Information and Evidence Unit
Office of the Prosecutor
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM The Hague
The Netherlands
Fax: +31 70 515 8555
Email: otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int [1]
July 15, 2008

Dear Chief Prosecutor,

Congratulations on your request for an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan. When the rule of law cannot be justly enforced within a nation, it must be enforced internationally. In that regard, I would like to recommend that you seek an arrest warrant for the president of my nation, the United States of America. I have read your letter of February 9, 2006, in which you decline to seek prosecution of George W. Bush, and I believe new evidence compels another review.

With all due respect for the difficulty of your work, the case you have brought against the president of Sudan has followed quite different standards than those applied in your refusal to prosecute the president of the United States. In fact, you have refused to consider prosecution of George W. Bush because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court. But Sudan is also not a member of the International Criminal Court. Were you to consider the evidence of international crimes in Iraq as it exists today, and to consider the crimes committed on behalf of the president of the United States by members of the United States military and mercenaries employed by the United States, I believe you would find a case for prosecution that met the standards you applied, and applied well and admirably, to the president of Sudan.

While there is good reason to expect multiple prosecutions of George W. Bush and of his Vice President and top advisors by individual nations, the rule of law would benefit were the International Criminal Court to take the lead. Should it fail to do so, the entire idea of international law will suffer seriously. In the time since your 2006 letter, Judge Baltasar Garzón of Spain, on March 20, 2008, has written these words in El Pais:

"Breaking every international law, and under the pretext of the war against terror, there has taken place since 2003 a devastating attack on the rule of law and against the very essence of the international community. In its path, institutions such as the United Nations were left in tatters, from which it has not yet recovered....We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it....There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation and inquiry to start without more delay."

You wrote in your 2006 letter that you cannot prosecute the crime of aggressive war but only the commission of war crimes that take place during a war, and that in 2009 it may become possible for you to prosecute the crime of aggression. While we must all strive to make that prosecution possible in 2009, it is not needed in order to prosecute George W. Bush, and his prosecution should not wait. As the Nuremberg Tribunal stated so well, "To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." This has proven to be true in Iraq, and in Bush's global "war on terrorism", and there is no reason to delay prosecution for each separate element of the accumulated evil.

In order to prosecute crimes against humanity, you write that you need to identify "widespread or systemic attack directed against any civilian population." The civilian population of Iraq has suffered as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation in numbers and proportion that can only be called widespread and systemic. Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and occupation, measured above the high death rate under international sanctions preceding the attack, are estimated at 1.2 million by two independent sources (Just Foreign Policy's updated figure based on the Johns Hopkins / Lancet report, and the British polling company Opinion Research Business's estimate as of August 2007). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of Iraqis who have fled their homes has reached 4.7 million. If these estimates are accurate, a total of nearly 6 million human beings have been displaced from their homes or killed. Many times that many have certainly been injured, traumatized, impoverished, and deprived of clean water and other basic needs.

In examining attacks on civilian populations, some specific incidents can be highlighted, not all of them occurring between March and May 2003, the period of time you referred to in your 2006 letter, and not all of them involving soldiers of the United Kingdom. It is necessary to examine the entire length of the US-led occupation, and to examine the crimes of US troops and mercenaries. Since May of 2005 I have collected evidence of these crimes on a website at http://afterdowningstreet.org[2] A thoroughly documented October 2006 report posted there and prepared by Consumers for Peace ( www.consumersforpeace.org [3]) with the advice of Karen Parker, President of the Association of Humanitarian Lawyers ( www.humanlaw.org [4]) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), will provide you with much useful evidence of crimes during the sieges of Fallujah, Samara, Tal Afar, and other cities, as well as systemic violations of the basic duties of an occupying power, and widespread illegal use of a variety of weapons. See: http://afterdowningstreet.org/warcrimesreport [5]

The above report, as many others, also makes the case that the killing of civilians in thousands of isolated incidents has been standard operating procedure for occupying forces in Iraq:

"One reason for the huge numbers of civilian casualties under the U.S. occupation is that U.S. soldiers have often behaved as if they have been told to shoot anything that moves. As noted in the Christian Science Monitor: 'The rules of engagement instruct U.S. soldiers to bring withering force to bear on positions they're attacked from, even when an insurgent ducks into a private house for cover'. However, many NGOs have attested that private homes and persons who are clearly civilians are attacked without any possible excuse that a particular attack was directed at insurgents....

"'One sergeant in northern Iraq puts it this way: "If someone runs into a house, we're going to light it up. If civilians get killed in there, that's a tragedy, but we're going to keep doing it and people are going to get the message that they should do whatever they can to keep these people out of their neighborhoods."'-- Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor....

