14 January 2014

Let’s all tweet now



The US Embassy has tweeted.  Tweeted a pic.  This is the line:’ St. Anthany's Ground - site of Jan 2009 killing of hundreds of families by army shelling.’ Thanks for the information. 

Information?  Is that what I said?  Sorry.  The word is ‘claim’.  Not the same as ‘fact’.  Claim is vague and has connotations of conjecture.  Information implies things known, definite, verified.  But then again there is only so much one can do with 140 characters, except of course that there’s no upper limit on the number of tweets allowed.  Michele Sison could have sent more tweets in order to elaborate, substantiate etc.  Didn’t happen.

So we have this claim.  There’s a date: January 2009.  US Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice Steven R Rapp (that’s almost half a tweet length btw) has figured that the place was shelled, shelled in January 2009, shelled by the Army and that this shelling had killed hundreds of families.  Just by talking to some people who sided with the LTTE.  Wow! 

Now we can ask him what he’s done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We can ask if he’s gone to other countries democratized (that US-speak for ‘destabilized’) by the USA to check what’s happened and what’s happening.  Libya and Egypt come to mind.  We can ask if he’s gone to Saudi Arabia and Yemen.  We can ask what the liberty-bringers in Syria have done.  We can ask if he’s investigated and concluded.   We can ask Sison if her counterparts in these countries invited Rapp and if indeed they have, whether Rapp stood on similar sites.  We can ask Sison if her counterparts tweeted similarly, if they said for example ‘X [Type in location] – site of Y [Type in Month and Year] killing of hundreds of families by US [or ‘us’]’.  There’s enough characters left to script in method; drones, bombs etc.   

Did any US diplomat say anything about the Highway of Death in Iraq (google that!)?  What was the tweet equivalent of the diplomatic equivalent of Sison way back when the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki or sprayed Napalm in Vietnam?  Was there some pithy one liner about the scorched earth policy of the USA?  We don’t know.

But since this is tweeting time, let’s play. The following are some possible tweets which you can take as ‘information’.  Here goes:

George W Bush begged Barack Obama do something, anything, from being accused of committing crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan!!

Guantanamo Bay is just a holding facility for pigs, mosquitoes, centipedes, gila monsters and ostriches who have cut school more than once!!

Michele Sison has a fixation: she has to watch at least one episode of Star Trek (first three series) every night after 11 so she can sleep

Apollo 11 never went to the moon and Neil Armstrong's recorded speech was 'Buzz dude, I really, really, really, really, really, need to pee'

George W Bush's election campaigns were funded by very rich Arabs who he kept away from other backers, the Ku Klux Klan and Kermit the Frog

Ok.  We can go on and on and on with 140-character tweets. 

It’s time for Charlie Chaplin to be reborn.  Maybe he’ll be called the Savior.  At least he was honest.  

msenevira@gmail.com

3 comments:

h. said...

Why isn't there a check-box to say 'this is more than brilliant'? THANK YOU for this writing.

gdesilva said...

Time to unite, Sri Lanka, or else time will come soon when SL will become a pile of rubble like Libya, Iraq etc etc. The guardians of democracy and freedom are setting the scene for a kill...They have one aim, to use the divisions in the community to get a puppet to do what they want.

Only a united stand against these war mongers will help this country. It is no longer a case of MR vs RW or Sinhala vs Tamil. Wake up before it is too late.

Anonymous said...

I agree totally with your message Malinda, so I assume we have a good idea of who was responsible for these specific instances of shelling of hospitals in January 2009 that Sison is referring to. Fight fire with fire... tweet with facts back in their faces. Like you I am so tired of the double standards and hypocrisy of the US government. In my 55 years as an American I have never felt more disappointed in the 'American Way' of international affairs.