Letter 9 from Eric Arnow                               Arnow Letter Index

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Eric Arnow has his own web site now. For years I've been putting his letters from Asia here. From now on they'll go on his site, the Bumble Buddhist which also now has all the previous ones from cuke and photos more. - dc

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005
From: Eric Arnow <e_arnow@yahoo.com>
Subject: A warning from award winning journalist Seymour Hersh

Dear Friends:

This is the last day before I go back to my retreat. I will be going in and out of retreats for the next few months, and have written you of some of my experiences , which have generally been very uplifting.

But there is that shadow which was a lot of why I came here.

Yesterday, talking with a fellow from Amsterdam, he went on at length at how disgusted our former allies are, how after 911 the world was with the US, but now, whenever a US official visits another diplomat, they get smiles to their face, and curses to their backs.

This is in addition to the citizens of these countries. Another fellow, who taught in Kuwait and is from Canada, said that all westerners are hated in Arab countries, Kuwait initially was grateful for getting their country back from Saddam (though they don't know the US role in encouraging Saddam to attack in the first place--another story.)

But they see what is going on with the war and now westerners are despised, even Canadians.

So I am sending along this quote from an interview with Seymour Hersh, the reporter who exposed the Vietnam My Lai Massacre (that Colin Powell, then a major tried to cover up--another story), and what has happened to the 20 year olds who torture and kill in Iraq.

 This was in a Democracy Now interview available on the Web.

This journalist has a remarkable record of telling the truths no one else can,

Here is an excerpt:

"For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of - you know, we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over - by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards - you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to - it's - I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe - Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody - it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit - our - we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he [Bush] could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead."

Please take good care of yourselves and each other.

Eric