<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">I only would say that the phrase—<div><i>Pakistan is now on call should Saudi Arabia need any troops to kill its own people, the United States having heeded bin Laden's demand and pulled its troops out to deploy them elsewhere in the region…</i></div><div><i><br></i><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">—puzzled me. It may puzzle others as well. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Otherwise a useful forceful statement, even if too enthusiastic, in my view, to Tim Johnson. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">--mkb</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br></span></i></div><div><div><div>On May 7, 2011, at 12:39 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">
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[Text below / formatted copy attached / comments welcome. --CGE]<br>
<br>
<br>
<b>The Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana<br>
~ A.W.A.R.E. ~<br>
is a group of local citizens who for almost ten years have been
demanding that<br>
the US government cease its Long War for oil against the people of
the Mideast.<br>
<br>
<br>
About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes
into buildings.</b> A tall skinny guy who took credit said he was
protesting the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, US support for
Israel's war on Palestinians, and the sanctions that were causing
starvation in Iraq. That wasn't going to hold up in a court of law
as a justification for mass-murder. But the U.S. government had
already, before 9-11, turned down offers from the Taliban to put
Osama bin Laden on trial in a third country, and it turned those
offers down again.<br>
<b><br>
Instead, the US president said he had no interest in bin Laden,</b>
but proceeded to encourage Americans to be afraid of their own
shadows. He used that fear to help launch a war without end. We've
now had nine-and-a-half years of pointless horrific murderous war in
Afghanistan and eight years of the same in Iraq, plus a drone war in
Pakistan, a new war in Libya, and smaller wars and special military
operations in dozens of other countries.<br>
<b><br>
We watched people in the Mideast on television dancing in the
streets</b> and celebrating the crimes of 9-11 and we thought how
evil and barbaric they must be. Knowing nothing about the decades
our government had spent exploiting and occupying their countries,
toppling their democratic leaders, and kicking in their doors, we
assumed that these subhuman monsters were celebrating the killing of
Americans because they just happened to dislike us or because their
religion told them to.<br>
<b><br>
Of course, we used to have lynch mobs in this country.</b> Ask the
freedom riders who left for the Deep South 50 years ago this month.
But we had outgrown that. We were not driven by blind vengeance. We
were civilized. The reason we locked up far more people in prison
than any other country and killed some of them was a purely rational
calculation dealing with prevention, deterrence, and restitution. We
weren't monsters. We didn't torture or cut people's heads off.<br>
<b><br>
But those beasts whom we started locking up in Guantanamo, they
were a different story.</b> They clearly could not be reasoned
with. They had to be tied up like animals just to control them. Our
government wouldn't do that to people if it didn't have to, so
clearly it had to. To think otherwise would be inappropriate,
disloyal, disobedient. It was best to think what we were told to
think, and if most of those people in Guantanamo turned out to be
innocent, well at least they weren't real people like us.<br>
<b><br>
And so we gave up 800 years of civil rights.</b> We tore up the
Magna Carta. Because people should have the right to a trial only
when the government doesn't tell us they are guilty. We gave up our
opposition to torture. We abandoned our trepidation regarding
aggressive wars. We sat silent as President Obama declared his right
to assassinate Americans and threw a whistleblower, naked, into a 6'
x 12' cell in Virginia. We asked Congress to obey the president and
the media to cheer for our team. And we watched lots of movies.<br>
<b><br>
And in movies and on TV shows, torture works.</b> Completely
unlike reality, the torture victim always tells the truth in movies.
And killing people works great too. It doesn't disturb the killer at
all or have any nasty side effects. People backing the same cause as
the victim never appear as the credits are rolling.
Happily-ever-after is what comes from killing people. The best thing
for us to do, unless we're busy shopping, is to cheer and scream
like deranged maniacs whose team just won the Big Game.<br>
<b><br>
So, after 10 years of shredding the rule of law,</b> hiring
mercenary armies, invading helpless unarmed countries, causing the
deaths of over a million people, and learning to love torture, all
of this warfare did absolutely nothing to locate Osama bin Laden -
who was hiding near the capital of a country to which we'd given
billions of dollars and helped to build illegal nuclear bombs. We
fought a war in Iraq on the pretense that Iraq was giving bin Laden
nuclear weapons, while bin Laden was hiding out in a nuclear nation,
almost certainly with the knowledge of that nation's military.
Pakistan is now on call should Saudi Arabia need any troops to kill
its own people, the United States having heeded bin Laden's demand
and pulled its troops out to deploy them elsewhere in the region --
a region in which our government supports and arms dictators until
they are nonviolently overthrown or, as in Libya, a rebel force led
by a CIA stooge can be backed instead. Only massive ignorance can
continue to ask "Why do they hate us?"<b><br>
<br>
And so, after nearly a decade, our government bothered to look for
bin Laden,</b> found him, and murdered him. But what choice did
they have? A truly fair trial would always involve the risk of
acquittal. A semi-fair trial would have risked bringing up
undesirable topics, such as the US failure to prevent 9-11, our
decades-long support for bin Laden, bin Laden's evasion of the US in
2001 and ever since, bin Laden's reasons for 9-11, and the question
of precedent. If we gave bin Laden a semi-fair trial, how would we
explain denying one to so many other people? And a truly unfair
military trial would have made the United States look even worse. A
member of the CIA said this week that killing him was "cleaner."<br>
<b><br>
We don't try people as we tried the Nazis.</b> We don't lock
people up and torture them ... as much as we did. We kill them. It's
cleaner. And then we dance in the streets cheering for the killing.
But killing Saddam Hussein didn't bring peace. Killing Muammar
Gadaffi will not bring peace any more than killing his children and
grandchildren has. Killing Osama bin Laden will bring no peace and
is no justice. Nonviolently overthrowing the governments of Tunisia
and Egypt and Yemen points us in a better direction, if we can break
through our government's propaganda.<br>
<b><br>
In 1969, less than ten years after the US government launched a
war against South Vietnam,</b> about 70% of the public had come to
regard the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a
mistake." The Obama administration is working desperately to keep
Americans from reaching that conclusion today, but it's not
working. Two-thirds of the US population now thinks the US war in
Afghanistan "is not worth fighting."<br>
<b><br>
If you object to the Obama administration's conducting an
unjustified war in the Middle East</b> - and misrepresenting the
reason for it - while doing nothing about the economy except aiding
the rich, tell your representatives in Congress. Congressman Tim
Johnson, and Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk, can be reached
through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. <i>Your protest
makes a difference: local congressman Tim Johnson, who voted for
the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, decided that he was
wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more money for war in
the Middle East. He has kept his promise, while our senators
continue to vote for war. Now Rep. Johnson has joined other
members of the House to initiate legislation calling for an end to
the Libyan intervention unless Congress approves it. You can call
him and thank him for his stance against the war at 217-403-4690.
<br>
</i><b><br>
AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana,</b>
meets every Sunday at 5pm in the McKinley Foundation, 5th and Daniel
Streets in Champaign, near the UIUC campus. We discuss the war and
what can be done against it. Visitors are welcome - and see our
Facebook page. We also present AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm
on Urbana Public Television, channel 6. Each week we bring you
comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the
opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose
our government's betrayal of our democratic principles.<b> ###</b><br>
<i><br>
(Prepared by C. G. Estabrook, from a text by David Swanson, 6 May
2011) </i><br>
</div>
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