Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox: THE 9/11 DECADE
Paul Thompson
CS: Cindy Sheehan
PT: Paul Thompson
CS: Welcome back to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox. I am your host Cindy Sheehan and you are listening at CindySheehansSoapbox.com
Well dear listeners, today is the 10th anniversary of the awful day when thousands of Americans were killed. The day that precipitated hundreds of thousands of needless and tragic deaths--my own son, Casey, included.
If you listen to my show you know that there are many unanswered questions about that day. No matter what really happened the war of terror is still being justified by something that terrified us, then unified us, then ultimately destroyed us. Instead of using that day to reevaluate our national priorities the idiot Bush told us to go shopping and travel then embarked on his war of terror. Today on the Soapbox I have two quests with intimate knowledge about that day and it’s tragic aftermath. The first guest on the Soapbox today is the author of The 9/11 Timeline Paul Thompson. Then we will hear the perspective of Iraqi American, Dr. Dahlia Wasfi.
Our first guest Paul Thompson is an alumnus of Stanford University and the creator of The Complete 9/11 Timeline available at Historycommons.org. By collecting mainstream articles, government documents and peoples statements Paul has written a multitude of entries and placed them into a timeline format like is done with so many crimes. Through these timeline entries you are able to see many omissions, distortions and contradictions of the official account of 9/11.
Paul Thompson welcome to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.
PT: Hello, thanks for having me.
CS: Of course today when the show is airing is the 10th anniversary of the events on 9/11 and I believe that there are many unanswered questions. Your website does attempt to put things in factual order. So what prompted you to become involved in 9/11 and what specifically inspired you to do a timeline?
PT: Well I’m like you and I believe there are many unanswered questions there. I started feeling that way in the middle of 2002. That was the time when a bunch of stories started to come out. Like the one about President Bush having this briefing called, “Bin Laden determined to strike the US” and that really got me wondering and so I was really trying to make sense of it for myself and I thought, well if I could put this in a timeline that could really help. It just snowballed from there. It grew and grew and other people started joining in
And here it is pretty much ten years later and it’s continuing to grow.
CS: You mentioned the briefing, “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US”. George Bush was handed that on August 6th of 2001. And I’ll never forget that date because that’s the date 4 years later I sat in a ditch in Crawford Texas demanding that he speak with me. And it’s also Hiroshima day so that’s a very significant date. What was contained in the Presidential daily briefing that he received?
PT: Well just a lot of different pieces of information. What’s interesting is that we now know that there were so many warnings that were coming in and a lot of them were not actually mentioned in that daily briefing which is kind of strange. But certainly at that time period that’s one of the things that really intrigues me so much is that there were just so many warnings coming in. For instance just from foreign governments alone you had the British, the French, the Germans, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Italy, I mean it just goes on and on and all these countries were warning the United States. Some of them were really specific warnings that talk about airplanes being used to crash into buildings.
Even according to 60 Minutes there were warnings from Egypt where they actually said there were about 20 people coming to the United States some of them trained to operate aircraft and they even mentioned the names of some of the high jackers like Muhammad Atta.
So you had this tremendous information coming in and then the Bush administration did nothing. There was in the 9/11 commission they interviewed Norman Manetta the transportation secretary and they asked him, what did the Bush administration do in response to all these warning? He literally said “nothing." It’s just staggering when you think about it.
CS: Well also it was recorded somewhere, you probably know the direct source, that George Bush said to whomever handed him that briefing, he said “you’ve covered your ass." Is that correct?
PT: Right. Yeah there’s some strange thing about that briefing like it mentions that there were 70 FBI ongoing investigations into bin Laden and Al Qaeda and there was no where near 70 investigations going on. So it definitely seemed like some kind of ass covering moves that were going on there. But that was hardly the only warning that George Bush got. I think they said he got 40 warnings in the months leading up to the attacks.
CS: Well you know I’m kind of peripherally on the 9/11-truth movement. I think like I said there are many questions. I don’t have a definitive explanation of what happened that day. Many people do though based on very flimsy evidence. There’s speculation that Israel’s Mossad was responsible for it 100 percent; or laser beams hit the towers and that the planes were actually holograms; that the people on the flights didn’t really call their loved ones, whatever, there’s just so much speculation based not really on any facts going on with 9/11. You’ve actually said that you do not like to speculate. Why is that?
