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Dead
for a Lie
June 7,
2003
By Mike McArdle
I didn’t know Kirk Straseskie, in fact my only contact with
him was reading a newspaper article about his death.
Straseskie was a Marine who was killed in Iraq on May 19th of
this year. He drowned after leaping into a canal to save four
fellow Marines whose helicopter had crashed. By the time Straseskie was killed the newspapers and embedded reporters
were on their way home. The staged-managed tearing down of the
Hussein statue was just a memory. The little man who had
started the war had taken his dress-up victory lap on the USS
Abraham Lincoln and had film in the can for his reelection
effort next year. The 24/7 cable news channels had moved on to
Laci Peterson.
So not much attention was paid to Kirk Straseskie, who
drowned after jumping into a canal to try to save four other
Marines who had crashed in a helicopter. The war is perceived
as being over and the fate of the new casualties only
resonates in hometowns like Beaver Dam, Wisconsin where
Straseskie grew up.
Straseskie and the other Marines that he tried to save
probably didn’t ask a lot of questions about why they were in
Iraq. A good serviceman follows orders and leaves the larger
decisions for others. They had more than enough to occupy them
without dwelling on the political issues that surrounded the
war.
But Straseskie’s father had seen enough of the war to know
that Iraq did not and in fact had never posed any threat to
the United States as the President had claimed. John
Straseskie who had served in the Army and National Guard for
26 years expressed anger at the loss of his son in a war that
that he now thinks was sold under false pretenses. “He put our
troops over there to finish what his dad didn't do. They found
no weapons of mass destruction," he told the Capital Times, a
Madison, WI. newspaper.
Now, far too late to save to save Kirk Straseskie or
console his father, the press and the intelligence community
have begun to wake up to the fact that they and the American
people were deceived. We’re finding out that Colin Powell
denounced some of the claims about Iraqi weapons as “bullshit”
before his speech to the UN in February. A newly formed group
called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote a
letter to the President protesting "a policy and intelligence
fiasco of monumental proportions." An Army intelligence
officer told Time Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld was “deeply,
almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence". Greg
Thielmann, recently retired from the State Department Bureau
of Intelligence and Research says that the Bush administration
“was grossly distorting the intelligence” on both weapons and
the Iraq-Al Qaida connection.
Kirk Straseskie will never have his own children or find
his life’s work or be able to comfort his parents as they grow
older. His life was ended sixty years prematurely because of a
lie told by his government, the government that he volunteered
to fight for. He almost certainly went to his death believing
that he was in Iraq to defend Americans when it is now obvious
that he was not.
Tony Blair in England will now face a parliamentary inquiry
on why the rationale for the war now appears to have been
false and U.S. Senate committees are at least talking about
pursuing their own investigation. But the gravity and result
of the deception demands a lot more than that.
If this administration cherry-picked the intelligence data
or ignored the real data in order to justify a pre-ordained
conclusion then they murdered Kirk Straseskie and the four
other Marines that he tried to save, and dozens of other U.S.
soldiers. And they also murdered a few thousand Iraqi
civilians who in the absence of weapons have become the
back-up excuse for the war (we had to go to war now to
“liberate” the Iraqis).
If they sent human beings into harm's way under false
pretenses then they have committed a crime, a crime against
America, a crime against Iraq, a crime against humanity. And
if there were real justice in the world then Bush and Cheney
and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would be placed on trial, not here,
but in The Hague where the international law that they have
expressed such utter contempt for is enforced.
Colin Powell? He should receive a worse punishment. The
General should have to go to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and explain
to fellow vet John Straseskie why he helped send Straseskie’s
son to his death for
“bullshit.” | 
