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

[C. G. Estabrook]

Most of the text is from David Swanson, including the speculation on 
Pakistan/Saudi Arabia.  Since they're both leading US clients, there may be 
something to it, depending on what deal the Obama administration has made with 
the Pakistani military ("there's no honor among thieves...").  But as Bahrain 
shows, SA may be more useful to the US in killing locals that the divided 
Pakistani rulers.

Tim has voted wrong (I think) on a number of things recently - I try to write 
him each week, after the N-G publishes the summary of Congressional votes - but 
he's one of the handful of representatives who consistently vote against war in 
the Mideast. He voted for war in Afghanistan and Iraq (probably euchred on the 
latter by Bush administration, from conversations with him) and has for a while 
said he was wrong to do so. (The principal point re Tim below is the 
encouragement that /"Your protest makes a difference"/ - certainly not obvious, 
and maybe not true.)

While Congressional Democrats maintain the support for Obama's aggressive policy 
in AfPak, opposition is appearing among Republicans and teapartiers (where the 
Ron Paul movement has been the most consistent anti-war voice). Bob Naiman has 
been crying up the presidential candidacy of the Republican former governor of 
NM, Gary Johnson, "on a platform that calls for withdrawals from Afghanistan and 
Iraq" (perhaps an optimistic reading) and even Haley Barbour, a political 
scavenger willing to eat almost anything, was sniffing the withdrawal air, 
before decide in to crawl back into his hole.

Even some Democrats, wearing their Good Cop hats, say that the killing of OBL 
should hasten withdrawal from AfPak - nicely using a crime (extra-judicial 
execution) to trump a lie (we're in AfPak "because of 9/11," to "stop terrorism").

The Democrats are probably lying again in any case, a la mode - see Alex 
Cockburn's "Volcano of Lies" 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05062011.html>, a harrowing account of 
Obama's scant respect for the truth, to say nothing of justice.   --CGE


On 5/8/11 2:33 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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) /
>> <flyer201105.doc>_______________________________________________
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