PT: When I started on this project of putting this timeline together and if people want to check this out go to historycommons.org. You know it occurred to me that all these things were coming up in the news. These interesting little bits of information and yet it was sort of there one day and gone the next so folks tend to forget this stuff. So I thought it was kind of important to almost be like a librarian for this whole issue. To have this documented on a way that not going to go away. That’s not going to be forgotten in a few months.
If people want to come to the website they can look it up see it and if I am in that sort of role of archive or librarian for all these different stories I feel like it is almost my duty where I shouldn’t be imputing my personal opinion in on everything. I just want to state what the facts are, this is what such and such report say’s and summarize it in a way where you don’t have to read thousands of pages to understand all this stuff. If I start throwing out this theory and that theory then I am going to be turning my back to other facts that might be contradicting that. So I really try to keep an open mind and the other people who work on the project to, we all try to do that. Of course everybody has biases, everybody has their theories but we really try to be objective as we can.
CS: Well I’ve found that some people are very dogmatic about their theories. They don’t think they are theories they think they are facts. Especially the people who say Mossad did it. You know they accuse me of being a Zionist if I won’t expound on the theory you know when I am very much against Israel’s policies concerning Palestine. But I don’t see any evidence that’s factual that states that Mossad was behind 9/11. Do I think they would be capable of it? Probably. Do I think our CIA is capable of it? Yes. Do I think our own government is capable of killing three thousands of it’s own citizens? Yes. But I haven’t seen any incontrovertible facts that any of those things are true.
PT: Lots and lots of kind of weird facts out there. You may have heard the story called the Israeli art students where months before the attacks they were all these people going across the country from Israel claiming to be art students and they would say they were selling pictures, you know kind of really weird stuff out there and it’s not some weird conspiracy theory. It was on ABC News; they did a big thing on it. The mainstream people did a big story on that. However, it’s a huge leap from that to some sort of spies running around the United States to saying Mossad did it.
I think it is unfortunate that there are some people who get so dogmatic and all these people are arguing with each other and I think they lose sight of the bigger picture which is that amongst all the people who question the official theory it’s not so important which specific little thing that you think is important as I think it is that everybody can agree that there are problems with the official theory. That there are holes in the 9/11 commission report and as time goes on we find more and more holes and that we never really got to the truth.
We never really had an honest investigation. It was a very politically compromised investigation. The executive director for instance, Phillip Zelikow, we found out there were all kinds of conflicts of interest. He was a close friend of Condoleezza Rice. Even during the commission he was having some phone calls with Karl Rove. It was just basically a whitewash. So I think people who truly know the facts and looked into the 9/11 issue they should say, "let’s all agree that we’ve never got to the truth. We need new information we need new investigations. Real honest, independent investigations."
CS: Well what are some of these big holes in the 9/11 report specifically?
PT: A real interesting thing recently happened about a month ago. Richard Clarke who was the counter terrorism czar under both Clinton and Bush through 9/11. There was a video interview. You can see it on secrecykills.com, I believe and it’s about 12 minutes, it’s really interesting.
What he (Clarke) says is sort of three or four years before the commission came out with their report some new information came out that made him seriously doubt a lot of the story that the commission put out, and in particular, I think the most intriguing thing that’s come out in recent years is the theory that two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdharand and Nawaf al-Hazmi and they were in the US twenty months before 9/11 living openly in San Diego.
One of them even had his name in the phone book. And the whole thing, I can’t really go in to too much detail, the whole long tangled story about how way back when even before they came to the US the CIA found they had US visas, found that they had gotten onto a flight and came to the United States and yet that information was never shared with the FBI or other people in government.
Clarke said he never heard about this and for twenty months the CIA knew about this. He said he was talking to the CIA everyday. Talking to George Tenet three or four times a day. Any little bit of information, he would read over people’s reports from the CIA everyday. There’s no way they could have known that and just accidentally forgot to tell him about it and other people about it. It had to have been a deliberate cover up that went on for nearly two years and he’s just mad as heck about that. And you know it’s something the 9/11 commission never got into, never figured out. So we’re finding a lot of stuff now that’s coming out.
The real interesting thing is that a lot of people who were in the FBI and the CIA, they were interviewed by the 9/11 commission in different other criminal investigations and they’re now retired these people and they’re coming forward, doing interviews for the 10th anniversary and so forth. Some of them saying, you know I wasn’t really on this back when I was being interviewed by the 9/11 commission because there was tremendous pressure on me.
