Home > Open letter to the citizens of the United States of America

Open letter to the citizens of the United States of America

by Open-Publishing - Monday 1 November 2004
6 comments

Elections-Elected USA Timothy Bancroft Hinchey

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

Forum posts

  • Wow.

    No wonder France has lost its way in the world today.

    You just explained it.

  • Keep your NOSE out of our BUSINESS!!!!!!!!! You being a journalist will turn off most in the USA because of their liberal slant!!!! Just let the citizens of the USA decide without ANY outside oinions!!! PLEASE!!!! I don’t try to get involved in French elections, so just stay out of this!!
    There MIGHT be some things that you don’t understand!!!!

  • Practice your GERMAN, we might not save you again.

  • good article. ive been look for more truth to put in against bush. looking at how much other nations hate bush, then considering terrorist are caused by hate, how can elected one of the most hated people in the world bring peace?

  • First let me tell you that U.S. citizens do hear many sides of many issues. Europe, for the most part, only hears the shrillest of our elite left, centered in NYC or Hollywood. I know this because I lived in the U.S. and now I live in the E.U. Your "PRAVDA" is a strange mix of conspiracy theories by Michael Moore, billionaire Soros and propaganda from Saddam Hussein, Bin Ladin and many of your own corrupt leaders who attempt to deflect your dissent at America.

    1) The pipeline conspiracy theory popularized by Moore’s infomercials is utter nonsense, the pipeline was marginally strategic 20 years ago, but much has changed then. The collapse of the Soviet empire opened other oil routes which are much more cost effective.

    2) You’re accusing Bush of lies, forgery, blackmail... Did you know that Saddam Hussein managed to get 10s of billions of euro around sanctions. That somewhere in europe, in the deepest levels of the U.N. there was corruption that allowed children to starve in exchange for security council votes?

    3) Your claim that ’Saddam Hussein was the man telling the truth and that George Bush was the one who "stiffed the world". ’ Everyone including the U.N., Clinton and Saddam Hussein himself thought he had WMDs. Have you read the Duelfer report beyond the 3 word headlines?

    4) Lone Ranger?You watch too much American T.V. Afraid of demonstrators? Sorry, our president isn’t a populist. Chirac and Schroeder may be populists, Hitler was a populist. Bush may have many failings but basing policy on a mob of misinformed london students isn’t one of them.

    5) UN out of US/US out of UN? How about corruption out of U.N. and Europe pay for its own defense? Americans can abide by that.

    6) You claim things are no better in Afghanistan. On what do you base this? The fact that women can vote now, the fact that the taliban is no longer in power, that Bin Ladin and his killers are no longer a welcome guest?

    7) Yes terrorism and drugs were under control in the now dead totalitarian regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also under control in Hitler’s nazi germany. The good old days?

    8) Abu Gharib was an aberration, it did not have the support of Bush or any but a handful of mentally ill GIs. Those involved are being brought to justice. Why do you conveniently overlook the mass murder that took place in the same prison under Hussein?

    9) The U.S. spends billions on weapons designed to focus destruction and minimize casualties, yet terrible casualties do occur. I question the number and specifics coming from sources that are so keenly anti-U.S. biased on everything but I also understand that even a single civilian death in a war is wrong. But the recent Iraqi survey which gave the distressing news that Iraqis would like to move to shiara law (which failed miserably elsewhere), also showed that a substantial majority of Iraqis believe that things are improving there. The situation may not be improving for european profiteers who took advantage of the black market generated by the sanctions, but things are better for the Iraqis and the region is safer without Saddam in power. I thank the members of nations who understand that and helped rather than hindered this cause.

    10) Informed Americans who read your tyrade and find gaping holes in your worldview might actually be more likely to vote for Bush.

  • Bush and the neocons simply have to go. Even if some of the stuff written and said about him sounds exaggerated, the bottomline is he is a failure. A failure that has cost not just America but the rest of the world as well. Bush has spent billions of dollars, killed and tortured many and destabilised the entire middle east. And the thing that hurts most is that terrorism has emerged stronger than ever before after his war on terror. The war simply had no strategy other than unload all of Americas reserve of bombs and explosives into Iraq and Afghanistan. It simply looks like an effort at grabbing the resources of the middle east. America stands strapped of all international support and the only voices that are not opposing the US are of those nations that are still dependent on the US in one way or the other. This has to change.