George W Bush Killed Tomas Young
By Thom Hartmann A...
George W. Bush has killed again.
On Monday night, Iraq War veteran Tomas Young passed away at his home in Seattle, Washington. He was just 34. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Young joined the Army just days after 9/11 in a flush of patriotism. Like so many others, he wanted to go get the people responsible for the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But instead of being sent to fight Al-Qaeda, Young was sent to fight in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, against Saddam Hussein, who was an enemy, not an ally, of Al-Qaeda.
Then, on April 4, 2004, five days into Young’s tour of Iraq, everything changed. As his convoy made a circuit through Baghdad, it came under attack from one of the many insurgents groups that had popped up since the American invasion turned into an occupation. In the firefight that followed, Young was shot in the neck, paralyzing him from the chest down. He would never walk again.
Many people would give up after such an awful injury, but not Tomas Young. When he got back from Iraq, Young began speaking out against the war and the president who lied us in it. His activism was moving and inspiring, the kind every American who calls themselves a patriot should aspire to. Tomas Young was brave and strong, but sometimes even the brave and strong can’t take it anymore.
Last February, he told an audience gathered to see the film “Body of War” that he would soon stop taking all life-saving medications. In other words, he announced that he was going to commit suicide. Young never ended up taking himself off his medication like he said he would, but shortly after he announced his decision to kill himself, he wrote an open letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War.
That letter deserves to be read in full, but this blistering paragraph, written as Tomas Young sat waiting to die, is the crux of it:
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney... because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice, but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Tomas Young was right. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are guilty of murder, including his. They knowingly sent thousands of young Americans to die in a fight that was a based on a lie, a lie they cooked up to fuel their own political ambitions and to save the finances of Halliburton.
If that isn’t cold-blooded, I don’t know what is.
If we really want to honor veterans like Tomas Young - who gave their lives and their bodies for this country - we should prosecute George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for murder. Veteran Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi - the man who famously prosecuted Charles Manson and wrote the book "Helter Skelter" about the experience - talked about this when appeared on this show just a few weeks ago. Bugliosi pointing out that the evidence for a murder charge against Bush and Cheney is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Every day that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney spend outside of jail is an insult to the memory of real patriots like Tomas Young. So let’s stop pretending like these two illegitimate politicians are anything other than what Tomas Young and the rest of the world knows they are - criminals - and start enforcing the law.
Let’s prosecute Bush and Cheney for murder.
Comments
#2
George War-Criminal Bush.
#3
Bush/Cheney took a page out of the playbook of Herman Goring...the people will follow you anywhere if you instill fear in them and make them believe they are being attacked...as he said during the Nuremburg trial...for his War Crimes.
#4
stepooc01. Yes we swore to uphold the constitution but there is nothing that dictates a soldier or civilian must obey any position of authority who issue an order or policy that is illegal, criminal or violates international law. The reaction may be severe but that is a choice that human morality and justice dictates. "I was just following orders" often heard at the Nuremburg Trials of WWII, just does not stand any more.
#5
In my opinion we can go over this many times and we will get the same result. We know it is a form of insanity. It's like throwing bricks at a tank when you have been wronged and the people in charge look the other way. I am a vet, my brothers were vets, my father and unckle were vets, we swore our life to protect this country over three generations and we don't see the rewards that we were promised. Others made millions their families are taken care of, I am not asking for myself. My father is pennieless at 90 years old. Is this what I see for my self I am only 69 and I have worked my whole life. Veterans programs are cut as the theater conflict ages we not needed so our value is deminished. I feel for the younger vets at this rate they will be left dying in the streets.
#6
I am very saddened that your program is of the air in the Phoenix reagon It happend right after the election. Someone is really affraid of you.
#7
Election fraud placed these two self puffed nut jobs in a position to wield arbitrary power leading directly to massive human slaughter for profit.
All individuals involved in the Florida Presidential election fraud need to be identified and prosecuted as facilitating accomplices in the Bush/Cheney war crimes trial.
I hear another pompous ass from the same Bush Family wants to be President.....unfreaking believable!
#8
I personally can't believe what has happened since the Bush crime family and others have been screwing around in the Middle East for the last three to four decades. All of the problems we have had with the Middle Eastern countries stems from their meddling with people they had no business messing around with. This country has been in trouble ever since the Oligarch loving Neo-Confederate types moved from the Democratic party and then infiltrated the Republican party. Like I've said before, "if president Abraham Lincoln were alive today and saw what these fascist slave driving, un-American pigs have done to his party, he would take his axe to them." I say we should arrest all of them and put THEM in prison where they belong. All their money and all their bought off politicians won't protect them from the American people who are being awakened with a terrible remorse. First, we should start by getting rid of the owner of Fox News and his Nazi like propaganda machine. They are nothing but liars and they are partly responsible for all the unnecessary deaths they the Rethugs have caused. Yes, it is far past time we did something about their crimes against the entire world. It's just plain unreal that these war criminals are still walking around and doing interviews on Fox News. Pigs, pigs, pigs, all of them.
