A Mouthpiece For A Menace Speaks

By Final Call News | Last updated: Mar 14, 2017 - 2:40:15 PM

Ari Fleischer, via his @AriFleischer Twitter account in early March, retweeted a short video from the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s account. “This man is a menace. Maybe his account was hacked,” Mr. Fleischer declared.

The Minister had delved into the great insult taken after an interview President Trump had with Bill O’ Reilly of Fox News, who described Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a murderer. Mr. Trump responded that there are plenty of killers and asked the interviewer if he thought America’s hands were clean? “And look at the way they jumped on Mr. Trump. ‘How could you compare America with Mr. Putin?’ No you are not as good as Mr. Putin or Russia because the judgment of God is not on Russia. The judgment of God is on America. You are the most rotten nation on the earth. That is why God has come and you are number one on his list to be destroyed!” warned Min. Farrakhan. He was delivering part two of his Saviours’ Day address, “Have No Fear For the Future: The Future Is Ours!”

Was he speaking the truth?

Let’s not focus on millions lost in the Middle Passage as part of America’s involvement in the slave trade. We won’t mention the horrific, psychotic, psychopathic behavior of Whites during slavery and the daily torture inflicted on Black people. We won’t point to post-slavery suffering with the Ku Klux Klan, Night Riders, Black Codes, the undoing of Reconstruction, the stealing of Black land, and the involuntary servitude Blacks suffered under sharecropping. Nor the race riots and abuses suffered once Blacks fled North for refuge. We won’t talk about Black women raped at will by White males. We won’t bring up the Black prisoners loaned out to railroads, factories, public work efforts, private projects and industries, in the name of paying debts to society after false imprisonment by sheriffs and courts—in the North and the South. We won’t mention modern mass incarceration, the CIA connection with the crack cocaine trade that devastated Black neighborhoods, modern medical experimentation, denial of voting rights, huge unemployment and inferior education, housing segregation and regular police killings.

That alone would qualify America as the most rotten nation on earth—and we did not even recite the stories of scalping, raping, starving and murdering millions of the original inhabitants of this country.

Let’s put that to the side for a moment. Let’s deal with a single moment and an atrocity connected to Mr. Fleischer and the president he served. Mr. Fleischer was press secretary and a top aide of President George W. Bush. As Nation of Islam general counsel Abdul Arif Muhammad pointed out, Mr. Fleischer should know a menace when he sees one given that he was the mouthpiece for Menace One—a president who lied to go to war and who wasted billions in treasure and lost thousands of lives in a military misadventure.

Let’s deal with the 935 lies that Bush administration officials told leading up to the invasion of Iraq detailed in a 2008 report, “Iraq: The War Card,” published by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

In the article “False pretenses,” writers Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith noted, “President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. … On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al-Qaeda, or both. … It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al-Qaeda.

“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements.”

Mr. Fleischer could qualify for the title “menace” himself, given that he made 109 false statements, more than Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and White House press secretary Scott McClellan, according to the report.

The Iraq War cost $2.2 trillion, including substantial costs for veterans care through 2053, far exceeding the initial estimate of $50 billion to $60 billion, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies in 2013. “The total of U.S. service members killed in Iraq is 4,488. At least 3,400 U.S. contractors have died as well, a number often under-reported. Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries. …

“The $60 billion spent on reconstruction for Iraq has not gone to rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, health care, and water treatment systems, but primarily to the military and police. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found massive fraud, waste, and abuse of reconstruction funds, according to the center,” said the report. “In 2011 the group released figures for a range of human and economic costs associated with the U.S. military response to the 9/11 attacks. It estimated the total combined costs of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan at $4 trillion and total direct war casualties at minimum of 330,000 men, women, and children.”

Menace is as menace does—and these true menaces have done much evil.

The Final Call