Where are the WMD? It doesnÃ??'t take a team of international inspectors to find the truth. Three nuns performed this service for free. Even as America sent its military forces into Iraq on the grounds that Saddam...

Where are the WMD? It doesnÃ??'t take a team of international inspectors to find the truth. Three nuns performed this service for free. Even as America sent its military forces into Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Ã??'mightÃ??'� have had Weapons of Mass Destruction, three nuns set out to open AmericaÃ??'s eyes to the WMDs we cherish here at home. Armed with nothing but a rosary, a call for moral courage, and a pair of fence-cutting pliers, three nuns spilled their own blood from baby bottles on the concrete dome of a missile silo in the midst of the sagebrush prairie. The stage was set for this peaceful protest by a sequence of events rooted in diplomatic and economic machinations going back to 1991 and before. No sign of WMD was found in Iraq, though no stone was left unturned and no office left unburned. Here in the US, three nuns were sent to jail for Ã??'undermining national security.Ã??'� Apparently, no one appreciates an unexpected wake-up call. Three nuns went to jail - and the whole world went to hell in a handbasket. This book is about the injustice of the US federal courts which sent the nuns to jail for virtuous conduct, and the public that preferred not to hear about it. ItÃ??'s about political immorality and the meaning of justice in a nation where it seems to be illegal to carry out non-violent protests against mass killing. The book also reveals the corporate sources of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that were delivered to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and raises troubling questions about responsibility.

CHAPTER 1. A LOOK INTO THE PAST FROM THE FUTURE It is unlikely that in the year 2020 anyone will be alive who cared why three nuns in the year 2002 were arrested and falsely convicted of sabotaging the national security of the United States of America. By then, if a free world still exists, it will be clear that there was, of course, no such sabotage. By 2020, a wrinkled George W. Bush might still be wearing his mindless smirk at his Texas ranch. He will likely be as unrepentant as ever for the damage he has wreaked within the world, using the pretext of revenge for 9/11 and fear of other nationsÃ??' WMD. Ã??'What nuns?Ã??'� he might say. Ã??'What nucular [sic] treaties?Ã??'� By 2020, most of the members of the jury that convicted the nuns will be gone, without ever having come to recognize that they voted to convict despite the fact that the colonel in charge of the missile silo said that the nuns had done nothing to impede the use of the missiles, and thus had not compromised national security (as defined by our holding the means to unleash nuclear Armageddon). By 2020, Judge Robert Blackburn may have suffered some pangs of conscience for manipulating the case against the nuns in favor of a government proclaiming its right to hold WMD even as it went to war over another nationÃ??'s non-existent WMD. By 2020, the judges of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver likely will be unable to recall why, except for reasons related to their federal paychecks, they refused to recognize that the nuns were far less a threat to national security than the people who planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By 2020, the strutting federal prosecutor, John Suthers Ã??' whose nunhunting exploits in the Bush political jungle earned him the position of Colorado attorney general Ã??' perhaps will have satisfied his ambitions enough to pause and reflect; but he is unlikely to be humble enough to recognize that his bullying deliberately over-reached the moral basis of what Common Law, as he learned it at Notre Dame University, is all about. By 2020, the three nuns in question will likely have died but will be very much alive in the heaven where such holy and persecuted people live forever in peace. By 2020, the public will have long since forgotten the confused logic and ego-puffery of the born-again ad-man Rush Limbaugh, who announced on November 3, 1988: And now the liberals want to stop President Reagan from selling chemical warfare agents and military equipment to Saddam Hussein; and why? Because Saddam Ã??'allegedlyÃ??'� gassed a few Kurds in his own country. Mark my words, all of this talk of Saddam Hussein being a Ã??'war criminalÃ??' or Ã??'committing crimes against humanityÃ??' is the same old thing: Liberal hate speech. And speaking of poison gasÃ??'¦I say we round up all the drug addicts and gas them. That, of course, was before Limbaugh was revealed to be a closet drug addict whose crime went unpunished, and before the US went to war with Saddam Ã??' twice. In his own words, the ultra-conservative Limbaugh blabbed to the world that America was selling WMD technology to Iraq as far back as the Reagan- Bush years, when dictators like Saddam were cultivated for the sake of their efficiency in eliminating objections to self-serving American policies. While neither of the Bush presidents has publicly expressed support for LimbaughÃ??'s WMD idiocy, over the years they didÃ??'through their political influenceÃ??'supply Saddam with poison gas WMD. If the observers from 2020 hearken back to 2005, they will find that the same wild WMD policy supported by Limbaugh was carried out by two Bush Presidents over the years. Vice President Dick CheneyÃ??'s aide Lewis Ã??'ScooterÃ??'� Libby resigned in November 2005 after lying about WMD and the issue of IraqÃ??'s trafficking in uranium for WMD, as noted in the preface. (This claim was the primary reason given by the Administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In the fallout, BushÃ??'s stubbornness in keeping the US on a war footing wiped out his ability to respond to domestic needs. His untenable fiscal policies raise broad questions about his cliqueÃ??'s short-term and long-term goals. With a $600 billion tax break for the rich, they put the nation into a fiscal box; the box got tighter with the war in Iraq, which cost another $300 billion. The rebuilding of Baghdad drained another $100 billion. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans (in part because flood control funds to beef up its dikes had been diverted for the sake of the war), there was no money to cover the emergency. Bush wildly pledged $200 billion Ã??'or whatever it takesÃ??'� to make the shredded Gulf Coast whole again. But months later, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was publicly bemoaning the fact that while money had been found to rebuild cities in Iraq, promises were all he had when it came to rebuilding his city. Ã??'It blows me away,Ã??'� he told CBS News on December 5, 2005. The irony is that when Bush came to office, he inherited from democratic President Clinton a budget surplus. Bush promptly broke ClintonÃ??'s piggy bank and created a drain on the economy of more than a trillion dollars Ã??' most of it spent on spilling blood in Iraq and applying the bandages. To understand the Iraq War, the people of 2020 will have to learn that such callousness and even the will to create human suffering for the sake of political goals was a part of America at the dawn of the third Ã??'ChristianÃ??'� millennium. But one thing will remain: the festering sores of the WMD of nuclear nations. The US seems to be on track to spread the war in Iraq to its neighbors (e.g., Iran, Syria, Libya) and the possibility of peace in the Middle East will have been once again deferred to somewhere over the American rainbow. The public most likely will have no idea why the government and courts sought to imprison nuns and priests and protesters for their peaceful resistance to the WMD of nuclear nations. On the other hand, perhaps those who tire of a war without end may be curious enough to ask questions, such as: - Who really owned WMDs at that time? - Who was a threat to AmericaÃ??'s security? - Who unilaterally voided nuclear treaties? - Who put the US on a first-strike pre-emptive war footing? - Who lied? - Who profited from a war designed around the body-bags of 2,000+ American lives? - Who once set up Saddam Hussein as a CIA Ã??'assetÃ??'� to wage war against Iran and then double-crossed him?