THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

Damnant quod non intelligunt.

Of course not!






I admire your tenacity! Excellent question!

For the purpose of answering your question, I assume four things before answering:
1. The Iraqies are persuaded by their intelligence gathering efforts that Governor Perry of Texas has directed and is directing the murder&maiming of thousands of innocent patriotic citizens of Texans.
2. The Iraqies are persuaded by their intelligence gathering efforts that Governor Perry of Texas has and is sponsoring terrorist organizations, one of which destroyed a part of Bagdag, murder&maiming thousands of innocent patriotic citizens of Iraq.
3. Governor Perry of Texas has refused to fully obey a UN resolution demanding that he provide proof that all toxic chemical and bacterial agents that he was known to have, have been destroyed and not merely hidden.
4. The arabic press is objective, accurate, and truthful and not trying to help elect someone running in opposition to the incumbent Governor of Iraq.

Question (slightly modified to make the analogy with Iraq more accurate):

If [the Texas part of] America were invaded by a force of a quarter million Iraquis, how many of the patriotic citizens of Texas would turn out to be fighters, insurgents, or "terrorists" in the eyes of the arabic press?

Answer:

All those mistakenly thought to be patriotic citizens of Texas but found to actually be fighters, insurgents, or "terrorists" who continue to murder&maim thousands of patriotic innocent citizens of Texas, would turn out to be fighters, insurgents, or "terrorists" in the eyes of the arabic press.

Citizens from neighboring US states who come to Texas to aid the fighters, insurgents, or "terrorists" who continue to murder&maim thousands of patriotic innocent citizens of Texas, would also turn out to be fighters, insurgents, or "terrorists" in the eyes of the arabic press.

Next question?

Nein! Reductio Ad Absurdum

Nor were the prison personnel we are discussing under direct command of government. They were under the indirect, indirect, ... indirect command of government. The perpetrators themselves (including but not limited to those of their commanders who commanded the perpetrator's actions) should be condemned, but not their governments -- unless their governments knowingly approved or approve the actions of the perpetrators.



Different story???

You don't really believe all of Islam should be condemned for the actions of part of Islam, do you???

Why is it so difficult for you to validly characterize the opinions of those with whom you disagree?

You should have written:

... highlights the hubris of those believing they have a moral and ethical duty to defend those they love, that somehow a foreign country that sponsors those who are threatening to murder&maim those they love, and has sponsored those who have actually murdered&maimed those they love is a place to invade, and manipulate, all the while adopting an appropriate high moral tone.

Our leaders say it it wrong to hood people and maltreat them, humiliate them and set dogs on them. But somehow some leaders and non-leaders act like it is all right to drop bombs on or crash airliners into them, or shoot them, or cut their heads off, or poison them, or push them off of high places to their death. I do not understand that.

I keep seeing the same image in my mind: it's the guy on the Ed Sullivan Show, the one who spun the plates on the sticks. He was one busy fella, remember? Toward the end with a dozen plates on sticks, all of them spinning, wobbling, tilting. Back and forth he raced, as each plate in it's turn would start to falter, he'd charge over to it and, with three or four flicks of his hand, bring it back to speed and equilibrium, all to the audience's delight at seeing this remarkable display; all those plates spinning at the same time.

So now I see President Bush early in his presidency, spinning those plates of Missile Defense, tax cuts, revocation of treaties, dismissal of stem cell research, disastrous job losses, huge deficits and an energy policy put together by a bunch of people they just arrested for massive fraud and someone, Dick Clarke or somebody, shows up with another plate: Osama bin Laden is determined to attack within the US.

He blew it. He went off and kept a lot of those other plates spinning, but let that one fall.

Today I saw a very tired Don Rumsfeld. He's had a lot of plates to deal with too. None of which he had given much thought to, he wanted to spin the Missile Shield. It was fun to go watch the tests and hob nob with the General's wives. All those other plates were Wolfie's, the aftermath of 9-11, invasion of Afghanistan, keeping the troop numbers lean, then the buildup to Iraq, spin all those plates and kept them from wobbling, a new one arrives in January, something about the Red Cross saying that prisoners were being abused at some prison in Bagdad, well....duh, yeah, well okay, we should deal with that but the damned report is SO thick and along comes the counterattacks and the roadside bombs and getting forced into extending everyone's tours of duty and well, some plate had to fall, it was just a report about abuse and a Red Cross complaint..for gosh sakes.......

Much later, mid April, someone reminded him there were pictures.... and the plates were spinning and falling and the audience was staring, gap-mouthed at it all and Ed Sullivan, over the roar of the taped applause was shouting, "We'll be right back after these important messages from our sponsors."

