NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actor Sean Penn published a 4,000-word
open letter in the front section of the New York Times on
Friday defending his December trip to Baghdad and criticizing
the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Penn would not comment on why he chose to place the
full-page advertisement, preferring to "let the essay speak for
itself," the actor's publicist Mara Buxbaum said.
Penn wrote that he was moved by a sense of patriotism to
question the underlying purpose of U.S. policy to force out
Saddam Hussein, who he described as a "beast among men."
"Our flag has been waving, it seems, in servicing a regime
change significantly benefiting U.S. corporations," said Penn,
questioning whether rebuilding the nation would benefit the
"people of either Iraq or the United States."
Penn said U.S. claims that an invasion was necessary over
fears of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were false.
"We found that our secretary of state presented plagiarized
and fictitious evidence of WMD's in Iraq to the American people
and the world," he wrote. "Any responsible person must ask, in
whose hands our flag now waves and what perception the world
may have of it in those hands."
Penn's agent declined to comment on how much the
advertisement cost. A Times spokeswoman said the standard price
for a full page ad in that section of the newspaper is about
$135,000.
"We see Bechtel. We see Halliburton. We see Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld," Penn wrote. "We see dead Iraqi civilians. We see no
WMDs. We see chaos in the Baghdad streets. But no WMDs. We see
the disappearance of a murderous Iraqi dictator, who relented
his struggle and ran without the use of WMDs."
Friday's piece was not the first Penn has placed in a major
newspaper. He wrote an open letter to President Bush published
in October 2002 by The Washington Post at a reported cost of
$56,000, expressing his anti-war views and concerns about the
administration's "intolerance of debate."
Penn wrote in the Times that following the October letter,
"I was hit by a tidal wave of media misrepresentation, and even
accusations of treason."
Reuters/VNU
