Blood on the Tracks

OpEdNews.Com

My grandfather, Percy Duncan, was a wise old man who taught me just about everything I know about dealing with this world. He grew up in the woods of South Jersey, known as the Pine Barrens, and he used to take me out there as often as he could and simply walk with me. He never said much on our walks and he didn't need to. His simple silence and humility were lessons on their own.

A few years ago, I attended a funeral for one of my Duncan relatives down in that area and ran across a group of folks that I had never met before. When I told them who I was and who my father and grandfather were they all said, "Oh you're from the hunting and trapping part of the family. Real interesting people those Duncan's were".

They then regaled me with stories about my grandfather and my great grandfather Allen M. Duncan, who were well known in that area as fierce individualists, and people you didn't mess with. They were also lifelong staunch Republicans who believed in the motto "Don't Tread on Me" and would fight to the death over their right to live their lives the way they wanted to.

You see, my kin came to these shores in the 1630's, to escape religious and political persecution, and as far as I have been able to document, my ancestors fought in every major war in American history with many of them, including my father, Allen J. Duncan, shedding blood on the battlefield. My father was an Army Ranger in World War II and came back with three Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts and his division was credited with the discovery and liberation of Dachau. My dad then returned to battle in the Korean War and fought at the Battle of Pork Chop Hill among others. My father was a career soldier who gave his all to this country and was buried with full military honors at a National Cemetery in New Jersey.

Before that, my Clan, Clan Donnachaidh, fought the English in the Highlands of Scotland in an attempt to repel the Brits who tried to take over their ancestral land. I am proud to say that my Clan fought alongside William Wallace, of Braveheart fame, against Longshanks, and hid Robert the Bruce, one of their cousins, on their land after the English sent out assassination teams to try to kill him. Some of my Duncan ancestors came to America aboard prison ships where they were unceremoniously dumped on the shores of Maryland after they fought against the English at the Battle of Culloden in 1745.

Even before that, my Pictish ancestors, the root ancestors of Clan Donnachaidh, charged down from the highlands, naked and tattooed, and drove the much better armed and equipped Roman Legions back to England. The Romans were so terrified of the Picts, that they built Hadrians Wall across the border of Scotland and England to protect their soldiers from being totally wiped out. The Romans built these small towers along the walls and garrisoned them with only a handful of soldiers in each tower so that they could keep watch on the Picts. They built them too far apart though, and the Picts simply attacked each tower and killed all of the soldiers in them and then moved on to the next tower. In a short time the Romans left that area and fled further south and never returned to Scotland.

I ended up shedding my blood on the battlefield too, it's in my genes, and I just can't help it. My battlefields, however, were the mean streets of New Jersey where I served as a cop. As a matter of fact, today is the 29th anniversary of one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. On that day, Good Friday of 1975, I responded to a shootout in a small sleepy town in South Jersey where a guy went berserk and started shooting at people in the street. One by one, as the local cops arrived, he fired upon them from a third floor bedroom window.

The unit I was attached to was dispatched to the scene in an attempt to gain control over the situation, and when I arrived, I saw three of my brother officers lying in the street bleeding to death. An armored personnel carrier had to be brought in from a local National Guard armory so that we could gain cover and drag the bodies from the street. Two of the men were already dead when we got to them and the third cop ended up paralyzed and died later on as a result of his wounds. This was only one of many dangerous situations I faced in those days and I consider myself a full fledged Veteran of Domestic Wars as a result of my experiences on the streets.

The reason I bring this all up is, because my manhood and patriotism were called into question recently, after two articles I wrote about Rush Limbaugh and the right wing attack machine bashing 9-11 Family members, brought on a torrent of hate emails. I thought I knew every curse word in the English language but I soon found out that there were a few more out there that I had not been aware of. I've been through much worse in my life though, and actually laughed at the total ignorance, narrow mindedness and complete lack of creativity that went into the writing of these messages.

