The Killing
David Swanson on the killing of Bin Laden:
"(Regarding)...the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural...The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans..."
He goes on: "As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degradation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral decency that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?
Not while we're dancing in the street to celebrate death."
It's so intensely disheartening to see the jubilation at the death of another human. It becomes more and more evident, I think, that we are a savage and bloodthirsty people. Those traits are not only noted, but celebrated, as the worship of the military is. I turn away from this unseemly joy and often, I despair of my country. Where are we headed? To oblivion, I think, and sooner rather than later.
A question: Why, why, why, after this deed was done--if it was done--would the body be buried at sea? Will it not foster, now and forever, the belief that he's not really dead, just in hiding? And will not someone rise who purports to be his emissary? And won't he become even more of a prophet and a saint to his followers?
Idiotic decision and I wonder who made it. And why. Maybe to continue the carnage, our way of life, after all, as it has become.
No, I'm not celebrating.
Labels: Dancing In The Streets
posted by Mimi @ 8:36 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Jonathan,
Throwing the body in the sea is like saying my dog ate my homework. I was just reading this morning that the CIA knew where bin Laden was five years ago. We should recall that bin Laden worked for the CIA and was the child of the CIA. Also bin Laden denied he had anything to do with 9/11 and frankly I believe him. There are many scenarios possible such as it was the CIA who has been hiding bin Laden since bin Laden worked for them. My first reaction to this was deep suspicion and remains that way.
The first story that came out was that of a 40 minute gun battle and bin Laden hiding behind a woman. All of that has turned out to be bogus. Evidently bin Laden was unarmed when Obama's little shit eaters murdered him if indeed that is what happened though it is just as likely that they moved a living bin Laden to another place. I think if we follow this trend to its logical conclusion the whole thing is a fraud and stinks to high heaven.
Hi Rob and Mimi,
I agree with both of you that the whole 'burial at sea' thing is bizarre, and highly questionable. As the days pass and more info is made available, it becomes clearer that if things happened as the official narrative says and he really was still alive and really was bin Laden, they probably could have arrested him and brought him back to the US to be tried. They didn't do this, presumably, because they didn't want to.
(I suppose that handing him over to the Hague for an international trial would have been politically out of the question.)
Mimi, as far as whether or not we're worse human beings than we were 10 years ago, I don't know. America has always been different groups of people, and the portion of the populace that cheers on brutish behavior has always been there, just as the portion that is disgusted by the the things Swanson talks about.
Part of the problem is that the media has been cheering the brutes on, virtually non-stop, for the past 10 years.
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