By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 -- After Sunday night's announcement of the killing in Pakistan of Osama Bin Laden, on Monday morning in his office at the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done to such a mastermind of international terrorism.”
By the next day, Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky was being asked if by this quote, Ban wasn't embracing what some call an extrajudicial execution. The questioner said that while relief and more might be natural emotions in the United States, should a UN Secretary General be speaking this way?
Ban's spokesman took a strange tack in response, emphasizing that since Ban himself was in New York on September 11, 2001, he “personally” felt relief, a sort of honorary New Yorker.
But the question remains: should a UN Secretary General jump so quickly into expressing relief at the shooting death of anyone, and calling it “justice be[ing] done”?
Inner City Press asked Nesirky when Ban will hold the next of his promised monthly press conferences.
Nesirky replied that Ban held a stake out, a week ago. But that is not a sit down press conference with twenty or so questions.
Ban is heading on another trip, beginning in Bulgaria. Staffers accompanying him have airplane tickets costing over $9,000 a piece. Where is this all leading? Watch this site.
