If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.�

-Jeremiah 7: 5-8

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned -
Everywhere is war -
Me say war.

- Bob Marley, War

The corporate media thugs snarled: The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a racist! �Their keyboards spelled out: Anti-American! They turned to the Black presidential candidate, and he pointed his finger at Rev. Wright: You must are banished! Out of my life!

And when I called Trinity United Church in Chicago to speak with Rev. Wright, indeed, he had banished: He�s out of the country!

What did Rev. Jeremiah Wright say? He followed his calling�to remind government of its responsibility to humanity and the Earth and to challenge its use and abuse of power. Echoing Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Wright exclaimed: The U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence!

A few days after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Rev. Wright asked his congregation to consider the origins of this violence:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye�We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.

In 2003, he asked: Why should we sing �God Bless America [?]� He answered: �No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people� God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.�

Of course, no one listened.� He�s a crazy old man, a Black radical, militant, spewing, as one presidential candidate aide said, �inflammatory rhetoric.�

Then we here this on December 1, 2009 from the now President Barrack Obama, Commander and Chief and Peace man: After further review, the U.S. will send 30, 000 more troops to Afghanistan! My administration is taking responsibility�for war!� Thirty thousand more troops for more war in a country where it is said that empire�s come to die!�

Inflammatory rhetoric?

Someone failed to real understand U.S. history from its origins!

Someone owes Rev. Jeremiah Wright an apology!

Everyday there is more.

�On the night of June 10, 2006,� writes Glenn Greenwald, �A New Report Questions �Suicides� at Guantanamo� at Salon.com, �three Guantanamo detainees were found dead in their individual cells�Without any autopsy or investigation, U.S. military officials proclaimed �suicide by hanging� as the cause of each death, and immediately sought to exploit the episode as proof of the evil of the detainees.�� These detainees were �evil� people, and their suicides were proof they were �committed jihadists,� according to a Guantanamo official. Greenwald continues: How is it possible �that three detainees kept in isolation and under constant and intense monitoring could have coordinated and then carried out group suicide without detection, particularly since the military claimed their bodies were not found for over two hours after their deaths.� People are questioning theses deaths�and they should.

Guantanamo officials announced an investigation to begin immediately.� Two years later, in August 2008, a �heavily redacted� report appeared confirming �suicide as the cause� of all three deaths,� writes Greenwald.

One of the young men was 17 years old when taken to the Guantanamo camp. He was 22 when he died. The men were participants in �hunger strikes� at the camp �to protest the brutality, torture and abuse to which they were routinely subjected,� Greenwald writes. Another of the men who committed suicide was scheduled for release that month!

Greenwald continues: On Monday, December 7, 2009, the Seton Hall University School of Law report was released regarding this case.� The report seriously doubted the �military�s version of events and the reliability of its investigation.� According to Greenwald, the �heavily documented,� 54-page report states that the men �died under questionable circumstances and �that the investigation into their deaths resulted in more questions than answers.� The report concludes with this statement: �[W] ithout a proper investigation, it is impossible to determine the circumstances of the three detainees' deaths.�

Parents of 2 detainees have filed lawsuits in federal courts, writes Greenwald, but the Obama Department of Justice is using �every Bush tactic�and inventing whole new ones�to block the lawsuit from proceeding.� Greenwald cites Daphne Eviatar�s report in The Washington Independent (October) in which Eviatar charges the Obama administration of endorsing �the same legal positions as its predecessor.�

According to Eviatar, the current administration claims that �there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgement of what occurred.�

�In addition, Greenwald writes, the Obama DOJ�s brief demands the �dismissal of the case�--�in classic Bush/Cheney fashion -- that merely allowing discovery in this case to determine what was done to these detainees would help the Terrorists kill us all.�

�I�m convinced that our security is at stake,� Obama told U.S. citizens on December 1, 2009.

Bush�s claims to �executive power, immunity and secrecy,� writes Greenwald, once condemned by Democrats and Obama alike, are now �invoked to insist that federal courts have no right to adjudicate claims that the Government violated the Constitution and the law.�

At the helm of this government is a Constitutional lawyer!

The U.S. government is still the U.S. government�a government that sells its lessons from the practice of violence.� What has this government learned from scalping Native Americans, women and children, too; from castrating enslaved Black men or whipping enslaved Black women so as not to harm the property in their womb? What lessons has it learned from providing security in the Philippines or dropping the bomb on whole populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What lessons did it garner from the Phoenix program or COINTELPRO? After subsequent years of a police state in urban areas and on reservations and years of mind-numbing teaching labeled �education� for Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow children�Can anyone tell me what did Rev. Wright say that was so wrong?

Maybe Rev. Wright does not possess that wonderful rhetorical flare that makes gory war sound like the �necessary� passage to glory for Pax Americana.�

The U.S. floats on the blood of millions and, worse, depends on the numbness of the living. It is all one seemingly unstoppable adventure of Pax Americana beginning with the each American who believes in the �deceptive words.�

I watched Bill Moyers� interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone (Platoon and Born on the 4th of July) last week (December 5, 2009).� Asked about the Obama administration, Stone does not hesitate to offer criticism: �You cannot win the hearts and minds of people if you invade their country with soldiers,� Stone answered. War is not the answer. When Moyers asked Stone about President Obama�s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Stone shook his head. �This is a key question. And I think many people are asking themselves that today. Why? He was the reform candidate, the agent of change. And here he's pursuing Bush III policy.�

Yeah.� This all sounds good until Moyers asks about Stone�s own reasons for fighting in Vietnam.

��What were you fighting for?��

��Our lives,�� Stone said without hesitation. ��Survival.��

You travel halfway around the world to fight for your life? To survive?�I think.

��Why did you go?��

��I wanted to.��� Stone was a classmate of George Bush Junior at Yale. He did not want to sit next to Bush Junior in 1968.� He knew he did not belong there�at Yale with Bush.� But he belonged in Vietnam, toting some guns and looking for �gooks.�

Then Moyers asks him about a book (Oliver Stone: A Child�s Night Dream) he wrote before he left for Vietnam.� The book begins with the line: �I killed a man the other day.�

This book with images of war and death�how did it come from?� Stone mumbles something about his mother, television and film�

But there�s this line: �I killed a man the other day.�

Okay. Stone had �fantasies of war.� War was �an adventure.�

War is an adventure! First, attempt to blame mom and then we have war as an adventure!

What is so frightening to me is that Stone�s explanation for going to war comes across as so normal while Rev. Wright�s warnings frightened American citizens.

He remembered Jack London, Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway.�

��So I had to go to Vietnam,�� he said.� He had to save other fellow soldiers there; to do a job as a soldier; to stand with those ��real�� guys, what he called �the Salt of the Earth.�

The aggressor names himself The Salt of the Earth! And what of the Wretched of the Earth�the victims of U.S. air raids, village burnings, hundreds of dead children from napalm and agent orange, executions, My Lei massacres discovered and others here and abroad still covered up? What divinity appointed the U.S. and its citizens the right to explore adventures and dream up war fantasies, capture, detain, torture, and kill other people on their lands?�

And it just goes on: Now, the world�s leading imperialist representative receives his Peace Prize after the discovery of the �Danish Text� by the Circle of Commitment (another name for the U.S. and allies, the �developed� on the �undeveloped� nations) and their narrative scheme to continue the callous disregard of Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow people and the Earth itself.�

Will someone apologize to Rev. Wright!

Where are all those North Americans who cried�hush, hush, he�s a Black man running for U.S. President? Hush, now. Black man on deck!

Americans owe Rev. Wright an apology�before the ship sinks!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.