March 4, 2006

"This administration is being investigated on how we got into the first war, and now they want us to go to a second war, to open another front on this war. It is about time that we say no more war. No more war, Mr. Bush.

I also want to, as I remember the gentleman in my district who is over 40 years of age who has been told that he has got to report for duty in Iraq, remember Kevin Benderman, whose wife frantically contacted my office asking for help for her husband. Kevin Benderman went to Iraq one time. He was asked to do things that he thought as a human being went against his conscience.

We know that collateral damage is not just a number: 100,000; 200,000. It is people. It is little boys and little girls. It is women. Kevin Benderman said, I am not going to kill innocent people. Don't ask me to do that. I have done it once. Once is too much.

He decided that he would apply for conscientious objector status. Well, Kevin Benderman is in the brig because he did not want to kill innocent little girls and little boys and women and men in Iraq. He is in the brig.

Last weekend, there was an action to free Kevin Benderman. It's a shame...

The next thing I would like to draw to your attention is an excerpt from a book. The name of the book is ``War is a Racket.'' It is written by Major General Smedley Butler, and this is how it goes:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.

In the world war, because this was written at the time of World War I, a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the world war. That many admitted to their huge blood gains in their income tax returns.

How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns, no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up by a few. Munitions makers, bankers, ship builders, manufacturers, meat packers, speculators, they would fare well. Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends. But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers, their sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children? What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits? Yes, what does it profit the Nation?

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad, or visit any of the veterans hospitals in the United States where there are thousands of the living dead. The very able chief surgeon told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home. Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks.

There they were remolded. They were made over. They were made to about face, to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and through mass psychology they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharge them and told them to make another about face. This time they had to do their own readjustment, without mass psychology, without officers aid and advice and without nationwide propaganda. We did not need them anymore, so we scattered them about without any speeches or parades.

Too many of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed mentally because they could not make the final about face alone. In the government hospitals, these boys are in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys do not even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces. Physically, they are in good shape. Mentally, they are gone. There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. Another step is necessary in this fight to smash the war racket.

To summarize, three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. One, we must take the profit out of war. Two, we must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. And three, we must limit our military forces to defense purposes. He says home defense purposes. This is an excerpt from Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.

Now, juxtapose what this man of war said to the drumbeats of war that we hear in our media now, that are emanating from high places within this administration, people who have not borne the rifle, who have not been in war. In fact, when America called them because America needed them, they were full of deferments. And yet they want to put a young man like Kevin Benderman who does not want to kill children and women and innocent people in Iraq anymore in the brig, and they would tell our country that we need to prepare for a long war. We do not prepare for a long war. Certainly not George Bush's war. And if Tom Hartman is right in his assessment, we do not need to prepare for Dick Cheney's war either.

We have had some discussion in this body about war, and one of my colleagues from Pennsylvania did what Major General Smedley Butler said we ought to do. He visited the young men and women who have been asked to fight this war, who are on the front lines of Donald Rumsfeld's long war. There he was compelled to make a change, a change in his conviction, that perhaps this is not the right war for America; and he came back to this Congress and he said so. I am talking about my colleague from Pennsylvania, Mr. Murtha.

We need to really think about where we are as a country. We need to think about who we are as a country, as Americans. What does it mean to be an American?"