"An attack on the small town of Baiji illustrates situations that have been repeated numerous times and on both larger and smaller scales. The following excerpts are taken from an article by Michael Schwartz, using reports from the New York Times and the Washington Post:

'In early January 2006, …a relatively small incident (not even worthy of front page coverage)…illustrated perfectly the capacity of the American military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.'

"Schwartz cited the Times account of what happened at Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on January 3. The account relied on U.S. officials who had stated:

"'A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men planting a roadside bomb about 9 p.m. The men "dug a hole following the common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement," the military said in a statement. "The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots."

"'The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which was then bombed with "precision guided munitions," the military said. The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at the site. An additional military statement said Navy F-14's had "strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds" and dropped one bomb."

"'Schwartz continues his narrative: The target was a "building nearby," identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy hiding place. According to eyewitness reports given to the Washington Post, the attack effectively demolished the building, and damaged six surrounding buildings. While in a perfect world, the surrounding buildings would have been unharmed, the reported amount of human damage in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.

"'The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that fourteen members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed.

"'Because in this case -- unlike in so many others in which American air power utilizes "precisely guided munitions" -- there was on-the-spot reporting for an American newspaper, the U.S. military command was required to explain these casualties. Without conceding that the deaths actually occurred, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, commented: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."

"'Notice that Lt. Col. Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had actually died) did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield themselves." These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures.'"

A thoroughly documented Article of Impeachment introduced in the United States House of Representatives in June 2008 charges, in part:

"In the course of invading and occupying Iraq, the President, as Commander in Chief, has taken responsibility for the targeting of civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, use of antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, the use of white phosphorous as a weapon, depleted uranium weapons, and the use of a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs. Under the direction of President George Bush the United States has engaged in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations, including but not limited to blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing over orchards.

"Under the principle of 'command responsibility', i.e., that a de jure command can be civilian as well as military, and can apply to the policy command of heads of state, said command brings President George Bush within the reach of international criminal law under the Additional Protocol I of June 8, 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, Article 86 (2). The United States is a state signatory to Additional Protocol I, on December 12, 1977.

"Furthermore, Article 85 (3) of said Protocol I defines as a grave breach making a civilian population or individual civilians the object of attacks. This offense, together with the principle of command responsibility, places President George Bush's conduct under the reach of the same law and principles described as the basis for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, under Article 6 of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunals: including crimes against peace, violations of the laws and customs of war and crimes against humanity, similarly codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Articles 5 through 8."

See: http://afterdowningstreet.org/busharticleVIII [6]

Your 2006 letter explained that in your investigation of willful killing and inhumane treatment in Iraq you were able to find fewer than 20 victims. It would appear you were limiting your investigation to victims of British troops, if not limiting it in other ways as well. More than 20 victims of U.S. murder, torture, and inhumane treatment can be found in photographic evidence from Abu Ghraib prison alone.

According to the just released book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documents and describes what it concludes is unequivocally torture in widespread use by the United States in Iraq and elsewhere. Mayer reports that this Red Cross report has long been known to President Bush. Bush, of course, signed an order in February 2002 brushing aside the Geneva Conventions and authorizing the use of torture. The evidence of torture by US mercenaries and troops is extensive and includes the testimony of numerous victims and witnesses, photographs, and video.

I was playing Gaelic Football which is similar to Soccer but handling and catching of the ball by all players not just the goalie is permitted. It is a fast game (some would say more exciting than soccer) and I was perhaps getting a bit too old for it. It is also supposedly a limited contact sport, shoulder to shoulder bumping is allowed, but if one is picking the ball up off the ground then one is not allowed to be bumped. However, it seems a large athletic young man playing for the opposition in his second game had forgotten or not been told that.

I have no recollection of the impact but am told I was hit by his hip in the left side of my head, near my left eye as he was running at full speed to kick the ball off the ground - presumably motivated to do so before I managed to pick the ball up, and I was stooped over about to collect the ball. The impact reportedly lifted me off the ground and I spun in the air and then landed fully limp on the ground hitting my head again, clearly having been knocked unconscious by the initial impact. Witnesses from my team, including my nephew, say I was unconscious for around 30 seconds to a minute.

They were very worried. I had some brief fitting (which is common in concussion with loss of consciousness) and there was bleeding from the side of my head. I looked very still for a brief time and some were starting to worry if I was still alive. I then started moving and groaning and then anxiously started asking about my eye, which I thought had been knocked out of place. I was carried to the sidelines and it took about 45 minutes before I seemed fully lucid again.

