My group, the Stone Crab Alliance, and I met Mr. Ford at Page Field in Fort Myers, Florida on Valentines Day in 1975. What one might call an anti-text is something to be preached against rather than interpreted. My anti-text is a common everyday contemporary saying: ‘speak no evil (or nothing ill) of the dead.’ What I want to suggest in this season of Christmas is that we do both the dead and ourselves a great disservice in subscribing to that adage. I and my fellows of the Stonecrab Alliance stood with our protest signs when Mr. Ford visited Ft. Myers’s Page field on February 14, 1975 as he tentatively picked his way down the steps from Air Force One (without falling). Not only had he thwarted justice by pardoning Mr. Nixon, he promised to bring I-75 south from Tampa–with all its attendant evils, and, worst of all, he authorized and supplied Suharto with money and weapons and “permission” to kill over 200,000 East Timorese. He was not my War Resisters League Valentine. Our poster signs said so and his facial expression was abashed. Everyone now knows about Mr. Ford's promise as Vice President to Mr. Nixon to grant his personal friend Presidential Pardon--an impeachable offense. Mr. Ford’s autobiography, _A Time to Heal_, is a far more anemic production than Mr. Carter’s list of twenty published titles. Mr. Carter’s newest book, _Palestine Peace Not Apartheid_, conversely takes the circumcised bull by the cojones (I allow myself the use of a vulgarism that was elevated to Presidential lips: Mr Blair’s resolve [to assist in the attack on Iraq] so impressed Mr. Bush that he told Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s director of communications “Your man has got cojones”, Mr Woodward reports.) _A Time to Heal_ barely mentions East Timor. But of special importance is the National Security Archive's record of Ford’s and Secretary of State Kissinger’s meeting with Suharto in early December 1975. The document shows that Suharto began the invasion knowing that he had the full approval of the White House. See: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/index2.html Other documents found among State Department records at the National Archives elucidate the inner workings of U.S. policy toward the Indonesian crisis during 1975 and 1976. Besides confirming that Henry Kissinger and top advisers expected an eventual Indonesian takeover of East Timor, archival material shows that the Secretary of State fully understood that the invasion of East Timor involved the "illegal" use of U.S.-supplied military equipment because it was not used in self-defense as required by law and he said so to Mr. Ford. Although Indonesia was a major site of U.S. energy and raw materials investment, an important petroleum exporter, strategically located near vital shipping lanes, and a significant recipient of U.S. military assistance, the country—much less the East Timor question—barely figures into Henry Kissinger’s memoirs of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Gerald Ford’s memoir briefly discusses the December 1975 visit to Jakarta but does not mention the discussion of East Timor with Suharto. Mr. Ford's does even less. I wonder if Mr. Ford has some explaining to do before the heavenly bar on this fine feast of St. John the Evangelist. The World Day of Peace is fast approaching. Nice-guy Mr. Ford is guilty of thwarting justice by pardoning his personal friend, Mr. Nixon; he is guilty of pushing I-75 south from Tampa through Naples and across Alligator Alley and worst of all his war, the Suharto attack on the East Timorese, killed 200,000 unarmed civilians. Believing war to be a crime against humanity, the War Resisters League, founded in 1923, advocates Gandhian nonviolence as the method for creating a democratic society free of war, racism, sexism, and human exploitation. War is not a way to solve human problems. Join us: http://www.warresisters.org/