[D66] Obama at Ground Zero

[Henk Elegeert]

Pprrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ...

Wat een verschrikkelijke onzin; just an orchestrated campaign to exploit the
killing of Osama bin Laden
for the most reactionary purposes.

"A major consideration in the decision to kill Bin Laden was the
idea that a successful operation could be exploited to shore up Obama’s
political position and divert this anger through the promotion of jingoism
and
militarism."

Ja nee, het kwam even niet zo goed uit en dus lieten ze Bin Laden maar lopen
 ... a major consideration in the decision?
:))

Dat Oto nog steeds met dergelijke kwats deze lijsters wenst te bestoken is,
lijkt me, ook an major consideration in the decision !! :)
Of het: dirty work of assassination squads ala Bill Van Auken?!! :))

Henk Elegeert (uw bevrijde Cubaan, nu Cuba nog ... )






2011/5/6 Antid Oto <aorta at home.nl>

> Obama at Ground Zero
> 6 May 2011
>
> President Barack Obama’s brief visit to New York City’s “Ground Zero”
> Thursday
> is part of an orchestrated campaign to exploit the killing of Osama bin
> Laden
> for the most reactionary purposes.
>
> Even as more details emerge making it clear that the operation mounted by
> Navy
> Seals and the CIA in Pakistan represented the extra-judicial execution of
> an
> unarmed man, there are growing indications that domestic political
> considerations have played a major role in the entire affair.
>
> Under conditions of unending wars without results, a protracted economic
> crisis
> and a tremendous deterioration of the social conditions of American working
> people, popular anger is growing, much of it directed at the Obama
> administration. A major consideration in the decision to kill Bin Laden was
> the
> idea that a successful operation could be exploited to shore up Obama’s
> political position and divert this anger through the promotion of jingoism
> and
> militarism.
>
> It is no mere coincidence that Obama’s “victory lap” over the killing of
> Bin
> Laden comes barely a week after the humiliating spectacle of the American
> president releasing his “long-form” birth certificate. In both instances,
> as in
> so many of his administration’s policies, the actions of Obama are driven
> by an
> accommodation to and cowering before the politics of the Republican right.
>
> Obama initially sought to make his Ground Zero visit a bipartisan affair by
> inviting George Bush, who exploited the events of 9/11 to launch wars of
> aggression and a frontal assault on democratic rights, which his Democratic
> successor has continued and escalated.
>
> After Bush declined, Obama came up with a Republican who is arguably an
> even
> more grotesque personification of political reaction--former New York City
> mayor
> Rudolph Giuliani, who accompanied Obama on his rounds to a New York City
> fire
> station, a police station house and then Ground Zero.
>
> In his remarks at the police station, Obama emphasized that Giuliani’s
> presence
> was “testimony that we may have our differences, politically, in ordinary
> times,
> but when it comes to keeping this country safe, we are, first and foremost,
> Americans.”
>
> What nonsense! Giuliani has denounced Obama in the most vitriolic terms
> ever
> since he was elected, charging him with being soft on terrorism and
> mishandling
> the war in Afghanistan. The decision to carry out the cold-blooded
> assassination
> of Bin Laden was driven in large part by Obama’s desire to deflect such
> criticism by adopting the methods demanded by the right.
>
> Obama, a constitutional lawyer and former president of the Harvard Law
> Review,
> is deepening the assault by the US government on international law and
> constitutional principles. There exist a whole series of precedents that
> apply
> to the case of Osama bin Laden and underscore the politically revolting
> character of the US administration’s claims that murdering him represented
> an
> exercise of “justice.”
>
> At the end of the Second World War, the US government insisted that there
> be no
> summary executions of Nazi war criminals. Based on the spurious claims made
> by
> Obama’s Justice Department in relation to the Bin Laden killing—that he was
> a
> combatant in war and therefore subject to being summarily shot--they too
> could
> have been put to death without trial.
>
> But in dealing with individuals who shared responsibility for the deaths of
> millions, the US government insisted that they be brought to trial at
> Nuremberg
> to expose and redress the war crimes committed by Hitler’s regime.
>