Joe

and coming up after this important message will be Osama bin Laden with Topo Gigo, s'al right? s'al right! Yes we also have with us tonight senor wences as protrayed by 4 star general Meyers and his barrel of bad apples spoiled no doubt by the commie pinko jewish liberal press. if there were no pictures, no harm would be done and the campaign would run smoothly. It's a really big shoe tonight.

Just Trust Us
May 11, 2004
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Didn't you know, in your gut, that something like Abu
Ghraib would eventually come to light?

When the world first learned about the abuse of prisoners,
President Bush said that it "does not reflect the nature of
the American people." He's right, of course: a great
majority of Americans are decent and good. But so are a
great majority of people everywhere. If America's record is
better than that of most countries - and it is - it's
because of our system: our tradition of openness, and
checks and balances.

Yet Mr. Bush, despite all his talk of good and evil,
doesn't believe in that system. From the day his
administration took office, its slogan has been "just trust
us." No administration since Nixon has been so insistent
that it has the right to operate without oversight or
accountability, and no administration since Nixon has shown
itself to be so little deserving of that trust. Out of a
misplaced sense of patriotism, Congress has deferred to the
administration's demands. Sooner or later, a moral
catastrophe was inevitable.

Just trust us, John Ashcroft said, as he demanded that
Congress pass the Patriot Act, no questions asked. After
two and a half years, during which he arrested and secretly
detained more than a thousand people, Mr. Ashcroft has yet
to convict any actual terrorists. (Look at the actual
trials of what Dahlia Lithwick of Slate calls "disaffected
bozos who watch cheesy training videos," and you'll see
what I mean.)

Just trust us, George Bush said, as he insisted that Iraq,
which hadn't attacked us and posed no obvious threat, was
the place to go in the war on terror. When we got there, we
found no weapons of mass destruction and no new evidence of
links to Al Qaeda.

Just trust us, Paul Bremer said, as he took over in Iraq.
What is the legal basis for Mr. Bremer's authority? You may
imagine that the Coalition Provisional Authority is an arm
of the government, subject to U.S. law. But it turns out
that no law or presidential directive has ever established
the authority's status. Mr. Bremer, as far as we can tell,
answers to nobody except Mr. Bush, which makes Iraq a sort
of personal fief. In that fief, there has been nothing that
Americans would recognize as the rule of law. For example,
Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's erstwhile favorite, was
allowed to gain control of Saddam's files - the better to
blackmail his potential rivals.

And finally: Just trust us, Donald Rumsfeld said early in
2002, when he declared that "enemy combatants" - a term
that turned out to mean anyone, including American
citizens, the administration chose to so designate - don't
have rights under the Geneva Convention. Now people around
the world talk of an "American gulag," and Seymour Hersh is
exposing My Lai all over again.

Did top officials order the use of torture? It depends on
the meaning of the words "order" and "torture." Last August
Mr. Rumsfeld's top intelligence official sent Maj. Gen.
Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantánamo prison, to
Iraq. General Miller recommended that the guards help
interrogators, including private contractors, by handling
prisoners in a way that "sets the conditions" for
"successful interrogation and exploitation." What did he
and his superiors think would happen?

To their credit, some supporters of the administration are
speaking out. "This is about system failure," said Senator
Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. But do
Mr. Graham, John McCain and other appalled lawmakers
understand their own role in that failure? By deferring to
the administration at every step, by blocking every effort
to make officials accountable, they set the nation up for
this disaster. You can't prevent any serious inquiry into
why George Bush led us to war to eliminate W.M.D. that
didn't exist and to punish Saddam for imaginary ties to Al
Qaeda, then express shock when Mr. Bush's administration
fails to follow the rules on other matters.

Meanwhile, Abu Ghraib will remain in use, under its new
commander: General Miller of Guantánamo. Donald Rumsfeld
has "accepted responsibility" - an action that apparently
does not mean paying any price at all. And Dick Cheney
says, "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the
United States has ever had. . . . People should get off his
case and let him do his job." In other words: Just trust us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/11KRUG.html?ex=1085276872&ei=1&en=4c7a0227ebedaaa4

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Ol George has got to be approaching meltdown .....



Shuttle Diplomacy in Najaf

Efforts continued Saturday to iron out differences on the Interim Governing Council about two provisions of the Basic Law, says ash-Sharq al-Awsat Seven Shiite members consulted with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf. The ayatollah is said to be unhappy with a provision that would allow any three provinces, by a two-thirds majority, to reject the constitution scheduled to be crafted in 2005. This provision would clearly allow Sunni Kurds or Sunni Arabs to stop implementation of any constitution they felt was too favorable to Shiite law. Sistani also objected to the current plan to have a president and two vice presidents. He wants 5 presidents, 3 of them Shiites, and one each for the Kurds and Sunnis, according to al-Hayat.

