Hello there. Bear with me through some heavy words, please.

We the people of the United States face the greatest threat to our health and freedom ever.

Horrors of mass death from barely imaginable terrorism might strike us at any time as an effect coupled to the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraq. Weapons of biological and nuclear warfare -- anthrax, smallpox, “dirty” nuclear bombs -- could easily be released into our cities by a handful of agents, causing thousands of fatalities and generally hysterical fear and rage. Our unelected government’s leaders -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice among them -- have warned about just such threats before and after their “ ‘War on Terrorism’ ” was triggered by the operations of September 11, 2001.

Consider these leaders’ own precarious positions.

They’re launching the most visibly unjustified and indiscriminate slaughter in history. Over and over they’ve articulated charges against their defenseless enemy that impartial observers from the United Nations and elsewhere have refuted. Over and over their maneuvers have been defeated by votes within bodies of international democracy. Over and over they -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld -- have been shown to adamantly prefer profiting from war rather than risking their lives in war. Month after month and now year after year the U.S. economy over which they preside has plummeted. The very currency they’re sworn to uphold is now down to 93 cents against the Eurodollar. Month after month, too, more millions around the world decry the very goal that studies -- the Project for a New American Century papers of 1997 and 2000 -- written by Bush Administration players (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, ...) before they took office in 2001 boldly assert: the U.S. should be the world’s unrivaled superpower, controlling sources of fossil-fuel energy and promoting democracy wherever it may be useful at whatever cost.

These few, bold men refuse to hesitate now.

From their vantage within personal bunkers they maintain their determined course. All cite their moral imperatives. At least one of the leading three (GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld) -- the one who looks most victim to mind control -- claims his mission is from God.

Certainly these few, bold men feel they must seize and control the flow of Iraqi oil. They must steal Iraqi oil. Oil is running out, the world over. U.S. production peaked in 1970. World production will peak not later than 2010. Iraq’s reserves are 12% of the world’s reserves. Saudi Arabia’s are 23%. Central Asia’s oil-and-gas reserves -- the reason for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan -- are proving to be less than expected. The U.S. must occupy the Middle East with dominant garrisons and dictatorships, Israel’s overwhelming armed forces at its side, to clinch a chokehold on the oil and gas necessary for China, Europe, and Japan.

Confronting the reality of Peak Oil in their oxygen-sensitive offices, these few, bold men won’t flinch from sacrifices. Commentators in our daily newspapers may even find these few, bold men merciful in their might. The tens of thousands of Iraqi women and children sure to perish under the “shock and awe” of 800 cruise missiles in the first 48 hours of bombardment -- that is, one cruise missile every four minutes -- will perhaps be happier with death quick rather than death slow from lack of food, water, and medicines due to the United States’ 1991-2003 sanctions against Iraq. The 100,000 body bags delivered last week to the U.S. Air Force Base in Sicily may just have to come home filled in order that democracy prosper in Iraq as it so obviously is in Afghanistan under warlords one year after the U.S. killed at least 5,000 civilians there.

The flow of oil and gas is as these few, bold men’s lifeblood -- but so too is the flow of drugs both illegal and legal. Opium from Afghanistan is an export little mentioned in our daily newspapers. The Taliban -- who were Afghanistan’s government before “ ‘9/11’ ” let them be these few, bold men’s target -- eradicated opium growing under their control in early 2001, reducing Afghanistan’s total crop to 173 metric tons. In 2002, however, the crop there increased more than 2,000%, reaching 4,500 metric tons, a yield worth $150 to 200 billion on the world’s street markets for heroin. Stock markets the world over depend on the influx of illegal drug-profits’ billions, as do the banks, the most enormous and established of banks, that also launder sales of smack and crack. Thus do the results of international U.S. military maneuvers flood or trickle down to street corners and suburbs within our borders.

These few, bold men refuse to shrink from such results. Illegal drugs’ profits are as essential to their mission as legal poisons (Donald Rumsfeld as CEO of G.D. Searle & Company used his connections to have the aspartame in Nutrasweet and Equal approved in the U.S. in the early 1980s) and exclusive licenses to vaccines against anthrax and smallpox (held by Defense Department-derived Bioport and Nazi-derived Bayer and Hoechst) are.

These few, bold men appear ready, in fact, to shrink from nothing.

“ ‘9/11’ ” has shown them the way. If Establishment Corporate Media and Establishment Left Media can look away from the holes in the cartoonlike Official Story of 9/11/01’s horrors, why, then, anything may pass. The Five Biggest Holes so far revealed, say, are as follow. (1) Five of the nineteen indicted Arab suicide hijackers remain alive. (2) The literal entry hole and exit hole in the Pentagon’s west wedge are much too small to accommodate the American Airlines Boeing 757-200 that supposedly hit that building. (3) Cell phones such as were supposedly used by passengers aboard their doomed Flights while at cruising altitude above 30,000 feet have been proven unable to communicate with ground sources above an altitude of 8,000 feet. (4) The three World Trade Center buildings that fell could not have collapsed from either the impact or heat that each underwent. (5) The U.S. military, headed by NORAD (North American Air Defense) had one hour and 15 minutes to protect the nation’s capital after the first airliner was hijacked on 9/11/01, while regulations require that jets be scrambled to intercept airliners within 15 minutes of the airliners’ deviating off-route.

Given that these enormous holes have not been widely exposed, these few, bold men appear to believe they can get away with anything. No lie is too absurd, no crime too monstrous, for them.

What can we do against them?

How can we oppose them? How can we stop them?

We can stop the machine that sustains them from working.

They depend on the financial and material engines of this society to somehow proceed while they’re ordering strikes elsewhere in the world.

We can stop them and their ultimately confused masters within capitalism by refusing to serve any more in the financial and material machine that sustains slaughter in Iraq and elsewhere.

We can NOT go to our workplaces on the morning after “shock and awe” bombardment begins. We can also stay from schools and universities except to protest these institutions’ involvement in illegal, barbaric war-making and theft. We can, instead, gather together and celebrate our own resistance and creativity, our own choices and democracy, in festivals of and for life.

Such actions are planned for many places in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow, Thursday, March 20. You can gather at Justin Herman Plaza at dawn.

You can gather at the Civic Center at noontime. You can check out www.directaction.org, www.actagainstwar.org, www.answer.org, www.notinourname.org, www.unitedforpeaceandjustice.org, www.uslaboragainstwar.org, www.waresisters.org, www.greenaction.org, www.legyouth.org, and many more websites.

These few, bold men can be shown to be the small, mean, vicious, cowardly, and ultimately powerless death-eating criminals they are, the anti-human monsters they are, by our refusals and our celebrations of our own compassionate independence and creativity tomorrow.

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The author writes: "Don Paul's three most recent books, the books of poems Pulsing and Flares and the study " '9/11' " Facing Our Fascist State, were available at City Lights Bookstore till a staffer there, first name Jeff, refused to stock the " '9/11' " book in the store's Muckraking section, where it had balanced the evasions and untruths of Noam Chomsky and his like, evasions and untruths that have helped the current slaughter in Iraq go forward."