Posted on 08/04/2005 3:08:21 PM PDT by kristinn
AUSTIN — The former ambassador to Afghanistan, Ann Wright, called on U.S. federal employees to leak more secret memos on the lead-up to the war in Iraq like Downing Street memos uncovered by the British press this last May.
“It seems like the British government is leaking like a sieve. We need to get our own U.S. government colleagues to be leaking like a sieve,” said Wright, who gave up her career in the foreign service because she disagreed with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “We need more documents — certainly not documents that are really going to jeopardize the security of the United States — but documents that show the sequence of events within our own government.”
Wright said that many federal employees disagree with the policies of the current administration but stay involved for a host of reasons, one of which more often than not is that they have mouths to feed. A closer look of the major U.S. newspapers, however, shows that those discouraged officials inside the government are sending signals of hope to the American people, she said.
“It’s important that we encourage our colleagues in the U.S. federal government to think really seriously about the future of our country and to inform their conscience and look to see if they can find the equivalent memos that we have in our United States government,” said Wright. “So if you have any colleagues, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, sons or daughters that are working in whatever level of government, talk to them. Just casually mention it. You never can tell.”
Wright’s remarks were made at a house party sponsored by CodePink Austin, one of over 300 events on the July 23-24 weekend that marked the third anniversary of the Downing Street Memos’ existence. During her talk in Austin, Wright also answered questions about the effects of depleted uranium on humans (DU is very, very bad), her opinion on whether Sept. 11 was an “inside job” (she hopes that’s not the case), as well as the CIA’s involvement in Afghan opium production and distribution since the Taliban fell (she needs more evidence).
Moving through Texas prior to the Veterans for Peace Conference in Dallas in August, she also spent Saturday, July 23, with about 225 people at a teach-in at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Houston.
“Once you make a trip from Hawaii, you want to do as many things as possible,” Wright said, adding that she gave a brief oral testimony on the Downing Street Memos at hearings held by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) on June 16.
The Downing Street memos interest Wright because they describe what was going on behind-the-scenes between the British and U.S. governments while she served as a diplomat in Afghanistan from December 2001 to March 2003. Wright was one of three who ended up resigning from the diplomatic corps in March 2003. She resigned as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Mongolia in protest over the Bush administration’s decision to enter war in Iraq, the lack of effort to resolve the situations in Israel and North Korea, the unnecessary curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S., and the reduction in resources from Afghanistan to a territory unrelated to the attacks in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.
“My whole resignation at that time was based on gut feelings, and now it turns out that we have memos from the British government which kind of confirm a lot of the feelings I had internalized,” she said.
“There were a lot of issues going on, and in fact as the memos have come out, it turns out that while I was in Afghanistan in March of 2002, Tony Blair’s gang was already starting to work with George Bush’s gang on Iraq, and the Britons in those memos said they were taken aback really about how far the U.S. was moving forward on this. They were really concerned about the legal basis on which war could happen.”
Wright has since aligned herself with peace activist groups, like Women in Black, Veterans for Peace, and CodePink, because, as she said, she gave up her career in the foreign service over the war in Iraq. “Although years ago I wouldn’t have agreed with some of them, I’ve seen more of their rationale of why they oppose certain things of the U.S. government,” Wright said. “And many of them bring up to me, ‘So why did it take you so long to resign? There were so many things the U.S. government was involved in and that you were involved in!’ But this one for me was just so far over the top that I wasn’t about to be associated with it.”
As a federal employee working with seven presidents, Wright said, she found plenty of policies she personally did not agree with and chose to not work toward. “I was able to rationalize that I was able to do good work for the American people because I could get away from those policies. That’s the way most people rationalize working for the government because there are so many ups and downs with every administration,” she said.
However, Wright admitted she should have resigned over her work in Nicaragua in the 1980s when she was in charge of all civic action and humanitarian systems projects for Central and South American. At the time, the projects were repaying the Hondurans for the Hondurans letting the U.S. train the Contras on their territory, she said.
“But sometimes, you let yourself get wound up in something that is exciting like that, and you don’t really look clearly look at all the aspects of it, and there were horrible things that the Nicaraguans were doing to themselves — the Nicaraguans who were fighting the Sandinistas, not that I agreed with everything the Sandinistas did, by any means,” she said. “But that was the U.S. creating a military force to implement its will, to get ride of revolutionaries who had overthrown a U.S. friend who was a very brutal, brutal dictator.”
