January 28, 2021

Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico

I clearly remember the moment when General Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State and the most credible person in George W. Bush’s cabinet made the case for war in Iraq.

It was February 5, 2003. I was a young military intelligence officer at the time, watching from a makeshift army base in Kuwait not far from the Iraq border.

Back then I was a true believer, trusting that the government was a force for good, “making the world safe for democracy. . .”

But that night, it all changed for me.

Powell told the world unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, an assertion that history has proven categorically wrong.

Back then, within the intelligence community, many people already knew the appalling truth. So when General Powell spoke to the world, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

That night it became clear to me that the government was lying, and that the whole case for war was being fabricated.

It was crushing, like finding out everything I’d been told throughout my life was total bullshit.

So for the first time, I broke out of the spell and began questioning. Everything.

I started learning about the extraordinary political power of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about decades earlier. (Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European theater during World War II, was no pacifist. So for him to warn about unchecked power and ambition in that arena was significant.)

My reading led me to the fraudulent “reasons” for many previous wars... going as far back as the Mexican War in 1845, one deeply criticized by Abraham Lincoln himself.

That led me to the Constitution, to which all military officers swear an oath to support and defend…

… and it surely didn’t seem like we were supporting or defending the Constitution by waging an ill-conceived, illegal war.

I couldn’t talk to my professional colleagues. Everyone was so gung-ho, I felt like an outcast.

When I returned home, instead of relief, I felt alarmed..

While I was away the country had noticeably turned into a police state.

Yet people seemed oblivious to the change, drinking in the propaganda like a spiked punch bowl.

All the loud, bombastic nonsense and pledges of allegiance were merely illusions masking modern day serfdom. The media was spoon-feeding an official narrative to the public. Dissent from that official narrative, even questioning the war at all, branded you a conspiracy theorist. You were “harming” America with your desire for facts and answers and truth.

Sound familiar? 

Never has it been more important to question everything.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s continuation of this story to learn how you can regain your freedom…

To your freedom and prosperity,