What did bother me, however, was the vile language directed towards the three women who lost their loved ones at the World Trade Center on 9-11. One person referred to them as "three sluts" and some of these cretins insinuated that these women deserved to suffer and should suffer even more because they had the audacity to speak out against the Bush ads.

The email messages I received made me aware of how the face of the GOP has devolved over time. This is no longer the Party of Lincoln and I'm sure that if Lincoln was alive and still walking around these days, he would most likely ask the GOP to strike his name from their rolls. My Republican ancestors would have raised holy hell over the words and actions against these women, since all of the males in my family always taught me to respect women at all times and to always be a gentleman in their presence"which brings me back to my grandfather.

I remember once when I was around five, we were walking through the woods, when he stopped all of a sudden and simply stated, "Ikey (that's what he used to call me), If you don't want to get run over by the train"stay the hell off of the tracks". Just as suddenly, he started walking again and he didn't say another word for the rest of our walk.

I wasn't sure what he was talking about because there were no train tracks anywhere near where we were, but for years and years afterwards those words echoed in my mind and I never forgot them.

My grandfather's words seem to be very apropos today.

It is very apparent to me that George W. Bush and his followers have never heard these words before, which is really quite a shame. I'm afraid that they've positioned themselves dead center in the middle of the tracks and are unaware that a colossal steam locomotive is bearing down upon them at top speed. By the time they hear the whistle blow it will be too late. Too late, because like a newborn fawn frozen in fear by the beam of a spotlight from an oncoming train, they will likewise be unable to move away in time to avoid being run over by the gathering force of the mainstream press which has seemingly now awoken from its slumber.

For the first time since 9-11, the mainstream press has finally started looking into the actions of the Bush Administration before, during and after 9-11. They are beginning to discover what many of us have known for a long time. We spent two and a half years screaming at the top of our lungs to have certain facets of 9-11 looked into and yet we were either ignored or labeled as conspiracy theorists in an attempt to discount the mountains of hard evidence that many of us had collected.

To put us down and try to stifle us, we were attacked every time we published anything on the internet. Many of the 9-11 Family members were also subsequently attacked when they criticized the Bush Administration, most likely by the same hard core group of thugs.

People like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and John Podhoretz, along with papers like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal appeared to be working together as part of an orchestrated Republican attack machine in an effort to rile the lunatic fringe of the right wing into a lather. Within a week, all of these people along with the papers I mentioned, were hammering away at the three 9-11 family members even though evidence had been provided to them that the three women were not being puppeteered by the Democratic Party or being funded by a foundation run by Teresa Heinz Kerry. Evidence and facts don't seem to have a place in their model of the world, however, since they refused to publish or mention the evidence and facts given to them, and the attacks continued.

This is nothing new though. Even before Bush stole the election and claimed possession of the White House, his attack dogs were ripping to pieces anyone who had the gall to oppose him. Senator John McCain, who spent years as a POW in a Vietnamese prison, and who is as genuine an American hero as you will ever find, was painted as unbalanced due to the trauma of his imprisonment, when he ran against Bush in the 2000 primaries.

Max Cleland, even though he left three limbs behind on the battlefield in Vietnam, was branded as unpatriotic and a traitor and had ads put out by the Republican Party that showed Cleland sandwiched between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden because he opposed some of Bush's policies.

How low can these people stoop?

Even lower than you think when you examine what the Bush Administration has done to try to intimidate and destroy the character of good and decent people who have chosen to tell the truth.

On March 26th and 27th, Matt Drudge had a huge photo of Richard Clarke posted on his website with the words 'Get Him' in bold letters underneath the photo. When you clicked the words you were taken to an article about how the Republican leadership is now requesting that Clarke's testimony before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9-11 be declassified, so that they could try to prove that he perjured himself while testifying under oath during this weeks 9-11 Commission hearings.