Wright, who served in the military for 29 years and reached the rank of colonel, said that the leaders in the U.S. military are doing what they can to fight the policies of the Bush administration, which are illegal in nature. The military leaders under other U.S. presidents also pushed back against certain policy wranglers, like President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who wanted to send troops into the Balkins and Rwanda, she noted.
“The military is the least happy about going to war. Some people in the military are (happy about going to war), but most people who have done anything, say ‘Let’s hope those diplomats succeed,’” she said. “Military pressure is good, but when you have really to go to war, oh no, that’s nasty stuff. In many cases, for good reason, it drags its heels. The civilian politicians, many of whom have never been in the military, are ready to use them at the drop of a hat without even considering the types of things that always go on during war, the things that go on in prisons, the aftermath, civil reconstruction.”
Wright also criticized former Secretary of State Colin Powell for being more loyal to the Bush administration than to the American people: “There was nothing legal to say that you could go to war in Iraq in March 2002 and March 2003.”
“I think (Powell) really was more loyal to the Bush family, who had gotten his fourth star for him in the military and who had appointed him National Security Advisor and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then Bush II comes back and appoints him the first African-American Secretary of State,” she said. “Miserably he failed the institution he loved the most — the military — when the Army Chief of Staff was telling the world that the operations plans that Rumsfeld and crew were forcing down the throat of the military were short by some 200,000 troops, the troops that would have prevented the looting that took place after we went into Baghdad, to seal the borders, to provide a good security plan.”
Wright said that Powell should have resigned on principle so that it would have caused attention to the lack of proper planning for the war, if not to stop the illegal war from even happening. Instead, Powell presented to the United Nations the United States’ case for war in Iraq based on trumped charges that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, “which he now in private admits was pretty pitiful and will weigh on his conscience forever,” she said.
“I have little sympathy — in fact, no sympathy — for Colin Powell,” Wright added. “I think he’s a very unprofessional person. At the Department of Defense, he did okay as a military guy. On the major leadership responsibilities at the State Department, he failed us because sometimes the only time you can win is by resigning and making a stink out of something. He chose to be Bush toady and go along with it. I think his karma — he’s going to come back as a rat.”
The goal of the July 23-24 events is to tell more Americans about the Downing Street memos, these infamous British intelligence minutes that state that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to justify the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.
“It’s unbelievable that millions of Americans still don’t know about the existence of the Downing Street Memo, despite the fact that its contents are so controversial that they could provide grounds for the impeachment of the President of the United States,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace, two groups that are involved with the After Downing Street Coalition, which spurred the organization of the July 23 events.
The events were also a push for a Congressional resolution of inquiry — the first step in the presidential impeachment process — into the Downing Street memos. According to a recent Zogby poll, 42 percent of voters polled said they would support impeaching President Bush if it were established that he lied about his reasons for the Iraq war.
According to David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org, hundreds of people were turned away at the larger DSM anniversary events, which brought such members of Congress as John Conyers (D-MI), Maurice Hinchley (D- NY), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jim McDermott (D-WA) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) to standing-room-only town hall meetings in their home districts of Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The Progressive Democrats of America also helped bring a number of smaller events into creation. There was another smaller DSM anniversary event in Houston, as well as one in The Woodlands, just north of Houston, and in Winnie, east of Houston. The main Houston event was organized by the Progressive Action Alliance (progressiveactionalliance.org) , and co-sponsored by the Harris County Green Party (www.harriscountygreenparty.org). To read the six Downing Street memos, visit After Downing Street’s website.
It's honorable to resign over policy differences. It's treason to give aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war. Ms. Wright has jumped over the line with both feet. And to think she served in the U.S. Army and attained the rank as a colonel in the Reserves.
I wonder if she knows Code Pink gave $600,000 in cash and aid to "the other side" in Fallujah. I wonder if she cares.
Well, let's see. That narrows it down to the cafeteria menu, I'd say.
Nope!
That's her little "who me?" caveat. She doesn't care as long as she gets President Bush.
Looks like she knows quite a bit about unprofessional conduct. I shudder to think of the damage this woman did to this country while working WITHIN the system for decades, since she's so eager to snuggle up with the Code Pink subversives today.
(BTW, nice touch on the source of the article!)
I'll bet Ms. Wright was happy as a pig in (slop) during the Clinton years.
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