Tomas Young joined the Army 48 hours after September 11, 2001 and was paralyzed just five days after arriving in Iraq in 2004.
Now, in hospice care and near death, he has penned a scathing letter directed at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Young criticizes Bush and Cheney for sending him to Iraq, which left him “abetting your idiocy and your crimes,” in what he calls an internationally illegal war.
He concludes: “My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come.”
“I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”
He continues:
“I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.”
First published at Truthdig.com, Rolling Stone has republished the letter in full on their website.
Morning Joe took a deep look at the history of the Iraq war on the 10-year anniversary. Watch the segments below.