My own internal experience is what interests me and is I think of some relevance and hence submitting it to IANDS. I should add that I am a psychiatrist by profession and used to self-reflection which may or may not have been of some assistance in recalling what perhaps others who are knocked unconscious don't seem to. The alternative is that I started to have an NDE and was perhaps closer to death than I'd like to think. \At 43 years of age I probably should not have been helping my son and nephew and their team make up numbers in a fast young man's sport!

I also am prone to supraventricular ectopic heart beats and occasional brief arrythmias - which is of note given my team-mates said I looked too still even for being knocked out. A psychiatric colleague later suggested I analyse my motivation for playing as a mid-life age denying defence. I did hang up the boots after this.

My experience was I suddenly found myself in a black void. I felt very comfortable but very surprised. There was no sense of vision, including no colour or light (not even a hint of visual stimuli as one may see even when eyelids shut in a dark room), complete silence - except for the hint of a memory of a "click" having come from the left side just some moments previously, no sense of temperature or pain or touch or smell/taste whatsoever.

There was a sense of enclosed space, like this black void was within a container that was not very large. There may have been a sense of being suspended - of floating but not moving - or there may have been complete stillness - at this stage of writing I cannot be sure which.

There was full powers of logical reasoning and language. I found myself thinking "where am I? what's happened? what was I doing?...I think I was playing football...hmmm...that's it, I was playing football...so now.. I must be knocked out...(a feeling of relief - but only slight because I was not really feeling any worry, the experience was quite pleasant and interesting up till then)...it's going on a bit long..(slight anxiety)..I should 'come to' soon...it's still going on a bit long.."

Then something started to happen. I felt myself moving and then a sense of rapid acceleration backward and upward as though I was travelling a huge distance and all around me a sense of small spots of light that could be stars blurred by the speed with which I was flying past them. I had a feeling of excitement and a sense of going somewhere wonderful. I then thought "but no! this is leaving my life like in those near-death experiences..I can't, I'm not ready, I've got to go back." Those thoughts were compressed into a moment. But they seemed to do something. I had a sense of sudden change of direction and rapid movement in the direction I'd came from for a brief moment.

My recall of the next few minutes is of being quite confused. I'm unclear now which came first - I either found myself viewing and smelling grass into which my face was lying, viewing with my right eye and aware my left wouldn't open, and then feeling a ping pong ball sized lump sticking up under my eyelid. Initially, I thought my eye had dislodged from its socket but then heard voices of team-mates telling me it was just the eyelid itself swelling with blood from the hit adjacent to the eyebrow.

I then had hallucinatory/illusionary "memories" of seeing in staccato some of the players moving and the ball moving along the ground away from me and the sky being pink. Or that vision may have come just before "coming to" to find my face in the grass. Either way it came after the period of lucid thought in the dark void and the accelerating movement through "space.".

The hallucinatory images of the game I later realised would fit with my vision in the second or so around the time I was hit, and thus were possibly memories coming back on line. My short time in the dark void and rapid movement past lights - seemed of about the same length as 30 seconds to a minute that I was reportedly fully unconscious.

But as my experience showed me, I was not "fully" unconscious. I was thinking quite lucidly, even though I was unclear who or where I was - although may have soon worked that out, being disorientated initially by the sudden shock of being suspended in blackness, as my reasoning seemed very clear and sound at the time.

My reasoning was much more confused for the next 40 minutes or so whilst sitting on a stretcher on the sidelines waiting for an ambulance. I watched the remainder of the game, struggling to remember the name of my team or team-mates or what day or date it was. I was aware I was confused and had memory problems and worried about long-term effects on my career. Eventually my nephew came over after the game and asked how I was.

An image of a chocolate cake kept coming into my mind. I asked him why I should be thinking of that. He said there'd been a family party for my niece that morning with a chocolate cake. That helped orientate me and I struggled hard but managed to connect my memories forward in time from my niece's party to about 10 minutes before the accident. Which is usual for post-concussion recall and retrograde amnesia.

In trying to understand this experience and I suppose submitting it to IANDS - I see two quite different explanations. The first is my experience reflected the degree of trauma to my brain, with being disconnected from sensory input in lower areas of my brain, but frontal lobe areas perhaps still functioning and reasoning well. The rapid acceleration and sense of leaving my body could simply have been my vestibular (balance) and visual systems coming back online and echoing the "seeing stars" of concussion and movement of my body due to the impact. I think that may be all it was.