I can't understand why Sistani wants 5 presidents, and I actually suspect that it is Shiite IGC members who came up with this formula and put it in Sistani's mouth. As Borzou Daragahi reports, Sistani is a quietist and doesn't believe that clerics should rule. The main beneficiaries of a 5-man presidency are people like Ahmad Chalabi, who probably could not get selected president, but who want to ensure for themselves some sort of high executive post.

al-Hayat: It was striking that the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, affirmed that the Shiite reservations about the text of the constitution served "foreign parties." He rejected a Shiite demand that the presidential council be expanded to five members, emphasizing that the Kurds would cling to their veto over any permanent constitution in order to prevent a "dictatorship of the majority." AP said 'a Kurdish official said his side would not consent to changing the clause, which was agreed to by the entire council when it approved the constitution on Monday after several days of intense debate. "We are sticking to it because it's a legitimate demand," Kosrat Rasul, an official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two main Kurdish parties on the council, said. '

In contrast, Hamid Bayati of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq objected to the current provision where by any three provinces can, by a 2/3s majority vote, veto any new constitution crafted next year. He said that some of the Iraqi provinces only have a few hundred thousand inhabitants, and it wasn't right that they could veto the constitution of 25 million persons.
March's president of the IGC, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, insisted that an agreement would be signed by Monday, but many observers were skeptical.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat quoted anonymous American sources saying that a third delay in the signing might be disastrous. In its wake, the IGC members may feel everything is now up for renegotiation.

posted by Juan Cole at 3/7/2004 08:54:12 AM


Saturday, March 06, 2004

All Dressed up with No Place to Go: Setback for Basic Law

az-Zaman: On Friday, five Shiite members of the Interim Governing Council suddenly pulled out of signing the Basic Law they had agreed to, with the rest of the IGC, last Monday.

A huge formal signing ceremony had been arranged, attended by hundreds of people and the press, who just kept waiting for hours and hours as the five were holed up with Ahmad Chalabi. Finally the Coalition Provisional Authority announced that nothing would happen, and everyone went home.

The whole performance was a huge embarrassment for the Bush administration, which had counted on enacting the Basic Law as a prelude to finding a way to hand sovereignty over to an Iraqi government of some description on June 30. That deadline seems increasingly shaky.

The renewed determination to have their way among the more hardline Shiite figures on the council may have been sparked by the massive bombings on Tuesday, which fell on the holiest day of the Shiite calendar. A feeling of vulnerability could well have impelled them to rethink the concessions they had made to Kurds and women.

The dissidents included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, and Ahmad Chalabi. Jaafari is the head of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, and Rubaie is ex-Da`wa from Basra. Al-Hakim heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which for decades was close to Iran's hardliners. Bahr al-Ulum is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Ahmad Chalabi has said that he is a secularist, but is rumored actually to have become personally pious. The five met repeatedly at al-Hakim's house, and appear to have received instructions from outside the IGC to refuse to sign the law at the last minute.

The issues over which the five revolted were: the presidency, federalism, women's rights, and the permanent constitution. The Basic Law had stipulated that there would be a president and two vice presidents. It said that the constitution could be annulled if any three of Iraq's provinces objected to it (a provision inserted by the 5 Kurdish representatives). They also withdrew their support for a provision that 25% of seats in parliament should ideally go to women.

A member of the IGC told az-Zaman that this sort of to and froing was par for the course in the negotiations over the basic law. Members would agree to something in camera, then when they got home and contacted persons or groups outside the IGC, they would receive contrary instructions, and would come back in and want to renegotiate the entire issue. This member said that the time had come to abolish the practice of apportioning IGC seats by sect, as the Americans had done initially, and to rely more on expertise and ability in making the appointments. He also said that the 5 hold-outs don't even represent a consensus of Shiites on the council.

The Washington Post reported that the five rebelled at the instigation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Az-Zaman was more circumspect, merely speaking of "forces outside the Interim Governing Council."

Eight other Shiite members of the IGC who did not join them (though they tried to recruit them), including Raja al-Khuzaie, a woman maternity physician who opposed them on the issue of Islamic personal status law and her colleague, Salama al-Khufaji, a dentist at Baghdad University. Likewise, Iyad Alawi, an organizer of ex-Baath officers. Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, the leader of the Marsh Arab Hizbullah, and Ahmed Barak were willing to sign. Wa'il Abdul Latif, a court judge from Basra, was committed to the basic law, as was Hamid Majid Mousa, the Communist leader that the Western press oddly keeps counting as a "Shiite."

