PRESS RELEASE
Open Letter Scoring Barbara Lee for Violating Her Principles in Opposing Trump Meeting with Putin
July 11, 2017 (EIRNS)—ConsortiumNews published an Open Letter to Rep. Barbara Lee yesterday, calling her out for joining the Democratic Party’s embrace of the New McCarthyism and Cold War, in violation of her historic role in standing up against the frenzy for war after 9/11. The author was Norman Solomon, coordinator of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and Bernie Sanders backer in last election.
"Your longtime wisdom is antithetical to the tweet that you sent out after the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin from your official Rep. Barbara Lee Twitter account: ‘Outraged by President Trump’s 2 hr meeting w/Putin, the man who orchestrated attacks on our democracy. Where do his loyalties lie?’"
Solomon wrote.
"In mid-September 2001, when you implored the Congress and the country to ‘think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control,’ the words of your speech were beacons of sanity in a propaganda storm for war. But now, as I watch a video of those two transcendent minutes, some of your old words echo in a newly haunting way.
"Now it falls to peace advocates who read your new words to urge you to ‘think through the implications’ of the political line you’ve just taken, ‘so that this does not spiral out of control’. And now, peace advocates must remind you of other insightful words from your historically prescient speech nearly 16 years ago: ‘Some of us must urge the use of restraint.’
"Your declaration on Friday that you are ‘outraged’ by a meeting between the Presidents of the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers is the opposite of restraint. Likewise, your baiting of Trump with the question ‘Where do his loyalties lie?’ echoes the accusations of treason hurled at you for years. Such rhetoric is far beneath you and beneath any leader with a responsibility to encourage diplomatic discourse, especially between two nations brandishing huge arsenals of nuclear weapons....
"To counteract what Martin Luther King Jr. called the ‘madness of militarism,’ we must get off a partisan bandwagon when it is heading toward military catastrophe."
