The Story of Bob Bowman

Campaign: Bob Bowman for Congress

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. is President of the Institute for Space and Security Studies, Executive Vice President of Millennium III Corporation, and retired Presiding Archbishop of the United Catholic Church. He flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam and directed all the “Star Wars” programs under Presidents Ford and Carter. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers' ROTC Award of Merit (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors.

I want to start with a scary thought: Can you imagine what would have happened if George W. Bush had been President during the Cuban missile Crisis.

You people who are out here protesting, you are the shock troops battling to preserve our cherished freedoms. You know our freedoms are not under attack from the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Bathist Party. They’re under attack by the likes of John Ashcroft. They’re trampled by Donald Rumsfeld, they’re disdained by Dick Cheney, and they’re not even understood by George W. Bush.

The battle to preserve our freedoms is not taking place in Baghdad and Tikrit and Falluja. It’s taking place in peace marches and demonstrations in Ghiradeli Park in San Francisco, in Memorial Park in Oklahoma City, and in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC.

The front lines are right here. You are preserving our cherished freedoms by exercising them in spite of ridicule and opposition. The battle to preserve our freedoms is you.

You are the foot soldiers protecting our civil rights.

You are the Minutemen sounding the alarm against tyranny.

You are upholding the spirit of the American Revolution.

You are preserving the freedoms that the troops in the desert have a right to come back to.

The troops getting shot at in Iraq are not protecting us, we are protecting them and their honor and their freedom. We my sisters and brothers are protecting this nation by speaking truth to power.

We’re speaking truth to a pack of liars.

We must do it loudly and fearlessly and courageously and joyfully, for we are the Patriots. And when we speak, this is the truth that we proclaim:

This war in Iraq has nothing to do with National Security or freedom or democracy or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with money, it has to do with oil, and it has to do with raw imperial power. And it’s based totally on lies.

Those that forced this war on an unwilling world are guilty of violating the US Constitution, the UN Charter, the Nuremburg Principles and International Law. What they have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and treason!

Before this war started, we knew it would fracture NATO, split the United Nations, seperate us from our allies and destroy the great nation we inherited from our fathers who died in World War II, and it has.

We knew it would make our beloved country feared and hated and outcast from the world community, a pariah among the peoples and the number one rogue nation on Earth, and it has.

This is nothing but treason.

We knew this sadistic corporate war would incense the Arab world, provide thousands of new Osama bin Ladens and enormously increase the terrorist threat, and it has.

We knew it would further endanger the American people and the British people and destroy our National Security, and it has.

This cabal of neoconservatives from PNAC who planned this war, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle, Jeb Bush - even before Dubya became President - they told us why they had to do it, they said we need to occupy Iraq permanently in order to dominate Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the southern Russian Republics around the Caspian Sea. We need to control the entire Middle East and all it’s oil.

This is nothing but treason.

As other speakers have said, they knew the American people wouldn’t stand for it, and they said so in their documents, and they said, unless there’s that new Pearl Harbor. Well 9/11 did supply that. And we’ve been lied to not only about the war, but about 9/11 itself.

The Bush administration was warned. They were warned by the Clinton Administration during the transition period, they were warned by the intelligence agencies of eleven other nations, they were specifically warned by one FBI agent that Moussawi was planning on flying a hijacked airliner, “into the World Trade Center.”

They ignored the warnings, more than that, we have mounting evidence that -at least-, they made it impossible for those planes to be intercepted.

If our government had merely done nothing - and I say that as an old interceptor pilot and I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were and I know what they changed them to - if our government had merely done nothing and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the twin towers would still be standing and thousands of Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!

As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by and watch our security destroyed by a President who went AWOL rather than serve in Vietnam. As one who has devoted his life to the security of this country. I will not stand by and watch an appointed President send our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil companies.

Patriotism demands that I speak out and call it by it’s name. It is treason.

I joined the Air Force a long time ago to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita-Banana, Exxon and Halliburton. We’ve had enough corporate wars. No more Iraqs, no more Kosovos, no more El Salvadors, No more Columbias.

These are not isolated incidents of stupidity, they’re part of a long bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. It is a new form of colonialism, all the benefits and none of the responsibilities. It violates our Constitution, it endangers our people and it is treason.

As a pilot who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that includes a renegade President. It’s time for George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and the whole Oil Mafia to be removed from office and indicted for treason.

We owe it to the men and women serving in Iraq to end the occupation, restore our credibility and honor and bring them home, and it could be done if we had a President who would go to the UN and say we made a horrible mistake, it was wrong and we make you three committments:

1. We give up all rights to Iraqi oil
2. We give up all rights to the rebuilding contracts- if Halliburton wants a contract from you, they have to bid on it like anybody else, and they have to hire Iraqis to do the work for a change.
3. We give up all rights to those 14 permanent military bases we’re building in Iraq at this time.

And the people in the White House are not going to make those commitments and so they have to go and all the puppeteers with them.

You know we are the people and we are sovereign. We are the patriots and the whole world is with us.

Everywhere in the country that they have a free press, all over the world people know the facts and they are with us. Not the people out there, not the deadheads, not the know-nothings, not the chickenhawks, they’re with us.

Don’t let anybody intimidate you into silence, it’s time for all of us to speak truth to power. Our sons and daughters are being killed, they’re being maimed by the tens of thousands, they’re being poisoned by Depleted Uranium by the hundreds of thousands. Their children are being born with birth defects, horrible birth defects, at an alarming rate. We’re being lied to about all that as well.

Our sons and daughters in uniform are being dehumanized, emotionally damaged, psychologically destroyed, they’re being made not just to kill, but to hate. Those who return are prone to domestic violence, divorce and suicide. The lies, the killing and the destruction of our young sons and daughters must not continue. We must end it. Patriotism demands that we speak truth to power, and that we support what’s left of our troops by bringing them home now.

Together we can do it. We can get the truth out there to the American People, we’re on the verge. We’ve got half the people with us, we’ve got to go after the other half. And together we can take back our country and get the liars the heck out of there.

God Bless America, and God grant us regime change in Washington DC.