[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] Fwd: Unable to deliver your message

Fri May 2 15:07:20 EDT 2014

[This is the introduction to tonight's News from Neptune, on Urbana Public Television at 7pm]

~ Good evening, & welcome to NEWS FROM NEPTUNE for the 18th WEEK of 2014 (May 2) 

~For MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS, this program has been "a spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media" - first on a so-called "community radio station" - and, when censored & locked out of there - welcomed, I'm happy to say, by the good people at Urbana Public Television.

~ I'M CARL ESTABROOK / my discussants tonight are David Green & RON SZOKE.  
~ OUR PROGRAM'S NAME, News from Neptune, was chosen to honor Noam Chomsky, who has been talking sense about American politics for twice THE QUARTER-CENTURY we've been on the air.  Chomsky has said that in the American media, “either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”

Our format is to take turns suggesting stories that have been ignored or misreported (occasionally even innocently) and then having our colleagues comment on them. 

======================
TODAY IS May second. On this day three years ago Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks  is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

{Noam Chomsky 6 May 2011} It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 [Special Operations] commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. 

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

...There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region...

[The Obama administration called the assassination] Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders [as was led by the historic Geronimo]. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”...

YOU’RE WATCHING NEWS FROM NEPTUNE, an “Obama Revenge-Killing” edition...

On May 2, 2014, at 11:12 AM, Stan <swag901 at ymail.com> wrote:

> 
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
> 
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Unable to deliver your message
> From: Yahoo Groups <notify at yahoogroups.com>
> To: swag901 at ymail.com
> CC: 
> 
> Well I must tell you that as a general opponent to the drone program collateral damage is never a good thing. however as a reasonable man I must tell you that if we had used the drone program to take out osama bin laden  and KSM before 9/11 perhaps we could have saved 3000 lives at the world trade center, about 7000 u s military lives, about a million innocent Iraqi lives and then there is the 2 trillion dollars in added debt to our country from not having used drones prior to 9/11. thanks.
> 
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
> 
> 
> "C. G. Estabrook" <carl at newsfromneptune.com> wrote:
> 
> ...top Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been a staunch supporter of the remote-control assassination program, noting that "during a February 2013 confirmation hearing for CIA Director John Brennan, Feinstein stated that the CIA’s targeting procedures kills only “single digits” of civilians annually." Try to imagine an ordinary human being standing up in court to defend a serial killer by saying that he only kills single digits of people annually." Is that so wrong? Or hell, imagine your co-worker turning to you in the office and saying, "I ain't such a bad person, you know; I probably don't kill more than six or seven innocent people a year." Try to imagine what kind of mindset believes that as long you hold your murder rate of innocent people to "single digits," then that's OK. What would you say if someone talked to you in that way? You would say, quite rightly, that they were insane. Criminally insane, and very dangerous...  
> 
> http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2388-mad-men-the-lunatic-fringe-that-leads-the-west.html
> _______________________________________________

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