To the editor:

When I hear the voice of George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, I get the willies. I am appalled the Bush administration continues its charade of “liberation.” The Bush administration lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida. Scared Americans were duped into supporting an unprecedented “pre-emptive” war. When war started, the rhetoric shifted to that of liberating the people of Iraq.

No doubt the Iraqi people had a strong interest in being liberated from Saddam’s brutal regime, yet not in this way — first through U.S.-led sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, then shootings and bombings which maimed and killed thousands more innocents.

Pre-9-11 papers from Dick Cheney’s “Energy Task Force” support Peace Movement claims that the U.S. invasion was about control of oil and corporate profits. As we hear accounts of the ruthless torture and killings perpetrated by Saddam’s now dead sons, might one also consider U.S. war policy, which, according to Amnesty International, includes the widespread use of torture, “ruthless”?

We must hold our elected leaders accountable for their lies and for waging a horrifying, unnecessary, and costly war. In his poem “Comment on War,” Langston Hughes writes that in war, youth are killed for the sake of “truth.” The poem continues:

We who are old enough to know what truth is —

“Truth” is a bundle of vicious lies

Tied together and sterilized —

A war-maker’s bait for unwise youth

To kill each other

For the Sake of

“Truth.”

Lora Jost,

Lawrence