The CPA evinced hope that the problems could be resolved through further negotiation. Maybe. But remember that this Basic Law is only a temporary document, and all the issues in it will be broach again when the constitution is drafted next year. At that point compromise will be even more difficult, and the US will no longer be in authority in Iraq. Not an optimistic scenario.

posted by Juan Cole at 3/6/2004 09:53:25 AM

5 presidents? You gotta be kidding! Why not have a rotation every 3 years or so?

Sucks don' it?
We get stuck with dubya and Lon.
Can you imagine the size of a dollar bill with five pictures ........
I don't think they have a good grip on this democracy thing.

The money is not the problem; they just need to show each president on a different denomination bill - after they're long gone.

My posts are too short! Size matters, evidently. Here's one for Ican. He's tenacious, so he can read to the end.


The War is Lost
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 10 May 2004

We have traveled a long, dark, strange road since the attacks of September 11. We have all suffered, we have all known fear and anger, and sometimes hatred. Many of us have felt - probably more than we are willing to admit it - at one time or another a desire for revenge, so deep was the wound inflicted upon us during that wretched, unforgettable Tuesday morning in September of 2001.

But we have come now to the end of a week so awful, so terrible, so wrenching that the most basic moral fabric of that which we believe is good and great - the basic moral fabric of the United States of America - has been torn bitterly asunder.

We are awash in photographs of Iraqi men - not terrorists, just people - lying in heaps on cold floors with leashes around their necks. We are awash in photographs of men chained so remorselessly that their backs are arched in agony, men forced to masturbate for cameras, men forced to pretend to have sex with one another for cameras, men forced to endure attacks from dogs, men with electrodes attached to them as they stand, hooded, in fear of their lives.

The worst, amazingly, is yet to come. A new battery of photographs and videotapes, as yet unreleased, awaits over the horizon of our abused understanding. These photos and videos, also from the Abu Ghraib prison, are reported to show U.S. soldiers gang raping an Iraqi woman, U.S. soldiers beating an Iraqi man nearly to death, U.S. troops posing, smirks affixed, with decomposing Iraqi bodies, and Iraqi troops under U.S. command raping young boys.

George W. Bush would have us believe these horrors were restricted to a sadistic few, and would have us believe these horrors happened only in Abu Ghraib. Yet reports are surfacing now of similar treatment at another U.S. detention center in Iraq called Camp Bucca. According to these reports, Iraqi prisoners in Camp Bucca were beaten, humiliated, hogtied, and had scorpions placed on their naked bodies.

In the eyes of the world, this is America today. It cannot be dismissed as an anomaly because it went on and on and on in the Abu Ghraib prison, and because now we hear of Camp Bucca. According to the British press, there are some 30 other cases of torture and humiliation under investigation. The Bush administration went out of its way to cover up this disgrace, declaring secret the Army report on these atrocities. That, pointedly, is against the rules and against the law. You can't call something classified just because it is embarrassing and disgusting. It was secret, but now it is out, and the whole world has been shown the dark, scabrous underbelly of our definition of freedom.

The beginnings of actual political fallout began to find its way into the White House last week. Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the House Democrats' most vocal defense hawk, joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to declare that the conflict is "unwinnable." Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, rocked the Democratic caucus when he said at a leader's luncheon Tuesday that the United States cannot win the war in Iraq.

"Unwinnable." Well, it only took about 14 months.

Also last week, calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld became strident. Pelosi accused Rumsfeld of being "in denial about Iraq," and said U.S. soldiers "are suffering great casualties and injuries, and American taxpayers are paying an enormous price" because Rumsfeld "has done a poor job as secretary of defense." Representative Charlie Rangel, a leading critic of the Iraq invasion, has filed articles of impeachment against Rumsfeld.

So there's the heat. But let us consider the broader picture here in the context of that one huge word: "Unwinnable." Why did we do this in the first place? There have been several reasons offered over the last 16 months for why we needed to do this thing.

It started, for real, in January 2003 when George W. Bush said in his State of the Union speech that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX, 30,000 munitions to deliver this stuff, and that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to build nuclear bombs.

That reason has been scratched off the list because, as has been made painfully clear now, there are no such weapons in Iraq. The Niger claim, in particular, has caused massive embarrassment for America because it was so farcical, and has led to a federal investigation of this White House because two administration officials took revenge upon Joseph Wilson's wife for Wilson''s exposure of the lie.

