This is a letter to our President and I regret I feel I must do it as an open letter, but I feel if I sent it to the White House, that he would never see it.
Right, wrong or indifferent he is an American President, not a republican not a Democrat, the seat you are occupying is an elected National seat, you are accountable to all of us and history.
You still have a chance to correct some of your mistakes, before history writes it's last chapter on your Presidency. I feel it is time you do a Ronald Reagan style "Mea Culpa" and below the fold is why:
Mr Bush, the men in power around you from your Father's Presidency I feel have had an agenda that differs from you, and due to their "trusted counsel" you have chosen to go along with their ideas. Mr Cheney and Rumsfeld's desire to overthrow Saddam.
Mr Rumsfeld is the one who was the Middle East envoy in 1987 and 1988 that helped Saddam obtain the chemicals needed to make the chemical weapons he used on his "people" and the Iranians in the 80's.
They were part of a group that wrote a "White Paper" in the early 90's explaining on why the U.S. needed to overthrow Saddam. This was not in response to 9/11, this is an agenda they have held for decades. An agenda that is destroying your Presidency.
These trusted men of government, men who served in our nations capitol while you were still in college and the National Guard. They have a lot of experience, and a lot of skeletons in their closets. They have worked together for decades, they protect each other, their loyalty is to each other, not this nation.
They committed crimes in the mid 70's while in Ford's White House they have never been held accountable for and the programs they approved or had knowledge of, caused death and disability to the men invovled, and they are still ignoring these "honorable" veterans and their widows, 31 plus years after Congress made President Ford stop the human testing that the CIA and DOD had been funding from 1952 thru 1975.
These "honorable" men around you did not stop the human experiments because they were wrong, they stopped them because they got caught. In the meantime DOD and the government have not sought to "find" these veterans of Edgewood Arsenal amd Fort Detrick's biological and chemical weapons and LSD, PCP etc experiments.
I do not have a clue how the health of the Fort Detrick test subjects is, there have been no known long term health studies of them, but Mr Bush, the IOM did a health study on the Edgewood vets, 7120 of them. In March 2003 the last study by Dr Page was released and it shows that 40% of the men are dead 2098, and of the 4022 survivors they found in FY 2000, that 54% of them are disabled about 2200 men. http://www.iom.edu/...
Your Secretary of Defense seems to be involved in keeping these men and their widows from obtaining their veteran benefits, why?
Mr President, you can probably still clean up this mess, by asking these men for their resignations. Your duty is to this country, not to a political party. Republicans and Democrats both need to realize, that being an American is the first consideration in anything being done. How does it affect their nation, not how can I get more votes. This country is more divided now than at any other point in our nations history, you have the ability to bring it together again, will you?
P.S. My wife sends her best wishes to your wife Laura.
Michael Bailey a disabled veteran
Lexington SC