Here is from Al-Jazeera English.

“News of Osama bin Laden’s death has brought a surge of nationalism throughout much of the United States, and the Obama administration is using the event to justify its foreign policy in the Middle East.

“Given that al-Qaeda has claimed the lives of far more Arab Muslims than Westerners, many Muslims and Arabs living in the US are relieved that he is gone.

“Yet that relief is tempered by the knowledge that bigotry they face is most likely going to remain.

“I hope that his death helps reduce the stereotyping we all face here at times,” Said Alani, an Arab and Muslim who is a college student in New York told Al Jazeera, “But even though the symbol [Osama bin Laden] is dead, and that chapter is closed, I imagine there will still be some people who carry the stereotype on against Muslims in the United States. Osama bin Laden was the symbol of the stereotype, but the stereotype will still exist. I even see people here that call Japanese ‘Japs’ and think that they should be in concentration camps. So even that stereotype is still alive.”

Here is what historian Adam Hochschild said on Democracy Now! about massive graveyards of war dead:

This was a thought that occurred to me, walking through the First World War cemeteries. Anybody who’s interested in the First World War eventually goes to the old Western Front in France and Belgium, which is an area of the world that I think has the greatest concentration of young men’s graves anywhere in the world. Go to anywhere where the greatest fighting took place—the region where the Battle of the Somme was or the fighting around Ypres or Verdun—you stand on the hilltop, and you see five, six, seven cemeteries, enormous ones, with, you know, 5,000-10,000 graves, spreading on all sides of you. And it’s an overwhelming experience.

Yet, when I think about the wars we’re engaged in today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is nowhere that an American or anybody can go and sort of visually see the toll of the war in this sense, especially since the great bulk of the casualties are, you know, Afghani and Iraqi civilians, as well as the American and allied troops who have died. You know, if they could all be buried in one place, maybe these senseless wars of today would come to a stop sooner.

Santa Barbara War Memorial 1

This picture and the next were taken at the beach in Santa Barbara, California, right next to the pier. A veterans group started putting a cross and candle for each U.S. death in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each cross has a name, a rank, date of birth, and date of death.
The veterans do this only on weekends, putting up the graveyard and taking it down each weekend. Guys sleep in the sand next to it, keeping watch over it so that nobody messes with it.

Santa Barbara War Memorial 2

Very moving. Very powerful. So many young volunteers. So many in their 30s and 40s as well.

Below is another graveyard, sponsored by Rethink Afghanistan and Veterans for Peace. (To put it into focus, click it.)

Rethink Afghanistan & Veterans for Peace (click to focus)

Amazing !

Please pass this link on.

Check out Osama bin Laden’s American legacy by Tom Englehardt on his Tomgram blog.

“As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) — from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.

“In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice [in the 1970s, simply to declare victory and go home], the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be [Osama’s] monument, and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

“At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

“Now, he’s officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.

“When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.

“For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.

“Those chants of ‘USA! USA!’ on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised ‘the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!’ That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury, and a people on the edge.

“Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those nonviolent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af/Pak theater of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.”

The death of Osama bin Laden has sparked a debate over whether torture of suspects held at places such as the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay helped track down and kill the al-Qaeda leader. Some claim the mission vindicated controversial Bush policies on harsh interrogation techniques.

Yeah?

The long-term negative consequences of torture:

• Al-Qaeda uses it to recruit.
• Future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification.
• It makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers.
• And… it doesn’t work.

And: It’s Immoral!!!

Check out this from Democracy Now!

“One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Skaykh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.

“The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information….
“When you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we—or ’02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don’t get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that’s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times…. My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.

“You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective—we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this—carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.”

Check out this from Truthout.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is taking corporate welfare to unprecedented new levels. While the country watched the protests in Wisconsin spill into the State Capitol Building, Snyder was passing a controversial bill that many consider a direct attack on the constitutional rights of the citizens of Michigan.

And:

After the new tax incentives started, Whirlpool announced it would soon be moving its Evansville and Fort Smith, Indiana, plants to Mexico, laying off another 1,200 workers and leaving up to 1,500 more out of jobs…And, like General Electric, Whirlpool’s effective tax rate for 2010 will be zero percent.

Take a look at the graphic here and look at the sobering graph there, too.