Next on the list was September 11, and the oft-repeated accusation that Saddam Hussein must have been at least partially responsible. That one collapsed as well - Bush himself had to come out and say Saddam had nothing to do with it.

Two reasons down, so the third must be freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people. Once again, however, facts interfere. America does not want a democratic Iraq, because a democratic Iraq would quickly become a Shi'ite fundamentalist Iraq allied with the Shi'ite fundamentalist nation of Iran, a strategic situation nobody with a brain wants to see come to pass. It has been made clear by Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, that whatever the new Iraqi government comes to look like, it will have no power to make any laws of any kind, it will have no control over the security of Iraq, and it will have no power over the foreign troops which occupy its soil. This is, perhaps, some bizarre new definition of democracy not yet in the dictionary, but it is not democracy by any currently accepted definition I have ever heard of.

So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.

What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.

And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.

This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.

I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.

We saw a prime example of this during Friday's farce of a Senate hearing into the Abu Ghraib disaster which starred Don Rumsfeld. From his bully pulpit spoke Senator Joe Lieberman, who parrots the worst of Bush's war propaganda with unfailingly dreary regularity. Responding to the issue of whether or not Bush and Rumsfeld should apologize for Abu Ghraib, Lieberman stated that none of the terrorists had apologized for September 11.

There it was, in a nutshell. There was the idea, oft promulgated by the administration, that September 11 made any barbarism, any extreme, any horror brought forth by the United States acceptable, and even desirable. There was the institutionalization of revenge as a basis for policy. Sure, Abu Ghraib was bad, Mr. Lieberman put forth. But September 11 happened, so all bets are off.

Thus fails the "War on Terror." September 11 did not demand of us the lowest common denominator, did not demand of us that we become that which we despise and denounce. September 11 demanded that we be better, greater, more righteous than those who brought death to us. September 11 demanded that we be better, and in doing so, we would show the world that those who attacked us are far, far less than us. That would have been victory, with nary a shot being fired.

Our leaders, however, took us in exactly the opposite direction.

Every reason to go to Iraq has failed to retain even a semblance of credibility. Every bit of propaganda Osama bin Laden served up to the Muslim world for why America should be attacked and destroyed has been given credibility by what has taken place in Iraq. Victory in this "War on Terror," a propaganda war from the beginning, has been given to the September 11 attackers by the hand of George W. Bush, and by the hand of those who enabled his incomprehensible blundering.

The war is lost.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

Nor were the prison personnel we are discussing under direct command of government. They were under the indirect, indirect, ... indirect command of government. The perpetrators themselves (including but not limited to those of their commanders who commanded the perpetrator's actions) should be condemned, but not their governments -- unless their governments knowingly approved or approve the actions of the perpetrators.

they were not under indirect, indirect,....indirect command. Unless USA is pathetic excuse for a country, full of chaos. Even if I would agree with you (and I don't) there would STILL be HUGE difference between american soldier and someone that supports Al Qaeda and happens to be french citizen. I am not sure about president, but in any normal country minister of defense would quit himself out of moral reasons after all that happened, especially after fact that it's clear they knew about abusing long time before photos came to public.
In any normal country I say.



Different story???
You don't really believe all of Islam should be condemned for the actions of part of Islam, do you???

I am not talking about Islam. I am talking about those that believe Allah speaks to them. And those that believe God speaks to them. I respect every religion but I also must add that it's pretty sad for humankind that there is country that thinks of itself as modern and civilized and where anyone will vote for person that believes God speaks to him. Without ANYTHING else (and there is a lot of "else") it's more then enough reason to help this man to cure himself if it's possible, and not to let him run the country.

So, you are therefore telling everyone that Bush should be "cured" and is not sane enough to be President - good point!

MyOwn, Many of us in the US agree with you; this lunatic we have as our president leads this country with his religious belief. We're not sure how often he speaks to god or god speaks to him. It's scary for many of us, but christians are blind to this fact.

From my understanding, most christians speak to God daily through prayer.

Apropos "belief":

US Public Beliefs on Iraq and the Presidential Elections April 2004 (PDF-file!) gives access to some opinion poll data, covering the attitudes of the American public towards the war against Iraq. (It also considers the extent to which the public believed Saddam Hussein and Iraq held weapons of mass destruction and how these opinions impact on support for President George W. Bush in the 2004 elections.)

speaking to God in a way of prayer and having illusions that God speaks TO YOU are extremely different things.
I am from strictly christian country where many people "speak to God" in a form of prayer and I know very very few (and none of them is our president or any important figure) that think that God speaks to them