[Peace-discuss] Draft of flyer for 'Main Event' 5/7

Sun May 8 16:07:44 CDT 2011

I also find that statement a little puzzling.  On reading it, my immediate response (tongue-firmly-in-cheek) was “Ye of little faith in Amerika presume that the U.S. was heeding bin Laden’s demand and would not have pulled its troops out to deploy them elsewhere in the region anyway without any demands or pressure from bin Laden.”  In seriousness, we know that bin Laden, terrorism, and fundamental Islamic organizations and movements serve the U.S. as only an excuse – a justification – for actions that they would have taken anyway for other more tangible and self-interested reasons, which raises the question in my mind as to why one would want to reinforce any inclination to support the shifting of responsibility away from ourselves as Amerikans to bin Laden and buying into the notion that were were somehow forced by virtue of reason and legitimate national security to respond to his demands in any way other than in ways that we already were prepared to for our own selfish purposes.

From: Morton K. Brussel 
Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2011 2:33 PM
To: C. G. Estabrook 
Cc: Peace-discuss 
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Draft of flyer for 'Main Event' 5/7

I only would say that the phrase— 
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…

—puzzled me. It may puzzle others as well. 

Otherwise a useful forceful statement, even if too enthusiastic, in my view, to Tim Johnson. 

--mkb

On May 7, 2011, at 12:39 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

  [Text below / formatted copy attached / comments welcome. --CGE]

  The Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana
  ~ A.W.A.R.E. ~
  is a group of local citizens who for almost ten years have been demanding that
  the US government cease its Long War for oil against the people of the Mideast.

  About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes into buildings. 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.

  Instead, the US president said he had no interest in bin Laden, 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.

  We watched people in the Mideast on television dancing in the streets 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.

  Of course, we used to have lynch mobs in this country. 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.

  But those beasts whom we started locking up in Guantanamo, they were a different story. 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.

  And so we gave up 800 years of civil rights. 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.

  And in movies and on TV shows, torture works. 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.

  So, after 10 years of shredding the rule of law, 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?"

  And so, after nearly a decade, our government bothered to look for bin Laden, 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."

  We don't try people as we tried the Nazis. 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.

  In 1969, less than ten years after the US government launched a war against South Vietnam, 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."

  If you object to the Obama administration's conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East - 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. 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. 

  AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, 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.    ###

  (Prepared by C. G. Estabrook, from a text by David Swanson, 6 May 2011) 

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