> The trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was based on the Nuremberg principles,
> established a similar precedent. Israeli agents who captured Eichmann in
> Argentina did not summarily execute him, but captured him so he could face
> trial.
>
> It is clear that Bin Laden could have been captured alive, but an order was
> given from the White House that he should be executed on the spot. The
> Obama
> administration had no desire to try the Al Qaeda leader on charges of
> terrorism
> and murder, to be proven in a court of law.
>
> To do so would risk exposing Bin Laden’s long-time and intimate ties to US
> intelligence agencies, going back to the US-backed Islamist insurgency in
> Afghanistan in the 1980s. It would also raise the threat of a legal forum
> in
> which the events of 9/11 could be exposed to scrutiny, endangering the
> concerted
> bipartisan effort to draw a veil over the terrorist attacks and what prior
> knowledge US officials and agencies had about them.
>
> Nor did Obama have any desire to resurrect the debate over whether
> suspected
> terrorists should be tried before civilian courts—where Bin Laden faced
> federal
> charges—or military commissions. That is a debate he had already ceded to
> the
> Republicans when he ordered the resumption of the drumhead trials at
> Guantanamo.
>
> Finally, extra-judicial execution has become standard operating procedure
> for
> the US government, carried out almost daily by means of Predator drone
> attacks
> in Pakistan and elsewhere.
>
> The pseudo-legal rationalizations of these actions pose a direct threat.
> Methods
> used internationally will eventually be employed against those seen as
> enemies
> of the US ruling elite within the United States itself.
>
> In carrying out this extra-legal and reactionary policy, Obama enjoys the
> full
> support of the media, which has dedicated itself to an obscene celebration
> of
> the killings in Pakistan, as well as the so-called liberals and “lefts,”
> who are
> ecstatic over the Democratic president’s ability to cloak himself in the
> mantle
> of the “war on terrorism.”
>
> The New York Times editorialized: “Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision
> to
> attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he
> cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image
> abroad.”
>
> Similarly, the Nation’s Eric Alterman proclaimed that Obama’s “cool, calm
> decision-making and demeanor—coupled with the peerless professional
> execution of
> the operation—can only impress world opinion with the mature and steely
> determination of America’s post-Bush leadership.”
>
> Such comments express the turn to the right by this entire socio-political
> layer, made up of privileged sections of the upper middle class that are
> rallying to the banner of US imperialism.
>
> The attempt by Obama, echoed and amplified by the corporate media, to
> invoke the
> killing of Osama bin Laden as a touchstone of national unity has a deeply
> reactionary content. Some have suggested that the assassination could
> revive the
> much over-stated feeling of unity that followed 9/11, as if Bin Laden’s
> death
> justified all of the crimes committed in the name of that tragedy,
> including
> aggressive wars that have killed over a million people.
>
> It bears noting that Obama’s celebratory trip to Ground Zero came 50 years
> to
> the day after NASA launched the first American—astronaut Alan Shepard--into
> space. The space flight came three weeks after the Soviet Union sent the
> first
> human being into space—cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—and the humiliating debacle
> for US
> imperialism of the CIA’s abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
>
> Notwithstanding this Cold War overlay, the space launch captured the
> imagination
> of the American people. In welcoming Shepard to Washington four days later,
> President John F. Kennedy praised the astronaut as well as NASA’s
> scientists and
> engineers for “an outstanding contribution to the advancement of human
> knowledge
> of space technology and a demonstration of man’s capabilities in
> sub-orbital
> space flight.”
>
> A half century later, it is a measure of the historic decline of US
> imperialism
> and the protracted political degeneration of the ruling establishment that
> its
> attempts to invoke national pride focus not on feats of science, technology
> and
> exploration, but on the dirty work of assassination squads.
>
> Bill Van Auken
>
> http://wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/pers-m06.shtml
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