However, I'm still struck by the degree lucidity and consciousness I had when I should've been at my most unconscious. I have had an interest in the NDE since reading Raymond Moody's book "Life after Life" when I was a medical student in the late 1970s and have read enough and spoken to enough patients with the experience to strongly consider it to be a sign that the mind/soul survives bodily death.

That knowledge was with me when I made my "decision" to not keep going where I thought and felt the accelerating movement was taking me. Perhaps my sense of leaving and decision to return are accurate and my decision the reason I can write this today.

I mixed my first bag of Quikrete yesterday - with my grandson's help. He is 17 today! Wow, I can't even remember back that far in my own life. Anyway, I made a mold from cardboard (won't do that again) for a large planter. It is now, hopefully, hardening. Wouldn't it be awful if it doesn't - harden, that is? Well, I can hardly wait the 24 hours. I have it covered in plastic so it will not dry out to fast - if it is to harden :-). Hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday. I intend to make this a good day, no matter what the bastards of the world have planned. You hear me, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft (yeah, he's still in there scheming), etc., etc.

Police State USA: Spying as Law of the Land
FISA "Compromise" Completes Transformation of US into Full Police State

By Larry Chin

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9565

Global Research, July 11, 2008

On July 9, 2008, the US Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation permitting government spying, including immunity to telecommunications companies involved in secret domestic surveillance programs. With the stroke of George W. Bush’s pen, the US is now a police state by definition.

The extent of the spying program, and its larger implications, have been revealed by Mark Klein, who blew the whistle on secret domestic spying program of Bush/Cheney’s National Security Agency (NSA) and AT&T:

AT&T whistleblower: spy bill creates infrastructure for police state

The update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the "FISA compromise", or more appropriately, the "spy bill", largely completes the triumph of the Bush/Cheney administration and a bipartisan criminal consensus. By convenient design, the FISA revision derails pending law suits filed against the Bush administration’s corporate spying partners (AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon), silences (the largely empty-to-begin-with) congressional investigations into Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying program. Presidential nominee Barack Obama and the Democrats have now moved to silence all discussion about the issue.

Fear itself, a.k.a. spying itself

Between the false flag mass murder of 9/11 and the creation of the "war on terrorism", the USA Patriot Act and this new FISA revision, the Bush-Cheney administration and its enthusiastically complicit congressional partners, have achieved total victory--world war, open criminality, and the end of law itself.

It gives the US government unprecedented new spying powers and sweeping new legal cover for spying that goes well beyond even the original FISA law---which itself was an abomination that already permitted the US president broad surveillance powers.

Given the fact that the US government is a wholly corrupted criminal organization by definition, the political spin over "oversight", warrants, the involvement of the Inspector General, etc. is all the more transparently ridiculous: the operatives of such apparatuses do not investigate or punish their own. Nor do they voluntarily stop the lucrative and intoxicating criminal activity that is their lifeblood.

In fact, the debate over the spy bill is a red herring, clouding the larger central (purposely unaddressed) issue: the "war on terrorism" lie itself.

The mass murder of 9/11 was a false flag operation, orchestrated and executed by the Bush administration. The "war on terrorism" is a perpetual covert operation, an endless pretext for war and murder, supported by a bipartisan consensus. (See "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda:the database".) No 9/11, no "war on terrorism", no war in the Middle East. No "war on terrorism" lie, no dictatorial powers for the White House, and no beefed-up FISA.

Given that the "war on terrorism" is a lie, the need for unprecedented spying is also a lie. Just as 9/11 remains the endless pretext for endless war and terrorism, it also remains, in its countless propaganda manifestations, the justification for open totalitarian rule of force and intimidation within US borders.

The totalitarian criminal agenda is fully endorsed by neoliberal Democrats, including Barack Obama. According to the Obama campaign, "Senator Obama has said before that the compromise bill is not perfect. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, Senator Obama chose to support the FISA compromise."

The pro-surveillance Democrats, led by Senator Jay Rockefeller and Obama (whose lame hemming-hawing justifications can be read here) are repeating asinine lies, and groundless excuses.

In calling criminal spying and covert operations "important surveillance tools", Obama is showing his truest colors. Obama, whose politics and rhetoric have been consistently in line with the Bush/Cheney agenda on all of the most telling issues (war in Afghanistan, war on Iran, "terrorism", "homeland security", globalization, and most recently, other right-wing positions), is a smooth-talking and appealing front for the Bush-Cheney status quo. Obama and McCain, like Bush-Cheney, will continue to push the endless "war on terrorism" lie, and embrace every single criminal act conducted in the name of this propaganda construct.