In another example of how low these people can stoop, Vice President Dick Cheney chose to unload on Richard Clarke on of all places, Rush Limbaugh's show. With all of the 24 news stations out there that Cheney could have been interviewed on, he chose Limbaugh's show so he could laugh and make merry while mocking Clarke before an audience with a specific mindset. I doubt very seriously whether Cheney would have even tried to laugh or crack jokes about Clarke in front of Wolf Blitzer or some other serious journalist. If he did, his credibility would have been destroyed in an instant and he wouldn't have been allowed to get away with his sophomoric behavior.

'Get Him', invoked in me, a vision of rabid villagers grabbing torches and pitchforks and running off to kill Frankenstein. Richard Clarke seems to be the new Frankenstein. He is only the latest, however.

It appears to me as though the Bush Administration needs to hire a new Personnel Manager. They have lost so many people from their administration that you have to wonder why they hired all of these losers in the first place.

I mean, it was only a few months ago that former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, came out and pretty much said the same things that Richard Clarke has testified to about the Bush Administration's lack of focus on their War on Terrorism.

Both O'Neill and Clarke are lifelong Republicans and were chosen by the Bush Administration because of their expertise in specific areas and given leadership roles as a result. Once O'Neill and Clarke spoke out and criticized the Bush Administration they were crucified.

If they do this to members of good standing within their own political party, God only knows what they are capable of doing to members of the opposition party or to people further on down the line with less political clout.

Unfortunately, we do know how they treat these people after examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of the Good Ship Bush.

Go back and look at the tragic story of John P. O'Neill. O'Neill was the most knowledgeable person in the FBI on the subject of Al Qaeda, and yet he was set up and smeared to the point to where he resigned from the FBI in the summer of 2001. I'll never forget the haunting words he spoke to Jerry Hauer, the Director of Emergency Management for the City of New York, the night before he died at the World Trade Center. Here is an account of the conversation according to Hauer. "We're due. And we're due for something big." That was just -- he said that, "Some things have happened in Afghanistan. I don't like," you know, "the way things are lining up in Afghanistan." And he said, "I just -- I sense a shift, and I think things are going to happen." And I said, "When?" He said, "I don't know, but soon."

Unfortunately for the families of the 3,000 people who died along with O'Neill the next day, his warnings went unheeded, and his expert knowledge and experience was apparently seen as expendable by the Bush Administration in the days leading up to the worst attack on American soil in our entire history.

John P. O'Neill also had this to say before he died, 'All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia.' I'll get back to the significance of this quote in a few moments.

In another twist of irony, Richard Clarke had asked O'Neill if he might be interested in being his successor, since he knew that O'Neill knew more about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden than anyone else in our government. Since Clarke knew that Al Qaeda was the biggest threat to the United States prior to 9-11, it only made sense for Clarke to lobby for a real expert in this area to take over his job.

Like I said before, the Republican leadership is now fighting to declassify Clarke's testimony before the Joint Commission, and yet ignores pleas from the 9-11 Families to declassify the 28 pages of redacted material about the Saudis from the same Joint Commission investigation.

Is tar and feathering Richard Clarke in public more important to the Republican hierarchy than revealing information about the Saudis role in 9-11? You can bet your bottom dollar it is!

If what John P. O'Neill said about the Saudis is true, then why is the information about the Saudis role in 9-11 being withheld from the public?

I believe that 9-11 is the Bush Administrations Achilles Heel, and for over two and a half years they have done everything in their power to block and stonewall any "real" investigation into what happened prior to and on that day. Information about the Saudi Royal Families links to, and particularly the unsettling Bin Laden family business relationships with the Bush family for well over 20 years, could become the spear that severs Bush's vulnerable Achilles tendon and knocks the legs right out from underneath him. They know this and that's why they are willing to pummel and destroy anyone who gets in their way who might be a threat in revealing the truth.

But that's only one part of the problem--

As Commander-In-Chief of our military, President Bush failed us miserably on 9-11. Despite calling himself a "War President" our Commander-In-Chief allowed our great nation to be sneak attacked by a bunch of Muslim Jihadists lead by a guy who lived in a cave. These cavemen took advantage of a military defense system that completely fell apart on 9-11 and allowed four hijacked planes to go unchallenged by the most technologically advanced fighter jets ever to take to the sky.

