Here's a letter I recently wrote friends and relatives (I invite any and all responses, refutations and information-kevin b):
Glossing over and 
covering up american violations of international law. Doesn't that name, Negroponte, ring a bell with anyone? It should. He was the "ambassador" to Honduras during the '80s under Reagan (by the way, 13 members of Bush's cabinet were also in Reagan's cabinet hence the similarities in policy!) where he set up battalion 316, a death squad that would attack and kill civilians all over the country killing countless men, women and children in order to quash support for popular civil rights and democratic movements and keep the oppressive, US backed government in power. Sounds like a real peach, eh? I put the word ambassador in quotes because although it was his title he was actually more of a proconsul who took us back to the age of gunboat diplomacy where the ambassador would basically run the country. As ambassador he was a direct superior of the head of the CIA branch in the country (all american ambassadors to any country have this privilege) . Meaning he was constantly kept abreast of all covert and overt operations. So when John Negroponte stated in front of the senate in his confirmation hearings to become ambassador to Iraq that he had not heard of battalion 316 until years after he left Honduras, that he had 
no knowledge of human rights violations during his stint as ambassador and that he believes to this day that there were never any "death squads' in Honduras you can understand my shock and awe. Now these facts I cite are not some conspiricy theory dreamed up by some left wing extremist wacko. No, no, these are facts released in declassified documents from the period which are now available to the general public. This means that congress is also privy to these facts. So when Negroponte lied directly to congress they either knew it and said nothing, or, they didn't do their homework and just let this monster pass through just because the president said so. 
So now Negroponte will be confirmed by the senate as Director of National Intelligence ushering in a new era of domestic peace and tranquility (extreme sarcasm here). In a time where Bush is trying to systematically dismantle many of the social programs we the people have fought for over the last century (in an internal White House memo it was stated that the dismantling of social security would be one of the greatest conservitive political victories ever) and america is seen by a vast majority of the world population as the biggest threat to the world, american citizens need to wake up and realize that we are fastly becoming the most despised country on the planet (the poll I got this info from ranked the US higher than Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Al Queda or Iraq or anything else as the number one danger to world security, and studies funded by the state department let Bush know that an invasion of Iraq would only increase the level of terror in the world. He knows this yet he declares that he doesn't understand why other countries hate us so much with an air of bewilderment). If we don't do something about it the 9/11-type terrorist attacks will multiply. Watch out citizens of america! The proverbial shit is hitting the fan. I can only hope and pray that Bush doesn't do anything irreparable before the end of his term.words mean nothing. Sure, they're pretty and they boost peoples pride to use them but what I see happening is that the current administration is spewing out ideologically charged words as a smokescreen and, more oftenly as a substitution for the facts. When Bush uses the word freedom 11 times in a speech and makes constant references to being a beacon of democracy where is the space for actual facts!? Now when Bush lauds Negroponte for being a real patriot and a champion for freedom and democracy and say someone comes up and says, "hey, I have government documents here that prove that Negroponte was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Hondurans and countless civil rights violations," Bush (or any other rabid, blinded patriot afraid of being called anti-american) can dismiss this person as unpatriotic and a hater of america without having to get into the details.I love the US. I love it so much that it saddens, sickens and horrifies me to see the place that we are now occupying on the world scene. Look at the huge list of "democracies" we have tried to establish all over the world and you will see that no semblance of democracy was ever set up. And that even the opposite, extremely oppressive regimes, were put in place of democratically elected ones (Honduras, El Salvador, The Phillipines, Indonesia, not to mention Vietnam and Korea, and the list goes on). Lofty words like liberation and freedom and democracy were bandied about but nothing was ever established on an enduring basis. Beware of lofty words. Insist on lofty actions.someone who has internalized the values of this administration or chooses to believe that they'll do what's right can swallow this. Now if there was some kind of debate in the mainstream press about how to solve the problem peacefully then there could possibly be some hope to a peaceful settlement in reality. the rest of the world is. The rest of the world knows that the US is a outlaw state that plays by it's own rules when it comes to the UN and the world. They always find a way to be the exception to the rule where all the other countries of the world are obliged to follow UN rulings or else be set to rights by a UN coalition. Why? Are we so much smarter than the combined rest of the world? Do we know some secret that other countries don't (and if we did why wouldn't we share it)? Or, is it just that we don't want to be told what to do so we can keep violating UN law to fill the coffers of the rich? You want to know how to stop terrorism? It's painfully simple. Stop running the world as if we were it's owners and, for that matter, as if it was an infinite resource and an infinite garbage, and follow the UN in it's decisions! Otherwise what purpose does the UN serve if a country can get away with violating it's laws with impunity? If we do that, I guarantee that terrorism will all but stop. Plus we can stop putting all these billions into the military and spend that money on domestic problems like universal health care and social security (which, by the way is not in crisis even though the conservatives would have you believe it-I invite you to check the facts yourselves). The US is the richest country in the world but it is a disgrace in regards to the fact that we cannot set up a universal health care program or take care of our poor because all this money goes into the completely unnecessary military machine which jumps from war to war under the guise of making the world safer. Can anyone in their right mind believe that a bigger army makes the world safer? We do not need an army this big! The UN sends coalitions of troops from many countries when it sees the need. We can send the ones they ask for, period! of mankind; the two parties sit down and talk and, more importantly, listen! How are problems resolved in a marriage? The same way! Do you smack your wife because she doesn't agree with you? I'm sure there are some who do but intelligent people know that the only way to resolve a problem is by discusion and airing of the grievences with a real desire to rectify the situation.