For instance on these interviews there would be minders, government minders. Like if you were from the CIA they would have this CIA boss with you, a CIA lawyer with you and we know that these minders would often be intimidating to the point of almost answering the questions that were supposed to be asked of the interviewee. So these people were feeling a lot of pressure to conform to a certain story that their agencies wanted them to put out that would make the agency not look bad. Only now that they are retired are they starting to be able to talk freely and we’re really just starting to see how much of a whitewash those early investigations were.
CS: What do you think about the recent information, I don’t even know if it is recent information but I just found out about it, that Phillip Zelikow actually wrote an outline to the 9/11 commission report before the investigation even started?
PT: Yeah, I think that came out in 2008 they had a whole table of contents for their book, the final report that they came out with. This table of contents was written before they even started looking at any of the information. Not only that but they broke up into different teams and some of the teams even had some of the different subchapter heading and everything all worked out. So it was like a fill in the blanks where they had all the conclusions that they wanted to make beforehand and then let’s go and find the evidence that will support those conclusions that we want.
That’s not any way to conduct an investigation. There was just so much political bias in these kinds of things because you basically had five Democrats, five Republicans and they were a very partisan people, Senators and Congressmen and they were really using the 9/11 commission as a way to try and score political points, were not really trying to get at the truth.
The whole thing became a political football, which anybody would have seen from the way it was created. That it was sort of, in fact the two chairs said lately, that we were set up to fail. They actually said that, that we didn’t get enough money we didn’t get enough funding. The way that it was done so politically and everyone was a political appointee. We didn’t have enough time. They were set up to fail and they did. So yeah, it’s a real shame that they got away with it because they put out that final report that a million plus people bought a copy and I think a lot of people just though, "oh well they got that whole issue sorted out. We found out what the whole story is there." When in fact we did not at all.
People say, "well that was ten years ago you know, its kind of becoming ancient history why does this matter so much?" It really does matter because so much of what our current society has become is based on this 9/11 incident. You know we have had erosion of civil liberties, we’ve had tremendous military spending, different wars we’ve fought. I read something in the newspaper today that really blew my mind. It said that if you look at the total spending on the wars plus all the security measures, Homeland security all that different stuff and put it all together there’s one estimate has been eight trillion dollars.
CS: Holy Moley. Yeah I mean you know the wars abroad are bad but as you just mentioned the national security state that has arisen from this must be, well we know there must be people profiting off of, even the X-ray machines in the airport, Michael Chertov has an interest in those. So it’s been very profitable for some people but for people like my family it’s been very disastrous and devastating.
When 9/11 happened I was just a regular American and my son was still alive and we were struggling like any other family with all the issues. I think it was a couple days after 9/11 George Bush was saying, "I don’t want to hear any crazy conspiracy theories." And as soon as I heard him say that, and I wasn’t even very politically sophisticated, but as soon as I heard him say that I thought, "well then it must be, there must be some kind of hanky panky going on if George Bush is already telling us not to question things.
PT: Just want to address that before you move on. I think you said that a couple of months afterwards he was speaking at the UN and he did make that comment about the conspiracy theories. You know I think you are really right to have a red flag there because I think that term "conspiracy theory" is kind of code for, "let’s not talk about this, let’s put that off the table."
An interesting example of that I like to tell people about is right when the Iraq war started Tony Blair, the Prime Minister in England, there were big headlines there because he said anybody who thinks the upcoming war in Iraq has anything to do with oil is a "conspiracy theorist." It’s just come out in the past month or two that now know at the very time he was making that comment there were British oil companies that were scrambling to talk to Tony Blair about getting big oil contracts in Iraq. So I think he knew if you just throw out that statement and say that people who think “x” are "conspiracy theorists" then in the mainstream media a lot of journalists are just going to say, "I don’t want to touch that topic because I don’t want to be tarred with that brush."
Unfortunately now the whole 9/11 topic has been so tarred with that brush that a lot of journalist don’t want to do any articles on it. They feel like people are going to think I’m wacky if start looking in to all these issues.
CS: Well and especially of course when one says, "conspiracy theory" people start to think tin foil hats and crazy cab drivers or people at home alone and that’s their whole life because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to think.
