A Break In The Timeline:
"My son Nick died in Iraq on May 7, 2004. He is buried next to my father, who had died just a year and a half before. That is not the way it's supposed to be.Michael Berg/CommonDreams 16.Jun.06
I'm supposed to go somewhere between my father and my son in the graveyard. Nearby are my proud immigrant grandparents, who died first. That is the way it is supposed to be.
There is a lot else going on that is not the way it is supposed to be. Our leaders are not supposed to lie to us. Yet because George Bush and company told us to beware of weapons of mass destruction and so-called Iraqi involvement in 9/11, my son and the loved ones of 150,000 other grieving souls on both sides lost their lives.
Though I doubted our president's words, I did too little too late.
My son Nick was an independent contractor, not associated with Haliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed-Martin, or the U.S. military.Nick was arrested by the U.S. military without reason and then illegally detained for thirteen days. While he was in custody, the revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public. These revelations ignited the resistance in Iraq and made it impossible for Nick to get home alive.The president's contribution was to order then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to rewrite definitions of torture essentially ordering these sins, and he did so with impunity. Though Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he took responsibility for the resulting atrocities, no consequences were felt by him, but they were by my son and everyone who loved him..."
Once released, Nick was swiftly murdered - on videotape, by a hooded man now believed to have been Abu Musab Zarqawi - in retaliation for the atrocities committed at the Abu Ghraib prison: murders, rapes, and torture of Iraqi citizens.
