-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! ARTICLE 1 In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776 The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies Ed.: A reminder of a courageous act, which triggered the most profound changes for the freedom of mankind. We often don’t remember. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity, which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For protecting them by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever: He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare. That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. --- And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. The signers of the Declaration represented the new States as follows: New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton ARTICLE 2 A Crusade To Salvage A Big Gun - An artillery system under attack is spared the ax, for now Ed.: About political pork and defense waste. Should the Big Bertha gun survive, it would indicate that many other superfluous programs could also slip through the cracks. My current prediction: Be prepared for troop cuts to pay for the pork. Excerpts from: U.S. News & World Report, June 25, 2001. By Mark Mazzetti Wars of peacetime are fought with budgets, not bullets, and the casualties are not men but machines. The battles often force the four branches of the military to fight each other to protect big-ticket weapons. Such is the Army's campaign to save the Crusader, an $11.1 billion, 70-ton artillery gun system that has been in development since 1994. The Army argues it can't live without it… The president is among those who have adopted the view that the Crusader is too heavy, it cannot be quickly deployed, and it can't fight the wars of the future. During a campaign speech when he pledged to "skip a generation of technology," Bush outlined a vision for a military defined "not by mass or size, but by mobility and swiftness." The words were written with Crusader in mind, according to John Hillen, a defense expert who helped craft the speech…. …When Bush came into office, some expected the Crusader to be among the first casualties of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's promised Pentagon shake-up. Yet campaign rhetoric is more easily penned than delivered upon, especially when it threatens the mighty military-industrial complex. The military contractor, of course, has at least as much at stake as the Army, and it retains well-placed, well-paid influence brokers to run the capital's traps. Members of Congress have a cut of the deal as well, often with an eye on guns and butter back home. The Crusader's supporters leveraged this "Iron Triangle" to distinct advantage. The battle over whether to kill it or keep it underscores the level of resistance that Rumsfeld faces in his efforts to overhaul the American military… For the time being, it seems, "what is" is what will be. In a recent letter to Congress obtained by U.S. News, Rumsfeld confirmed that final decisions on weapons programs will be postponed until the 2003 budget is prepared in the fall. Nothing will be cut until the defense secretary gets the initial results of the Pentagon's quadrennial defense review, due in September. The Crusader, like so many weapons systems before it, has lived to see another fight. …Based on technology alone, the case for the Crusader is arguably strong. It is superior to the Army's current howitzer, the Paladin, in speed, range, and rate of fire, and the Army even sliced 20 tons off the system's weight in response to criticism that the gun was too heavy to airlift to crisis spots. But fights over defense spending are often more about political muscle than about technology, which is why "Team Crusader" is doubling its efforts to sell the program. United Defense, the company building the Crusader, has produced a promotional video and bought full-page ads in Washington-based political magazines proclaiming the Crusader a "bridge to the battlefield of the future." United Defense is owned by the Carlyle Group, a Washington merchant bank run by former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. Carlucci has met with Rumsfeld since he took office, but a Carlyle Group spokesman would not comment on whether they discussed the Crusader. A United Defense spokesman, however, says the company did pay to help produce a study on the Crusader by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, a defense think tank where Carlucci serves on the board of directors. Both the IFPA and United Defense insist that the money was not contingent on the report's being favorable to the Crusader. Nonetheless, the report concludes that the Crusader "incorporates the leap-ahead technology needed to meet future fire-support requirements." This isn't the first time Crusader has been a survivor. The Clinton administration also considered scrapping the Crusader in its development stages. "I thought Crusader was a marginal program relative to the larger transformation effort going on," says Jacques Gansler, defense under secretary for acquisition under President Clinton. United Defense President Tom Rabaut met several times with Gansler in an effort to change his mind, and Carlucci placed a call as well. The lobbying didn't sway Gansler, but he doesn't fault the effort… Two Republican Oklahoma congressional members, Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. J. C. Watts, lead the effort on Capitol Hill to save the Crusader. Continuing the program would be a windfall for Lawton, Okla., where United Defense plans to build an assembly plant. Moreover, with Crusader testing slated for nearby Fort Sill, the base would most likely escape closure. Inhofe says he has spoken to Rumsfeld "many, many, many times" about the program. Lawmakers from eight states that would manufacture Crusader components also drafted a letter to Rumsfeld, urging continued support. …The Crusader is competing with a handful of expensive weapons systems that Rumsfeld will soon decide whether or not to fund. Others include the Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy's DD-21 destroyer, and the Air Force's F-22 fighter. Each service has launched an effort to save its own program, and each program has friends in high places… *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? 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