Iraq + 10. Time for Truth and Reconciliation

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Dear Friends,

This is an anniversary not to be celebrated, but observed: Ten years ago, the war against Iraq began. It was based on lies. Demonstrable, easily disproven lies. Lies that were so easy to see that back in October of 2002, when the cause for war was being delivered to Capitol Hill, as a junior Congressman I was able to categorically ascertain that there was no cause for war, and distributed an analysis of the War Resolution to hundreds of members of the House. http://action.kucinich.us/page/m/13310f ... 8538/VEsE/
I then spoke to Congress for an hour detailing the false call for war. http://action.kucinich.us/page/m/13310f ... 8538/VEsF/ America needs to move forward, but we can only do so with the truth as our guiding light, and reconciliation as our healing path.

That is why I have called for a process of Truth and Reconciliation, where those who were responsible for taking us to war are brought forth in an officially sanctioned setting, and, under oath, testify to what they knew. The American people must know the truth about the grave decision made by our government to go to war. The families of US servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice, deserve to know the truth. The families of dead Iraqi civilians, who died as a result of the war, deserve to know the truth. Ten years after the war, Iraq is still in turmoil. Ten years after the war, the United States' financial security is threatened by the cost of the war and our long-term physical security has been damaged by the war. How can we recover? How can the people of Iraq recover? How can the world recover? We must demand the truth. We must know the truth. Truth and Reconciliation is the process. It has worked in other countries struggling with their past. It can work in America. Please let me know what you think.

Contribute to Kucinich Action to help support candidates who will stand for the truth, and to help us broaden our reach for an America which tells the truth, an America which focuses on our needs at home, an America which never mistakes offense for defense.

Please read the recent speech I gave to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, for a broader discussion of these themes.
The speech is republished today in Truthout.
http://action.kucinich.us/page/m/13310f ... 8538/VEsD/

Here is an excerpt:

We must demand that America, our nation, establish a fully empowered Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, so that those responsible for misleading us into annihilating innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere be brought forward to a public accountability in a formal process of fact-finding, of inquiry, of public testimony, of admission, of confession. There is no other way out of the moral cul-de-sac in which reside the monstrous crimes of mass murder, torture, kidnapping and rendition other than atonement: AT ONE MENT. It is in atonement that we will achieve what Blake called the unity of opposites. It is in reconciliation that the Blakean idea of the contrary nature of God, containing multitudes of humanity, will cause us to understand the fragility of our social compact and the possibility that any of us could be murderer and victim. Without public expiation for the unbridled use of force, the wanton violence we have writ large in the world will replicate, perpetuate and be our own ruin. This is the importance of a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation. We had and have a right to defend ourselves as a nation, but when we go on the offense, the violence that we have visited abroad will inevitably blow back home. The violence we create in the world in turn licenses and desensitizes us to the wanton violence which is exercised in our streets, and unfortunately in our homes. We must understand the causal links. What is outermost presses down upon what is innermost. What is innermost becomes outermost.

Please help continue our own work of truth-telling. Contribute to Kucinich Action today.
http://action.kucinich.us/page/m/13310f ... 8538/VEsA/

Thanks,
Dennis Kucinich