Osama time, and the grieving is queasy - or at least in one small corner of your ABC

ABC Online's religion and ethics portal editor Scott Stephens on 612 ABC on Thursday:

ABC Online's religion and ethics portal editor Scott Stephens on 612 ABC on Thursday:

I'm actually choking back the sick ... The whole logic of what the US has done is political assassination. Or let's just call it what it is: it's murder, so that this man, and his memory, and his existence symbolically, politically, internationally, can be wiped off the face of the earth.

Host Steve Austin: Why not call it extra-judicial killing?

Stephens: Extra-judicial killing is another word for homicide. It's another way of saying this murder is outside the proper process of law ... The US is never more unified than when they're united against a common enemy.

Austin: That probably goes for any people.

Stephens: The US is consuming itself by almost any standard, and the only time when people are able to put these differences, these almost tribal feuds to the side, to forget their dramatic and ever spiralling social ills, is when they are united by a common sense of hatred. We saw it after September 11, we saw it with the Glenn Beck rally last year ... We're talking about something other than an inverted form of patriotism: this is also called psychosis, collective psychosis.

A president visits Ground Zero? How odd. Lateline on Thursday:

Host Tony Jones: Craig, what exactly is the President doing there today?

Reporter Craig McMurtrie: Barack Obama is going to visit midtown Manhattan fire station. It's where 15 firefighters were killed. Then he's going to Ground Zero; he's going to be laying a wreath.

Jones: Does anyone consider it to be a little odd? I mean, it's not the anniversary of the attacks, it's just the, well, not the celebration, but the marking of the death of the leader of al-Qa'ida. It seems strange that he's going there.

McMurtrie: Perhaps, but the White House has been saying it's a moment of national unity.

Osama bin Laden puts things in a nutshell in November, 2001:

We love death. The US loves life. That is the difference between us two.

Blast at the past. Julia Gillard at a press conference on July 7, 2010:

Journalist: Given that Papua New Guinea is a signatory to the Convention on Refugees and was at the time of Manus Island, given the fact that refugees or asylum-seekers on Nauru were processed in that Tampa period with the assistance of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, how can what you're proposing be different on East Timor?

Gillard: Let's just remind ourselves of a little bit of history, here. The Pacific Solution was announced by the Howard government as a unilateral action and it was announced as an urgent response. That processing was then undertaken on Manus Island and Nauru. That's not my approach.

Gillard in a press release on March 12, 2002:

Today's announcement by minister [Philip] Ruddock of a new detention centre on Christmas Island is an admission the Pacific Solution is an expensive failure ... Stay tuned for the removal of the multimillion-dollar a day naval blockade and closure of the multimillion-dollar a day camps on Nauru and Manus Island.

Gillard in parliament on August 26, 2002:

We know that the Pacific solution is unsustainable.

Blast from the past. Gillard on Radio 6PR on July 8, 2010:

Howard Sattler: I want to quote something that Julia Gillard said on May 13, 2003: "The so-called Pacific Solution is not a long-term solution. Can anyone in this place really imagine that Australia will be processing asylum-seeker claims on Nauru in 10 to 12 years? Labor will end the so-called Pacific Solution of processing and detaining of asylum-seekers on Pacific islands because it's costly, unsustainable and wrong as a matter of principle." Now you've clearly, apart from the word Nauru, changed your mind about that.

Gillard: I haven't changed my mind about any of those words and I'd happily read that quote out and make it my words of today.

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