A recent letter I wrote to the editor of the Comox Valley Record,

Dear editor,

Re: Freedom never free.

As much as I agree wholeheartedly with Colonel J.K.Ambler's assertion that "as long as some of us on earth are not free then none of us are free", I find his comments regarding the recent peace demonstration held outside the gates of 19 Wing Comox to be dismissive of the efforts of those who participated. Personally, I thank them for representing my interests as a civilian, knowing that civilians invariably suffer the most casualties in any war.

I believe we must honor every sincere attempt by civilians to alert their community to critical issues regarding government activities. Recently, under the Harper administration, Canadian foreign policy has become increasingly aligned with American foreign policy under the administration of George W.Bush. This is the same foreign policy that has given rise to hostilities that have recently been shown by the prestigious Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to have caused the death of not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians. This fact alone should alarm all Canadians but there is much, much more to be concerned about.

As painful as it is to entertain the possibility that 9/11 was an "inside job", a rising tide of concrete evidence (currently pervading the alternative media) points to this possibility. Evidence indicates that the destruction of the Twin Towers and nearby Building 7 were controlled demolitions precisely timed to coincide with the simultaneous destruction of what are said by authorities to have been terrorist-controlled aircraft. Equally startling is the fact that the official government explanation regarding the attempted destruction of the Pentagon on the same day lacks any conclusive supportive evidence and remains to this day shrouded in controversy.

Equally disturbing is the fact that the Bush administration has used to full advantage the widespread fear generated by 9/11 to advance their own political agenda. This is much the same as President Johnson and his administration covertly orchestrating the Gulf of Tonkin incident to rally public support in favor of going to a war with North Viet Nam that led to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. The Tonkin incident, now openly admitted to by the Pentagon, is only one of a multitude of covert operations orchestrated by elected American officials to pull the wool over the eyes, not only of the American people but of the eyes of the rest of the world as well.

Under the pretext of national security, the Bush Administration has successfully gutted the American Constitution of many of its most essential elements of democratic process including such a long-standing provision as the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus that has its origins in the Magna Carta of 1215.

As a Canadian citizen, I demand that our troops be withdrawn from the struggle in Afghanistan and that any future deployment of troops anywhere on the planet be based on the kind of peacekeeping role pioneered by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Rather than support an imperialist agenda hell bent on global domination, let us look for guidance in the examples of peaceful, historical exemplars like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. who, like many of our soldiers, made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of liberty and freedom for all.