The Pentagon, the headquarters of the most powerful military force ever assembled in the history of the world was struck by one of these hijacked planes itself, even though there were defense systems in place at the Pentagon to thwart such an attack. The airspace over DC was left totally unprotected that morning, and that plane could have crashed anywhere the hijacker wanted to crash it since there were no interceptors anywhere around even though this plane had been flying for hundreds of miles before it reached DC.

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who our Commander-In-Chief appointed to head up our military, claims that he never even knew that a hijacked plane was in the area of DC until he felt the rumble and heard the crash of Flight 77 as it exploded into the same building in which he was sitting. What does this say about the guy who is supposed to defend our homeland, when he can't even defend his own damn building?

Then you get into the area of intelligence. Condoleeza Rice and other members of the Bush team have claimed that they never knew that hijacked planes could be used as missiles. What short memories they have. In July of 2001, the airspace over Genoa Italy was secured after a threat was received that hijackers might crash a plane into the G-8 Summit to kill President Bush. If they know of a threat to crash a plane in Italy, why didn't it ever cross their minds that they could do the same thing in the United States?

I also get tired of hearing how difficult it is to piece together fragments of raw intelligence, when I know damned well that dozens of foreign intelligence reports regarding threats of attacks by Al Qaeda were given to American intelligence people prior to 9-11. I'm not talking about fragments of info either, these were reports, not fragments.

We also know that a number of people working for the FBI and other agencies of our government have blown the whistle about both 9-11 and Iraq War issues and reported that their work was either ignored, not passed on or was simply discounted as not being important. Let me rattle off a few names for you here:

FBI Counterterrorism expert John P. O'Neill
FBI Agents Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright, John Vincent and Kenneth Williams
FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds
Defense Intelligence Agency Analyst Julie Sirrs
Bush Aministration Intelligence experts Richard Clarke, Rand Beers, Gregory Thielman and Paul Redmond
Former Nixon Political Strategist Kevin Phillips
Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson whose wife Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA Operative
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski
Retired Marine Cops General Anthony Zinni
Former Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki
UN Weapons Inspectors Hans Blix, Richard Butler, Scott Ritter and David Kay

Retired CIA Analysts:
Ray McGovern
Larry Johnson

VIPS: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

From Great Britain:
Former British Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair, Robin Cook
Former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet, Clare Short
Former Environmental Minister under Tony Blair, Michael Meacher MP

In a number of cases some of the above people have sued their specific agencies. In the case of FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds, her case against the FBI was dismissed and she was slapped with a gag order by Attorney General John Ashcroft since he felt that her speaking out might compromise national security. Sibel Edmonds continues to speak out anyway.

In the case of former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, as soon as he started speaking out against the Bush Administrations rush to war with Iraq, he was arrested for allegedly trying to seduce young girls over the internet to have sex with him. His case was dismissed and the records sealed but the federal government then tried to unseal his case and wanted him tried on federal charges. After all of this, it turns out that Scott Ritter was right after all since to date no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix along with UN Weapons Inspector Richard Butler were informed that their phones had been bugged so that intelligence services could eavesdrop on what they were working on prior to the War with Iraq. Blix also reported that there was an orchestrated smear campaign against him that originated in the Pentagon. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan himself recently came out in the press and reported that his phones had also been tapped in his office at the United Nations.

So these are just a few examples about how people who have the guts to tell the truth about 9-11 and Iraq War issues have been disrespected by the people in the Bush Administration they used to work for.

Now that the mainstream press has finally awakened and started to look into these areas that have been ignored for so long, I'm sure that the heat will now be turned up and their boiler will be soon be fueling that locomotive right on down the line.

I hear that train a coming

Allan Duncan is a 911 activist, and a former Social Worker and police officer,  who lives in New Hope, PA.  This article is copyright by Allan Duncan ADuncan282@aol.com originally published by opednews.com Permission is granted to forward this or to place it on a website as long as the article is included intact, including this statement