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Letters: Liars and Politics: Justice Where Justice is Due

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The Armenian Mirror-Spectator
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To the Editor:


It’s election season and like all media outlets, the pages of the Mirror-Spectator are subject to the propaganda of paid political advertisements. If the facts behind the political posturing of these ads weren’t so sad in many cases and the ramifications so serious, I would find amusing the full-page ad in the Mirror which encourages voters to vote Republican in November. But it’s not amusing.

A. Kevorkian of Philadelphia, the ad’s underwriter, declares: “All Liars Must be Punished.” I couldn’t agree more. But how and why he concludes that we should vote Republican in November is bewildering. Sadly, we have a backlog of lying politicians and government appointees for whom justice has yet to be served, most notably George W. Bush and his administration. And these are not lies about extra-marital affairs or historical tragedies that occurred nearly a century ago (i.e. The Armenian Genocide), but events and circumstances in current history — lies concealing the truth about activities that to many people are tantamount to war crimes. To name a few in chronological order beginning in 2001:

•Bush and Condoleezza Rice lied to the public and the 9/11 Commission about receiving warnings of a possible terrorist attack and military preparedness for a scenario of using planes as missiles;

•EPA Director Christine Whitman lied about the air quality in NYC immediately after 9/11/01 at the insistence of the White House;

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•Generals Arnold, Eberhart and Meyers lied repeatedly to the 9/11 Commission about NORAD’s lack of intercept response on 9/11, presenting three different timelines to the Commission (two of which must be lies — maybe all three), which was so egregious that the

Commission itself considered bringing it before the Justice Department;

•Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld lied about Saddam Hussein’s connection to 9/11;

•Cheney and Colin Powell lied to the media and the UN about Iraq’s possession of WMD;

•Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld lied about the use of torture for “terrorist” detainees …and on and on and on.

These lies have put the entire account of 9/11 by the Bush administration in question and have needlessly cost the lives of thousands of dedicated American soldiers and over a million Iraqis and Afghans and ruined the lives of tens of millions of families around the world. Certainly Armenians understand better than anyone the ramifications of lies concerning more than one million dead people.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

And what about Obama? Last I checked, the illegal detention center at Guantanamo is still open for business, contrary to his pre-election promise.

Voting Republican (or Democrat) won’t fix this problem of politicians who lie. In America, where we are governed by the rule of law, only the proper dispensation of real justice for real criminals will remedy the sad state of affairs in which we find ourselves today.

In the final analysis, both political parties are broken and both need to be fixed (or dissolved). So I say, vote your conscience in November. And then watch them all like a hawk.

–Mark McKertich, Boston

(Mark McKertich [AKA Marc Mgrdichyan] is Art Director for the Armenian Mirror-Spectator.)

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