My friend Gore Vidal says, "I’m not a conspiracy theorist I am a conspiracy analyst." But even people on the so called left when you talk about 9/11 they just shut down and end the conversation and say, "it’s exactly the way the government said it happened." Even though they will scream from the top of the mountains that George Bush and Dick Cheney are liars and criminals, they lied about Iraq, sometimes they feel that Afghanistan was not justified, or they lied about Afghanistan, they’re torturers, they’re murderers, they’re liars, but they think that what the government says about 9/11 is exactly the way it happened even though George Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t testify under oath or publicly and they did it together which is the biggest problem I have with the 9/11 commission, their so called investigation.
PT: You know I think that a lot of people on the left they want to be seen as credible in the mainstream and they think if I touch this 9/11 issue that people are going to put me with that 9/11-truth crowd and so no one is going to take me seriously. I run in to that problem a lot with people who do not want to talk about this stuff at all. I think it is a real shame because this is in my opinion a real remarkable story and the aspects of it are continuing until the current day. One of the things that I have always been interested in with the 9/11 story as an example is the possibility of Pakistani government involvement in 9/11.
There’s a lot of evidence that even way before 9/11 that Pakistan had a pretty deliberate policy of supporting terrorism. They’re involved in this war with Kashmir; war with India and basically India is a way much larger country with a much larger military. So they felt the way to even things up were send in these very radical Muslims in to Kashmir that could pin down a huge number of Indian troops. So they have for years allowed openly these training camps and Al Qaeda and these other troops to flourish in Pakistan.
It even goes deeper than that where it seems like there are many attacks, even recent attacks that the Pakistani government was involved in like in 2008 here was a bombing in Afghanistan with the Indian Embassy there that killed 50 people. The New York Times reported that the US military found out from communications intercepts that that was planned by Pakistani intelligence service the ISI. The same year there was an attack in Mumbai India that killed 150 people. You may or may not remember that for three days gunmen were running around shooting people. More and more evidence show that was planned by the ISI.
There is a court case going on in the US right now. One of the guys who was involved in the attacks was arrested in the US. He’s being put on trial and he is saying he got his orders from the ISI. So you see this long progression and one result of that is that the ISI, Pakistani government, everyday they train, they fund thee militants and they send them across the border into Afghanistan and they’re fighting US troops there.
We’re in this crazy situation where we are basically funding the enemy. We've given something like 20 billion dollars to Pakistan since 9/11 and they turn around and fund the Taliban who are fighting the United States and there’s just no end to this dynamic. This goes on year after year like a machine that just chews up all these young men and women. It’s crazy in my opinion that this is still happening and it goes all the way back to 9/11 and even way before 9/11 when we see these same patterns continually. Yet it’s like I don’t know what. No one seems to notice or want to change things.
CS: It’s definitely hard to be aware, especially in the United Stares when we are so propagandized and distracted by things that are irrelevant. We only have about a minute left Paul. I can’t believe this has gone by so fast. I would like you to tell my listeners your website and also in just like a minute, what do you think should be done? What do you think; do you think it should be a valid transparent investigation? Or how are we going to get to the truth finally?
PT: The website is historycommons.org and I recommend people go there and even join in if they want to help get more information out there. And also I (unintelligible) with that book The Terror Timeline. I recommend people check that out.
About your question, you know the victims relatives, the Jersey Girls, way back when they said this should be an independent investigation of academics, of experts not politicians and I still think that’s the logical thing and we are still waiting for that to happen. It needs to happen.
CS: Okay great Paul. Well, thank you for taking the time to be on Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox today.
PT: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi
CS: Cindy Sheehan
DW: Dahlia Wasfi
CS: That was our guest Paul Thompson. Our next guest is Dr. Dahlia Wasfi. Dahlia was born in 1971 in New York to a Jewish American Mother and a Muslim Iraqi Father. Dr. Wasfi spent part of her early childhood living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. She returned to the US at age five, earned her B.A. in Biology from Swarthmore College in 1993 and her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Dahlia is my friend. She’s a fellow truth, peace and justice advocate and she’s one outspoken, eloquent, passionate and amazing person. Dahlia Wafsi, welcome to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.
DW: Thanks so much for having me.
CS: It’s nice to talk to you. When’s the last time we actually got to talk to each other?
DW: I think the last time I saw you was in Valley Forge in March 2010. So it’s been a long time and it’s overdue.
CS: We were actually doing a conference. I think it was called: Treason in America that had a lot to do with 9/11.
DW: Exactly. Absolutely.
