[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 17310]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     TRUTH-TELLING ABOUT THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: A FIREABLE OFFENSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Woolsey) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, sometimes it seems like the surest way to 
get in the most trouble is to tell the truth about the war in 
Afghanistan. Witness the case of Major General Peter Fuller, whom 
Congressman Walter Jones just talked about. General Fuller was one of 
our troop commanders in Afghanistan until he decided to speak his mind. 
After President Karzai made the outrageous statement that he would back 
Pakistan in a war against the United States, Major General Fuller 
delivered a colorful and candid on-the-record reply. He said, ``Why 
don't you just poke me in the eye with a needle?'' He said this of 
President Karzai, whom he also described as erratic and ``isolated from 
reality.''
  He added that the Afghan Government doesn't properly appreciate the 
enormous sacrifices Americans are making on Afghanistan's behalf, 
especially at a time when we have major economic challenges right here 
at home.
  And what was Major General Fuller's reward for telling it like it is? 
What did he get for expressing the frustration so many Americans feel? 
He was thrown immediately under the bus. He was fired, relieved of his 
command by General John Allen, who admonished General Fuller for 
``inappropriate public comments.'' An interesting choice of words: 
``inappropriate public comments.''
  As Time magazine pointed out, the implication there seems pretty 
clear: What Major General Fuller had the audacity to say out loud--that 
the Karzai regime is feckless and corrupt--is what most people secretly 
believe. Time correspondent Mark Thompson put it this way: ``It is not 
a good sign when what everyone is saying privately cannot be stated 
publicly. In that case, only the troops--the ones dying--and the 
taxpayers--the people employing both Allen and Fuller--are kept 
willfully in the dark.'' The writer Christopher Hitchens put it even 
more bluntly, saying that to silence Fuller ``is to establish a stupid 
culture of denial in the ranks.''
  Throughout this decade, Mr. Speaker, this decade that we've been at 
war, the failure of our government to level with us has been a 
persistent problem.

                              {time}  1040

  Whether it's the phony weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or 
prisoner abuse and torture or just the refusal to let soldiers' coffins 
be photographed--that was during the Bush administration--over and over 
again the American people have been fed a steady diet of misleading 
spin and outright lies. But the people who are paying for this war in 
blood and treasure deserve much better. They are tired of propaganda. 
They are owed an honest accounting of what's going on, what obstacles 
we face, and what kind of progress we're making--or not making.
  Major General Fuller had enough respect for the American people to 
tell them the truth. By refusing to dish out the same phony platitudes, 
he may have lost his job, but he maintained his integrity. If the 
continued rationale for this war is built on a lie that no one must 
expose, then surely that's a sign that this mission is beyond repair.
  The real solution is not to cover up everything that's going horribly 
wrong in Afghanistan. The solution is to recapture our integrity as a 
nation and end this war once and for all, not in 2014, not at some 
uncertain date in the future--now. It's time now to bring our troops 
home.

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