We must stop our government from manipulating us through our lack of knowledge.

I was one of the many peace activists who stood in front of the Farmington Post Office every Friday at noon to protest our government taking us to war once again. One gentleman come up to me and stood right in front of me and, shouting, asked why I, of all people, demonstrated. He was flabbergasted that we would protest what our government was doing.

You see, I was wearing my Korean War veterans hat and he was a veteran of a different war. I told him I would like to try and respond to his inquiry in a peaceful way, without anger.

Here is that attempt.

I know our government lies to us. All of us should know that our government lies to us. All we have to do is recall our recent history of Watergate and the Iran /Contra conspiracy to know that this group of government politicians lied to us before.

As a human rights lawyer who served the poor from El Salvador and Guatemala, I know that our government set up and ran “death squads” in these two countries. Government claimed that what we did there was to protect “freedom and democracy.” It was a slogan we have used for years but hardly related to any truth.

The opposite was the truth as can be seen by the many years we supported the likes of Somoza in Nicaragua and all the other dictators we installed in power. This includes, of course, Saddam Hussein who was chosen by our CIA to assassinate his predecessor.

As far as this president is concerned, we now know from the efforts of Greg Palast, an investigative reporter with the BBC, that he is a fraud. He didn’t win the popular vote, nor could he have won the Electoral College vote.

The Bush administration was in charge the disastrous day of Sept. 11. There are many, many unanswered questions about that day that the administration is trying to smother now.

Why do I bring this up? Because George Bush had waiting in the wings legislation that provides this presidency more power than any previous president; and it dispenses with many of our constitutional protections.

We no longer have the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Big Brother can now come into our homes and spy on us without us knowing it. He can tap our phones, put intercepts on our computers and get records from all sources about every aspect of our lives.

If veterans want to protest the recent cut of billions of dollars in the Veterans Administration budget, they most likely would find that Big Brother was following them and creating files on them.

Many people talk about supporting our troops. This is an indirect way to express support for our president. I don’t trust him!

We say we are a nation ruled by law. He recently called attention to this by announcing the rule of law day. Yet, this president has arbitrarily abrogated six international treaties we were signatories to so we could continue to have all the weapons of mass destruction he claimed Saddam possessed.

He told the officers serving under Saddam that he would take many of them before the World Criminal Court. Yet, he has told the world that he will not abide by that court if it takes any U.S. government official before it.

This man comes from an oil family.

Zapata Oil and Harken Oil are both companies his father started or this president served on boards of directors. They are intimate in their knowledge of what is happening in this business. They know that the world is running out of oil and that we have a few years left before oil production peaks and then starts downward.

There are only two countries in the world that can increase their production: Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

We went into Iraq for the oil. We must stop our government from manipulating us through our lack of knowledge. Otherwise we permit out government the use of our military assets to steal the assets of foreign countries for private groups in this country. That is what we did in Iraq, as we did in Iran in 1954.

This president wants once again to go into Iran and steal its oil. He is making noises about a reason.

See if you swallow his new line.

Russ Christensen of Farmington is a human rights lawyer, history teacher and political asylum hearing officer.