Testing the limits again, for freedom's sake. From: "Dick Eastman" Newsgroups: alt.dear.whitehouse, alt.politics.gw-bush Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 10:41 AM <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> September 28, 2001 To: The President of the United States of America Washington, D.C. Sir: We are fast learning new meaning of those words from our great revolutionary war: "These are the times that try mens souls." The weight that has been suddenly been thrown upon you, Mr. President, of unprecedented terror unleased on our shores reminds not a few citizens of what Lincoln bore when Fort Sumpter was first fired upon in 1861. Doubtless, when you can find a moment in this national emergency to reflect upon the less direct ramifications of this act, you must feel that further loss of so much the opportunity, in terms of the necessary time and energy this crisis absorbs, that could have been used to attain the many of the great reforms you and your able administration intended to accomplish. I have three daughters and a love of all children, and so I too was anticipating this great good and now feel the loss of it to terror. Mr. President, I am completely convinced that the Taliban were not responsible for terrorism that has cost so many American lives in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. I am also convinced that you and the American people are victims of a frame-up by the powerful international drug cartels who seek both to destablilze the United States and your Administration and to destroy the Taliban because of their role in acting upon moral religious motives to erradicate the opium crops grown by the drug lords of northern Afganistan that supply the Chinese triads working through the People's Liberation Army's transnational corporation and drug cartel that furnish the world with opium and heroin. The Taliban merely got in the way of this great flow of wealth within the great and perverse international system of anracho-capitalist free trade. I also am convinced by long study, that the CIA has many renegade agents whose heads have been turned by the temptation of the big money available in the two - trillion-dollar-a-year global drug trade. And finally, I believe that our great investment banks -- some of the most influential people in this country -- have become accomplices in this trade through their laundering of untold billions in drug revenues, most of it then invested in Communist China in new high-tech factories feed by cheap Chinese labor -- putting honest businessmen out of business all around the world. Mr. President, may I add that I am convinced that your faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior is genuine. I share that faith with you, though flawed and falling short in many ways. Mr. President, believing the Taliban to be an organization that exists to free a large section of the world for genuine freedom to worship the one true God of their ancestors and to free their people from economic hardship resulting from serious flaws in our modern system of globalization and unregulated international trade and finance by a few billionaires hostile to Arabic culture and Islamic morality (which opposes exploitative usury, drug addiction etc.), and knowing them to be innocent of the terror of which they have been accused, I have decided to exercise my political freedom to associate with any political cause or set of ideas I personally deem just, good and appropriate. I am announcing to you now, effective immediately, my joining, as a continuing pacifist and as a patriotic American, this International group for the curtailment of unjust economic practices and the systematic persecution of Arabic states and Islamic peoples. I have no contact with members of the Taliban and I know of no sympathizers with this organization that I realize is much hated in this country right now because of the disinformation that blames the terror done by as yet unidentified others on these poor people and their just cause. My purpose, of course, is to be arrested and put in court where I will have to be tried according to our laws. It is my hope that my action will become known to the public and that through a public trial it will become obvious to all that no one in the United States government has any evidence whatsoever that will hold up in our courts under our laws. I do this to help you Mr. President. I do this to get your notice, even as those around you press you to go to war with all of the Middle East. As an internet propagandist for populism and against globalization I have said many unkind things about you and about people close to you, occasionally knowingly without sufficient evidence for such accusations to be responsible. But I confess those sins now. I beg that you hear the merits of the Taliban case from soneone other than Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz. The hawks have your ear and so does Mr. Powell, the middle of the roader, who seeks a war diplomatically conditioned so that nothing valuable is upset. Mr. President, it is my hope and prayer that when you have this dove in one of your cages, that you will hear him too. I am joining the Taliban, believing it to be an organization working for justice and good in the Afganistanand I do so not believing that this organization is responsible for the terror that has horrified the world. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Chirst continue to guide you in your service to the Republic. And please, for the sake of my family, be apprised that I am not armed, that I do not believe in violence, and that I will go with arresting officers peacefully without anger or hatred for any man. I am a part-time clerk at a video store in Yakima, Washington. I have the honor to remain, Yours faithfully, Dick Eastman 223 S. 64th Avenue Yakima, Washington 98908