The White House's "death of bin Laden" story has come apart at the seams. Will it make any difference that before 48 hours had passed, the story had changed so much that it no longer bore any resemblance to President Obama's Sunday evening broadcast and has lost all credibility?
So far it has made no
difference to the once-fabled news organization, the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC), which on May 9, eight days later, is still repeating the
propaganda that the SEALs killed bin Laden in his Pakistani compound, where bin
Laden lived next door to the Pakistani Military Academy surrounded by the
Pakistani army.
Not even the president of
Pakistan finds the story implausible. The BBC reports that the president is
launching a full-scale investigation of how bin Laden managed to live for years
in an army garrison town without being noticed.
For most Americans the
story began and ended with four words: "we got bin Laden." The celebrations,
the sweet taste of revenge, of triumph and victory over "the most dangerous man on the planet" are akin to the thrill experienced by sports fans when their football team defeats the unspeakable rival or their baseball team wins the World Series. No fan wants to hear the next day that it is not so, that it is all a mistake. If these Americans years from now come across a story that the killing of bin Laden was an orchestrated news event to boost other agendas, they will
dismiss the report as the ravings of a pinko-liberal-commie.
Everyone knows we killed
bin Laden. How could it be otherwise? We -- the indispensable people, the
virtuous nation, the world's only superpower, the white hats -- were
destined to prevail. No other outcome was possible.
No one will notice that
those who fabricated the story forgot to show the kidney dialysis machine that, somehow, kept bin Laden alive for a decade. No doctors were on the
premises.
No one will remember that Fox News reported in December, 2001, that Osama bin Laden had passed away from
his illnesses.
If bin Laden beat all odds
and managed to live another decade to await, unarmed and undefended, the arrival
of the Navy SEALs last week, how it is possible that the "terror mastermind,"
who defeated not merely the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies
along with those of America's European allies and Israel, the National Security
Council, the Pentagon, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, airport security four times
on the same morning, etc. etc., never enjoyed another success, not even a
little, very minor one? What was the "terror mastermind" doing for a decade
after 9/11?
The "death of bin Laden"
serves too many agendas that cover the political spectrum for the obvious
falsity of the story to be recognized by very many. Patriots are euphoric that
America won over bin Laden. Progressives have seized on the story to excoriate
the United States for extra-judicial murder that brutalizes us all. Some on the
left-wing bought into the 9/11 story because of the emotional satisfaction they
received from oppressed Arabs striking back at their imperialist oppressors.
These left-wingers are delighted that it took the incompetent Americans an
entire decade to find bin Laden, who was hiding in plain view. The American
incompetence in finding bin Laden simply, in their minds, proves the
incompetence of the US government, which failed to protect Americans against the
9/11 attack.
Those who ordered, and
those who wrote, totally incompetent legal memos that torture was permissible
under US and international law, thereby setting up George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney for the possibility of prosecution, are riding the euphoria of bin
Laden's death by declaring that it was torture that led the American assassins
to bin Laden. All of a sudden, torture, which had fallen back into the disrepute
in which it had been for centuries, is again in the clear. Anything that leads
to the elimination of bin Laden is a valid
instrument.
Those who want to
increase the pressure on Pakistan to shut up about Americans murdering Pakistani
citizens in Pakistan from the air and from troops on the ground, have gained a
new club with which to beat the Pakistani government into submission:
"you
hid bin Laden from us."
Those who want to continue
to fatten the profits of the military/security complex and the powers of
Homeland Security, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, use bin Laden's
second, or ninth, death as proof that America is being successful in its war on
terror and that the war must continue on such a successful path until all
enemies are slain.
Most ominous of all was
the statement by the CIA director that bin Laden's death would lead to new
attacks on America and new 9/11s from al Qaeda seeking revenge. This warning,
issued within a few hours of President Obama's Sunday evening address, telegraphed the inevitable "al Qaeda" Internet posting that America would suffer
new
9/11s for killing their leader.
If the Taliban knew in
December 2001 that bin Laden was dead, does anyone think that al Qaeda didn't
know it? Indeed, no member of the public has any way of knowing if al Qaeda is
anything more than a bogyman organization created by the CIA which issues "al
Qaeda" announcements. The evidence that al Qaeda's announcements are issued by
the CIA is very strong. The various videos of bin Laden for the last nine years
have been shown by experts to be fakes. Why would bin Laden issue a fake
video? Why did bin Laden cease issuing videos and only issue audios? A person
running a world-wide terrorist organization should be able to produce videos. He
would also be surrounded by better protectors than a couple of women. Where was
al Qaeda, an organization that, according to former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, consists of
"the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth." Had these most dangerous men alive abandoned their leader?
The CIA director's warning
of future terrorist attacks, followed by a suspect "al Qaeda" threat of the
same, suggests that if the American public continues to lose its enthusiasm for
the government's open-ended wars, which are conducted at the expense of the US
budget deficit, the dollar's exchange value, inflation, Social Security,
Medicare, income support programs, jobs, recovery, and so forth, "al Qaeda" will
again outwit all 16 US intelligence agencies, those of our allies, NORAD,
airport security, Air Traffic Control, etc. etc., and inflict the world's only
superpower with another humiliating defeat that will invigorate American support
for "the war on terror."
I believe that "al Qaeda"
could blow up the White House or Congress or both and that the majority of
Americans would fall for the story, just as the Germans, a better educated and
more intelligent population, fell for the Reichstag Fire -- as did a number of
historians.
The reason I say this is
that Americans have succumbed to propaganda that has conditioned them to believe
that they are under attack by practically omnipotent adversaries. Proof of this
is broadcast every day. For example, on March 9, I heard over National Public
Radio in Atlanta that Emory University, a private university of some
distinction, treated its 3,500 graduating class to a commencement address by
Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.
This is the agency that
has goons feeling the genitals of young children and adults and which has
announced that it intends to expand this practice from air travelers to shopping
malls, bus and train stations. That a serious university invited such a
low-lifer, who clearly has no respect for American civil liberty and is devoid
of any sort of sense of what is appropriate, to address a graduating class of
southern elite is a clear indication that the Ministry of Truth has prevailed.
Americans are living in George Orwell's 1984.
For those who
haven't read Orwell's classic prediction of our time, Big Brother, the
government, could tell the "citizens" any lie and it was accepted
unquestioningly. As a perceptive reader pointed out to me, we Americans, with
our "free press," are at this point today: "What is really alarming is the
increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has
become so profoundly confident of its ability to deceive people that they make
virtually no effort to even appear credible."
A people as gullible as
Americans have no future.
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