All "homeland security"/Big Brother measures such as FISA, in any form, provides political cover for the US government to engage in criminal activity. Any politician, be it Bush/Cheney or Obama, who approve of any sort of "surveillance" is guilty of committing a criminal act, and of raping the Constitution along the way.

Cynical posturing and election-year flatulence from Obama’s legion of defenders and fans cannot hide what has happened, or who is responsible. The rape of the US Constitution is so overt and so egregious that it has set off a wave of outrage and backlash, spawning unusual new grassroots coalitions.

Clearly, however, the powers that be, including the Obama camp, has casually dismissed this relatively small portion of the US public out of its election-year calculations, regardless of how stridently they organize, blog, blow whistles or file law suits.

Senator Russ Feingold (whose own record on opposing the Bush administration is less than stellar) warned that the FISA revision "could mean millions upon millions of communications between innocent Americans and their friends, families or business associates overseas could now be legally collected."

It means much more than Feingold states, and it has for many years---perhaps decades.

Spying: the pre- and post-9/11 norm

Returning again to the expose by whistleblower Mark Klein, his detailed and stomach-turning expose, which includes materials from the key court cases, exposes the fact that the NSA began breaking into local telephone circuits in 2001. As pointed out by Robert Parry, the current program may have been in place before 2001.

In other words, the spying program never had anything to do with international "terrorists", and everything to do with a larger police state agenda, including the power to identify, designate and destroy individuals whose opinions run counter to those of whichever Big Brother is "in charge". This is a long-planned program that 9/11 allowed to push to full fruition.

It is a well-documented fact that the US government’s spying capabilities are overwhelming, and that continuous illegal surveillance has always trumped congressional oversight, and the law itself. Obviously, the light reigning-in of criminal covert operations in the post-Watergate 1970s has been completely undone in the decades since.

Investigators such as former NSA operative James Bamford (author of the expose of the NSA, Body of Secrets) and Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil have thoroughly detailed the pervasiveness and effectiveness of a wide range of spying and intelligence programs used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies. These include Echelon and PROMIS, which are used by operatives in criminal fashion, as ordered by high-level officials, specifically to get around all oversight.

Completely unaddressed throughout the years of noise over spying and FISA, the Total Information Awareness Program (formerly known as DARPA, and spearheaded by Iran-Contra participant John Poindexter) has found new life as the IARPA program.

Nobody is talking about IARPA. Nobody will.

Welcome to hell, again.

The George W. Bush administration seized the White House in 2000 by way of an openly stolen election, then cemented its criminal power into place with the unprecedented 9/11 mass murder, and its two resulting abominations: the fabricated "war on terrorism" (the pretext for endless global war), and the USA Patriot Act (the full-scale destruction of the Constitution, and the militarization of the US homeland).

These continuing atrocities were the works of a bipartisan "war on terrorism" consensus, a full partnership at the top echelons, whose overriding agenda is the survival of the criminal racket known as the Anglo-American empire.

The deepening of the war and security state has continued unabated. Under a US congress with a Democratic Party majority, nothing been done to stop, reverse or undo the world war, boundless US government criminality, open corruption, or the absolute and systematic rape of law itself. Now, particularly with a looming US presidential election, leading members of both political parties have shown their true colors: as flagrant proponents of military-intelligence/"homeland security", and enthusiastic destroyers of the Constitution.

In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John Marks wrote in 1974:

"The clandestine mentality is a mind-set that thrives on secrecy and deception. It encourages professional amorality---the belief that righteous goals can be achieved through the use of unprincipled and normally unacceptable means... .

Today, exemplified by actions of the bipartisan US consensus, assisted by an acquiescent and dumbed-down populace, the clandestine mentality is not clandestine. "Professional amorality" is the norm---celebrated openly, and opposed by few."

In other words, your life and all of your communications---from your emails, your web searches, medical records, and financial information, to your reading this article and clicking this web site---has been "hoovered up" by the US government’s spying machine, to be used against you at some future time, if the powers that be so choose.

If 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the relentless destruction of law since 2000 have not already make abundantly clear, a "Homeland Security" police state within US borders, courtesy of the spy bill, is now complete. Not even the trappings of a democracy remain.

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I'll Not Have Lived
in Vain

Bernard Howe

If I can help one lonely soul
And bring new hope to him;
If I can reach one lofty goal
And never take the win.


If I can do one single deed
To help a friend of mine;
If I can lead in time of need
Sure, let my light so shine.

If I can ease one breaking heart
Or take away one pain,
Or cause one sorrow to depart
I'll not have lived in vain.