#9
Unfreaking-believable indeed. And yes, Rupert Murdock is an Aussie fascist; we need to ship him back to Australia along with all his junk media, and let the Aussies deal with him. This is not his country. He has no business telling Americans how to think and how to vote. That FOX gives the soapbox to these disgusting fascist pigs and war criminals is reprehensible. They dangle higher education in front of today's young adults like a carrot, luring them into the armed forces with promises of college tuition benefits after military service... benefits that many of them either don't live long enough to collect, or return too broken mentally and physically to benefit from.
Among the various things I hate Obama for is letting war criminals skate free, "looking forward not looking back". What a lame cop-out that was. Call that leadership?!!! Is this how a so-called "constitutional scholar" protects and upholds the Constituation, allowing war criminals to skate free with impunity?! This is an insult to Tomas Young and everyone like him who served in the military under false pretense, only to come home broken or dead.
Goodbye America; hello Fourth Reich! Beam me up... - AIW
#10
Pearl Harbor was answered by FDR. The burning of the Reichstag fire was answered by German National Socialist Party led by a formerly obscure Austrian artisan who hated the Jews.
Indeed. The years have passed since Tuesdat, Sept 11, 2011 when our lives were brought to an eternal pause of grief and shock answered by the politicization of weak liberalism and the amassing of troops to invade an otherwise neutral, oil rich country long hated by Iran and the Saudi.
Greatness faltered following the horrific tragedy of innocence of 9/11. The steady assurance of. Eisenhower and the defiance of JFK facing down principled defense of the hemisphere from red, nuclear tipped missiles. The comforting, insightful analysis of Cronkite had long been displaced with little more than corporate money making sensationalism coverage embedded with the 51st armored tank division in Iraq, ripped apart and turned into a terrorist haven.
Nothing made sense to me. Billions of dollars was appropriated to quiet the voices of potential litigants of families who suffered the most. Years went by before any type of investigation was conducted - at best a window dressing exercise. Within a week of the attack, Carl Rove drove the nail into his party's hate by blaming "the week, cowardly liberals." Donahue was fired. Protests were ignored. A country took its Prozac and slowly went about our days, numb and bewildered.
The Bush and Cheney wars have become the longest and possibly the most costly in US history. The libertarians reignited a forever war. Their policies brought the US economy to its knees.
Greatness has been diminished. Drowned out by the commercialized, overly paid hecklers. Political correctness and assimilation by corporate lobbyists continues to tear away at greatness of America. Hillary voted to invade Iraq. Pelosi barred impeachment. President Obama clearly wanted to look to the future and not the past.
I did not know Thomas Young. Your passing symbolizes the end of an era. Leaders without a voice. A dream faltering. A truth stolen from those like you who believed in the words of great leaders, ordinary men and women who rally our hope, comfort us with the steadiness of their faith, and accomplish great peace and prosperity at home and through the world.
I am sad, Thomas, how you were robbed of your faith in the values we believed to be true: honor, integrity, adherence to humane treatment of others. We all were robbed.
Rest in peace.
#11
Sadly, rich, powerful and well-connected people almost never pay for what they've done. They often have connections to "resources" who can stop punitive actions against them by a variety of methods, even nefarious ones, if they think necessary. We must realize that our presidents are not their own bosses, much less our servants, any more. Those who run this country never come out of the shadows, and all presidents are reminded that they are temporary inconveniences at best, while those truly in control are well-entrenched and in it for the long run.
As for the decision not to impeach Bush and/or Cheney after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, I remember that at the beginning of the new Congress, Pelosi and other congressional leaders were called to the White House to "discuss how the parties would share power" (so said the media). I suspect that the Democrats were likely threatened with political ruin if they proceded with impeachment. Cheney has made precisely those threats of ruin to others, and made good on them, no doubt more often than we think. While it doesn't excuse cowardice, fear worked against the ability of the Democrats to form the LARGE, UNIFIED, AND DETERMINED BLOC needed to successfully push back. (Have they EVER been able to do this?)
It is the American people that need to stop complaining and really agitate for change. The latest announcement that the "War on Terror" will continue for another 10-20 years is not a plan for success; it's a surrender to the arms industry, served up by the warmongers in DC, who will spare no expense to fund them, at the cost of our safety net programs, public assistance, scientific research, schooling, personal privacy, public health, repair of infrastructure . . . . the entire economy. Long-term war is unsustainable. Worse, military action defeats terrorist/insurrectionist movements only 7% of the time. That's a 93% chance of failure! If war becomes a constant, the number of war criminals will only multiply. So will our enemies. The best justice is to insist on negotiations and non-violent methods, and get war OFF "the table", since it is no longer the "last resort."
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