Dear Editors,

It is no surprise that establishmentarians like yourselves object to our band's art work and political principles. We believe that individuals who feel the paranoid "War on Terror" security establishement has become a self-perpetuating, overzealous, violent enterprise would strongly disagree with your conclusions.

To be clear, The Suicide Pilots band logo and song lyrics do not "celebrate terrorism," as your armchair editorialists suggest. Rather, such lyrics allude to the rise of neo-Conservatism in this country and the consequences for civil liberties. There have recently been countless examples of this current government attempting to squelch dissent. We are pointing out how the state calls its own violence law, but calls the deviance of individuals 'crime' or 'terror'. Such a 'love it or leave it' attitude by the editorialists serves a mystifying function, insofar as their trial by media comments comprise an individualizing discourse unable to account for state violence and the corporate media's complicity therein. We are not "celebrating terrorism," but we are very much empathetic towards those who have been poached and tortured in this phony "War on Terror" by Canadian as well as American security and intelligence agencies. Only organized resistance to the violence of the state -- its security certificates, its deportations, its secret trials, its renditions, its detentions – will suffice as a real challenge.

The 'love it or leave it' attitude by the editorialists denies the possibilities of politics beyond state sovereignty and negates the lives of those who participate in such struggle. It eschews the racialized violence that has been perpetrated upon the bodies of innocent people caught up in this "War". That the editorialists are unable to allow space for alternative political positions shows how it is their position that is "crude" and "cheap". This pro-government sentiment, that you so gladly articulate at the expense of more intellectually honest treatment of our politics, is but another example of the Citizen's hypocricy.

You re-act with outrage towards our symbolic references. Where was your outraged editorial when the Conservatives tarred all those critical of Israel's foreign policy as anti-semites? If you wish to discuss crude invocations of tradgedy for petty political gains, you missed a sterling opportunity provided by the current masters of hyperbole and spin themselves. Shame. Perhaps the Citizen should focus their scrutiny on those abusing power.

Signed collectively,
The Suicide Pilots