Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Daniel Ellsberg muses about Bush and God


I have no idea whether Daniel Ellsberg is religious. The former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War exposing any number of government lies and misdeeds is plenty upset about our present war. SusanG reported these observations on the President's religious megalomania in Part 6 of a series of interviews with Ellsberg:

How reliable is [Bush's] channel to God? A God, by the way, who made George Bush our president. (What would that say, to the rest of us, about God?)

He has said on more than one occasion that God told me to attack Saddam Hussein and I did. And I've said to audiences, he was wrong. He was mistaken. That was not God. I feel very sure about this.

I've discovered that I do have some theological preconceptions, more than I would have thought. That's one of them. When you hear a voice you take to be God that tells you to invade a country that has not attacked and is no threat to us, get a second opinion.

The whole Ellsberg interview is worth reading -- long and scary. I'll just report that he says

I think we'll see from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands - and I mean plural, hundreds of thousands - of Middle Easterners, Muslims and sympathizers, some non-Muslim dissenters but mostly young Muslim males, in camps or deported. And that will happen without a whole lot of resistance by the public after another 9/11.

Unfortunately, it doesn't require the experience of an Ellsberg to believe that prediction.

1 comment:

Closed said...

Thanks for pointing me to this. He names some of my deepest concerns about where we could easily head and how much of the Constitution has already been undermined.