CS: You’ve gotten married since then?
DW: Yes. I’m trying to get my life back on track since that. Thank you for asking.
CS: Congratulations.
DW: Thank you very much. Thank you. In the midst of all this madness I found a soul mate who has the same convictions that I try to have. I think we are working now synergistically so we can really wrap up this whole unending war thing relatively quickly now that we have met each other. We’re counting on that.
CS: Since 9/11 also I have been gifted with three beautiful smart, amazing grandchildren and one on the way. He is in fact due on 9/11. (Cindy note: Jackson Newcomb Henry, weight 7lbs and 8oz was born on September 8th--Mom and Baby super-healthy and fabulous.)
DW: Oh my goodness.
CS: I know. So it gets us like, when these good, positive things happen it gives us so much joy and dare I say, hope for the future. But also a renewed sense of commitment, at least in my case. My grandkids motivate me to make the world a better place for them and their little grandchildren friends around the world.
DW: Absolutely. And this is the same thing for my only child, which has four legs so I don’t know what it is to be a mom, but this is the same thing I observe with my family overseas in Iraq that this is what they state. They continue to live their lives. If they waited for things to get better, to move on they would never stop waiting. So the next generation is being born. They do the best they can for their families and they as well try to make a better future for their kids. So that’s what comes to mind as you talk about rebuilding your own life.
CS: Well also it is the 10 anniversary of 9/11. I’m fed up to my eyebrows with how the US was attacked on 9/11 and we were attacked because "the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy and our way of life, that they want to attack our way of life." If that was true they did a really good job.
There’s very little talk about the people outside of the US that have been destroyed by whatever happened on 9/11. But you don’t hear their stories and how needlessly and tragically their lives have been affected because of what happened on that day. So that’s why I wanted to invite you on because you are very eloquent critic of US policies but you are also very eloquent in describing your Iraqi roots and what’s happening to the people in that country. So I just want you to today talk about that, talk about the connection between 9/11 and Iraq and what the US did ostensibly there and what really happened. And what’s still happening. Iraq has basically fallen off the face of the Earth. It may as well not exist because we don’t talk about it at all. Dick Cheney says it’s better, it’s a better place now, they have a democracy now and blah, blah blah. I wish I believed in hell because I know Dick Cheney would be going there. But I don’t think that’s happening. So Dahlia, give us the Iraqi perspective.
DW: I so appreciate it. I too promise that I am not going to forget what is happening on Sunday. I’m not going to forget the anniversary. I don’t need any reminders but I know more are coming. But I can tell from my personal experience. I was born in New York, we lived in Iraq when I was little and we left when I was five years old so except for a few years in there I was born and raised here. I don’t even speak Arabic. I know from the few months that I spent with my family what they have to endure on a daily basis, which is something that I could not consistently deal with. They’re much stronger than I could ever dream to be.
What happened on September 11th 2001 once it was clear, sort of, what was being built up and I knew that no matter who was responsible that Arabs and Muslims were going to be blamed by this country because that is just par for the course. It happened after the Oklahoma City bombing, pretty much anytime. It happened just recently with Norway. The first suspect that was must be an Islamic terrorist. We’re the "go to" people. While there still needs to be a genuine investigation, as far as I am concerned, and many others we still don’t know what happened that day. I knew that the next hits coming were going to be racist. I certainly did not face what others faced in this country. A lot of people died in this country after 9/11 because they looked Muslim, they looked Arab.
What came afterward was our assault on Afghanistan. Of course the people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with September 11th. And the assault on Iraq, which started the planning for that on September 13th two days after 9/11 in 2001.
It’s very clear I think the numbers are 165 times that Bush administration lied about numerous things including the supposed ties between Iraq and 9/11. The outcome today for Iraqi’s is their lives will never be the same. There’s over a million people dead. Over five and a half million refugees. That’s twenty percent of Iraq’s 27 million population. From what my cousins have told me there is no one who has been untouched. Everybody knows someone who has been killed. Either a victim of the violence we have brought to Iraq or a victim of the destruction of the infrastructure and the health care system.
