It is official. Osama bin Laden died on December 13, 2001, around the time George W. Bush stopped promising to "get him, dead or alive". Eight years after the fact (and without missing a beat), Osama's name was replaced by that of Mullah Omar in CNN and FOX news coverage as "the greatest threat to American national security". It was the perfect Orwellian rewrite, as close to "Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania" as we are likely to see.
President Obama, General McChrystal and even Dick Cheney himself have omitted bin Laden's name from their arguments for additional troops in the Afghan theatre. Did the White House forget to notify the press of bin Laden's death? Evidently because most Americans still believe that what US troops are doing in Afghanistan is searching caves for the evil-doer himself. With Osama dead, of course, the cry to bring the troops home would grow much louder. To paraphrase Lt. John Kerry, "who will be the last man to die for a lie?"
While CNN and the New York Times may have missed the memo, news of bin Laden's death was reported in a leading Pakistani newspaper on December 26, 2001, and later confirmed by President Musharaff of Pakistan, President Karzai of Afghanistan and FBI counter-terrorism chief, Dale Watson. (To quote Angelo Codevilla of The American Spectator, "Elvis has had more sightings than Osama has")....nbsp;In his 2009 book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?, author David Ray Griffin makes a convincing case for bin Laden's 2001 demise and explores the ramifications of the continued propaganda campaign that has led to endless warfare and affected the outcome of national elections.
In the current issue of Veterans Today Marine combat veteran, Gordon Duff writes passionately about the lives and treasure wasted in the eight-year search for a dead man.
"".since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time? Since we spent 200 million dollars on "special ops'looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that? Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that? Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US? This is a criminal act if there ever was one."
But the program of fear-as-motivator initiated by the Bush/Cheney administration and perpetuated by Obama is losing its impact as evidence seeps out that both the government and military intelligence offices have been cooking the books on terror. The once obscure term "false flag operation" is now common parlance on the internet. Americans wholly skeptical of all statements issued out of Washington are more inclined to believe that a future "terror event" will be a CIA operation designed to promote the next war than a verifiable attack. The Christmas Day "underwear bomber", the young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was reportedly trained at al Qaeda camps in Yemen, the next country on the Pentagon's wish list of places to try out their newest hi-tech weaponry. To the surprise of his fellow passengers, Abdulmutallab was permitted to board the airline without a passport. In consequence we are now advised that naked body scans will be required of us for all international air travel. Is it a coincidence that the Patriot Act is coming up for renewal in Congress at a time when Americans are being told, once again, that we must sacrifice our civil liberties in order to be "safe'?
As for Osama, websites devoted to revealing factual evidence about the 911 attacks , such as 911lies.org, have uniformly included photos of the real and fake bin Ladens across the last decade, prompting the inevitable question, "who hired all of those actors to stand in for the dead guy before every election". Who indeed?
Here in Oceania, where "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" the bogeyman may change his name, but he will never die.
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