote for on November 2nd?

George Bush and his administration spent four long years breaking every fibre of decency and each and every norm in practice in the diplomatic community. If New York is host to the United Nations Organization, how can it be justified to breach the UN Charter by attacking Iraq outside the auspices of this organization? Each and every resolution bears the express condition that any act of war must be the result of a separate resolution of the UN Security Council.

If Washington and London did not believe this to be the case, why did the USA and UK spend so many energies trying to secure the vote, only to deride this organism when they saw they could not win the day by diplomatic means? Hence the phrase, echoing around the international community: US out of UN or UN out of US.

George Bush has turned the USA into a pariah state in the international community and before the eyes of the citizens of the world.

The legacy of George Bush is unfortunately abject failure in everything he has done. Internally, it is up to the citizens of the USA to decide whether he has delivered on jobs, health care, welfare, pensions and so on - for this is nobody else"s business. Externally, however, he has wholly destabilized a delicate region which he was advised not to enter.

Afghanistan is far from pacified, the Taleban are as strong as ever, the difference being now that the heroin trade has restarted. Fantastic for the cities of Russia and Europe, now flooded once more by prime quality smack. We can thank George Bush for that every time an old lady is kicked to death for her pension money by some guy who needs a fix.

Iraq was never a bastion of terrorism, as Rumsfeld now admits. It is now, only after the illegal, incompetent, unfounded invasion launched by George Bush. Cities like Fallujah, more than one year on, are still in the hands of Iraq"s freedom fighters and now, the calls for British troops to help the US forces, who are losing control in Baghdad, are causing a political furore in London, due to the fact that the actions of the US armed forces would be considered war crimes in Europe.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was one symptom of a disease called George Bush and his neo-conservative, extremist, elitist regime, basically a group of super rich kids who thought nothing of spending two hundred thousand million dollars of your hard-earned money, which, you"d better believe it, you will pay a heavy price for in the coming years. Elect Bush again, and there will be more, much more.

You, the electors, will be the ones who pay, not Bush or Cheney or Rice or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz. They"ve already filled their coffers, they only care about you before November 2nd. After that, all you can do is to sit back and watch as the horror unfolds before your eyes..

The final twist to this sordid and horrible tale is that the war crimes committed by the Pentagon have created a sullen hatred in the hearts and minds of the international community. The shock and awe we feel at learning how cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas, for children to pick up thinking they were sweets, only to have their eyes and faces and futures and lives blown away, makes us stand together making a solemn and heartfelt request to our friends, or those we wish to count as friends, over the other side of the Atlantic.

Please, consider very carefully what you are doing on November 2nd. We want to have the USA back among us as part of the international community of nations. A vote for Bush is a vote for more wars, more terrorism, more violence, a shift further away from the welcoming arms of the community of nations, which wants to live together as brothers, not in hatred.

Killing tens of thousands of civilians is not Christian, it is evil and the callousness with which this issue is faced by the Bush regime is witness to the coldness in their hearts and minds, a coldness which creates shock and revulsion in the community of nations. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in Canada

If you cannot bring yourselves to vote for any of the other contestants, then at least, please, consider not voting for Bush. In a nutshell, there are no two ways about it. Killing tens of thousands of civilians by strafing their homes, mutilating tens of thousands more, commiting rape and torture on a scale unseen outside the concentration camps of Hitler, amounts to war crimes, murder.

Voting for Bush is voting for a war criminal and a mass murderer.

In the name of the world community,
For the Love of God,

Respectfully and in friendship

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/386/14460_Letter.html