Then on top of all that returning veterans are suffering the consequences as well from our use of depleted uranium which is basically a radioactive metal that vaporizes in to dust and this contaminates the air, the sand and the water supply for Iraqi’s. It’s in the air that occupying forces are breathing in so this is a risk of cancer for the next four and a half billion years. Still with that knowledge in spite of keenly aware of the weapons that we’ve used and the effects on future generations, which is most vividly being demonstrated in the city of Fallujah after two major sieges in 2004. Iraqi’s, they continue forward. They again you know, trying to do day to day things put their lives back together. But the sense that I get to this day is they want the end to the occupation. Very simple. And I think what as I hear as we build up to this tenth anniversary there are families out there in Iraq and Afghanistan where everyday is a marker for 9/11.
We have one day of tragedy to commemorate but with the number of offenses and operations that we’ve conducted there is a terrible anniversary for someone for every day of the year. That’s why it’s so important for those who have been affected the most; in my opinion you have the most powerful voice to say that, not in my name. Whether it’s the families of the victims actually on the date of September 11th 2001 or a military Mom like yourself who’s saying, :I know what the grief is." You know you walk in those shoes and it’s such a powerful voice to say, "it’s enough." Because all of this is being done for corporate profits. And while people are not waking up as fast as I’d like them to things are definitely, we are day-by-day seeing differences in more and more people awakening. And so still we’re working for an immediate unconditional withdrawal of US forces and mercenaries and the CIA from Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to military aide to Israel in compliance with our domestic law and international law. Those should be the first steps towards establishing security I believe.
CS: You mentioned that twenty percent of Iraqi’s have been either killed or displaced or wounded. I want to point out to people that would be 60 million Americans. You know, just think of 60 million Americans with something like that. Almost like twice the size of the population of California. Wouldn’t there be a national or international outcry if 60 million Americans were killed or made refugees in their own country or in another country?
DW: Absolutely. This is something that is beyond our comprehension it really is. And if we could see, and that seems really simple to me, if we could just get people to other lives, the lives of other nationalities other families the same way that we see our own I think we would conduct ourselves in a much different way and we would not allow what is taking place now. I think there is still a great deal of ignorance that allows these policies to continue. I am still trying to show that every country is made up of families and it’s those families that either reap the benefits of what their government does or pay the price and unfortunately in many places around the world from the United States to Iraq these families are paying the price and especially with the latest target of NATO war planes now in Libya.
You know it’s the same old story all over again. It’s very discouraging to see a lot of my colleagues who have opposed the wars in Afghanistan the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq all of a sudden turn around and say, "well this is a good intervention." Just to say with any military assault like this 90 percent of the casualties are unarmed civilians. So you cannot make a good argument to me that there’s good reason for that in any situation. This is ultimately who pays the price. We’ve seen it over and over and over again. Once we recognize that once that reality comes to light I do think things will change. I pray anyway.
CS: I also think with Libya it was just lazy justification and lazy reporting for the justification for the humanitarian intervention in Libya because I swear they could have replaced "Saddam Hussein" with "Gadhafi" and they could have replaced "Iraq" with "Libya." Every single time they talked about it. I was like, "people why are you falling for this again?"
DW: I know. It’s a brutal dictator that’s killing his own people and we have to go in to help them. Looking at the history certainly the United Kingdom has done a great deal to arm Libya in recent years. Just as we did a great deal to arm Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This is a lot like professional wrestling. The good guys become the bad guys then become the good guys again. Just depending on which way the winds are blowing. But it’s really remarkable that any sort of military aggression is considered humanitarian and that’s the ultimate Orwell double speak and I’ve had enough of it and I’m sure you have too.
CS: Absolutely.
DW: The only thing is that we are absolutely over extending ourselves. We are in Iraq, we are in Afghanistan, we are bombing Pakistan and we are bombing Yemen. We are trying to suppress the demonstrators, it’s funny they’re valiant rebels in Libya but they are insurgents in Bahrain where the American 5th Naval fleet sits. So you know it all depends on what is in our interests. So the double standards become more and more clear and we are over extending ourselves. Meanwhile back at home there’s no jobs. We’re continuing in this recession. So the connection should be made. The media is failing to make the connection but it should be made that while pouring all this money into overseas military aggression and through the budget of the Pentagon while our economy is falling apart. We just have to connect the dots. We could fix so much and open new jobs opportunities here by instead of destroying infrastructures overseas how about rebuilding it here.
CS: And making sustainable systems and economies instead of the one that we have now. Well Dahlia, thank you for coming on and connecting the dots on Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox. Thank you for giving the uncool side of the story upcoming on this anniversary.
DW: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I greatly appreciate it.