Monthly Archive for December, 2006

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
- Smedley Butler, 1933, Marine General & two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor

From OpEd News: Speech given at St. Mark’s Church in NYC, October 1, 2006

I am Sam Lwin, an ex-Marine, a conscientious objector and an anti-war activist from the first Gulf war. I would like to say a few words about the connection between 9/11 and war.

In the fall of 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush mobilized troops for the first Gulf War. I was a Marine reservist and a senior at the New School. Knowing that it was an oil war and finding out the various deceptions used by our government to gain support of the masses at anti-war rallies, I, as a conscientious Marine, refused to go. So did twenty-five other Marines, eight of them from here in New York City. We were all court-martialed and did time in the brig at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Many people supported us. They sent us letters and books to read and our prison sentences were shortened, in some cases by two years, due to public pressure through anti-war groups like Hands Off! and War Resisters League. During that time, one of the Marine resisters mentioned to me the name of Smedley Butler.

Smedley Butler was a Marine general who twice won the Congressional Medal of Honor. In 1933, he published a booklet called “War Is a Racket.” I would like to read a few sentences from it. “War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

And he continued, “I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force–the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

The whole ordeal in the first Gulf war made me realize that things are not always what they seem to be. Yet, a decade later, on the morning of September 11th immediately after the towers fell, even though I intuited that the Bush administration was behind the attacks, I chose to believe the official story, because I did not dare to believe otherwise.

It wasn’t until the Bush administration started incessantly insisting that Iraq had WMDs, that I realized that something was not right. In early 2002, I began to search for answers on the Internet, never thinking that I would spend five to six hours daily for the next four years.

So now we know. We know that, just like war, 9/11 is a racket, a military false flag psy-op, a highly deceptive series of events conducted to gain the support of the population for wars in the Middle East. Let me read General Smedley Butler’s definition again:

“A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

War is a racket. 9/11 is a racket.

It saddens and angers me that so many people in the antiwar movement refuse to examine the evidence of 9/11. We should ask them to do at least one thing. Watch the movie we just saw, “911 Mysteries.” And if after watching it, they still want to continue believing the official BS, so be it. But for people to say that they want peace and at the same time adamantly deny the direct connection between 9/11 and the current wars is irresponsible. Many anti-war people unquestioningly accept the official version, without even looking at the overwhelming evidence which the 9/11 Truth movement has laboriously collected over the years.

Three weeks ago we all went down to Ground Zero to mark the fifth anniversary of the so-called terrorist attacks. That memorable day — Sept 11, 2006 — was also the 100th anniversary of Gandhi’s first act of nonviolent civil disobedience, a movement he called “satyagraha.” In Sanscrit, satya means “truth”, agraha translates to “effort or endeavor.” Combined, Satyagraha means “work for truth, in pursuit of truth.”

I propose that our brothers and sisters in the anti-war movement, whom I thank a great deal from my experience in the first Gulf war, join with us in the 9/11 Truth movement, to courageously pursue the truth with us — our Satyagraha — to bring into reality a truly independent investigation into the events of 9/11. And through our collective efforts, we can began to dismantle the authority of this traitorous, treasonous, and illegitimate administration in the current wars and their nefarious plans for wider wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Only when the truth of 9/11 comes into light, on a national and international arena, will we be able to stop their immoral, unethical, and unconscionable rackets.

Thank you.

Sam Lwin is an ex-Marine, anti-war & 9/11 Truth activist with Veterans for 9/11 Truth.