Vale Harold Pinter. Is our Conscience Dead?

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."

Writing on CommonDreams she pays tribute - no, homage! - to Harold Pinter, who died the other day:

"On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptable speech. I was in London in December, 2005 speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech-not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.

I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Noble Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight onto the tragic effects of the past decades of U.S. foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.

Pinter's Laureate speech question "Is Our Conscience Dead" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or as in Cheney's case, purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable."

Continue reading the piece here - including the Pinter speech.

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