I think this is simply brilliant.
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Sorry Craig, but this is a musing on something that probably hasn’t even happened. It is extremely gullible to accept the United States version of Bin Laden’s alleged death when they have deliberately destroyed all the evidence. It is also extremely gullible to accept the United States version of 11th September 2001, when there is so much evidence to the contrary. To accept these highly improbable stories as fact and then to pontificate about the meaning of it all is just ridiculous.
The fact that the United States and Israel (and of course the United Kingdom) are criminal states, can be discussed, without the need to believe what those criminals claim, without any credible evidence to support those claims.
Do not know why this is brillint but…
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De gustibus non est disputandum
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The Origins of the War on Terror
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“The fact that the United States and Israel”
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I think you mean “IsraHELL” right? And it would be better off if you said “Rotten” at the beginning. 😉
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PS I am sorry for your loss.
The guy from that article use, heavily, as reference the Guardian, as if the Guardian is true teller and devoted to honest jouranlism.
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Bush rejects Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden
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Omission – is one of type of lies, inherently in the arsenal of propagandists. According to Stephanie Ericsson: Omission involves telling most of the truth minus one or two key facts whose absence changes the story completely.
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That person use the Guardian as source of information and both of them are using – Omission.
The date of the article,
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Monday, 15 October 2001
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Ten years of hell for Af-Pak! I would like to ask those who are writing nonsense like these. How many life could have been saved by now, in case that US imperial establishment had accepted this “offer”?
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I kind of sick of human idiocy and lefty-blogger who are supporting of imperial projects.
Here is one interesting bit from the post
It does seem remarkable,so remarkable that it hardly seems a miracle at all. As does the capacity of the US to just enter the country in helicopters. Was there no response at all from the Pakistanis? No curiosity from authority? No calls to the police, no screaming police sirens to investigate such a blatant intrusion? No response from the nearby military installations.
It begs the question of how confident were they that they would not be met by any resistance or pursuit?
Now we also hear(and see) that Obama and Clinton and others sat and watched the action on TV. Did they watch OBL being despatched?
One must ask however, what would have happened if it had all gone horribly wrong-if there was a major firefight with Navy people killed, or the US soldiers had been met with (say) a pre-wired suicide explosion of the entire complex or the destruction of both helicopters, and a major international incident, with 25 or so armed American personnel stuck in a town near Islamabad and few hundred thousand curious and angry Pakistanis wondering what the hell was going on in their country.
The fact they watched the action seems to suggest to me that ‘they’ (the military advisors and minders of Obama and Clinton) knew well enough what was in place and what would happen, and what resistance would be encountered. Would a genuinely risky project with real American blood and guts be likely to relayed to those sensitive souls at the white house. Would they choose to watch.
And the likeliest way they knew what to expect was by collusion with the Pakistani authorities or elements within it, or by informants within the Pakistani intelligence system.
If the former we must assume that OBL had outlived his usefulness. And we can never,of course, dismiss the possibility that $25 million and a permanent family move to Virginia, is a persuasive inducement for most people.
Here is another interesting quote from Bahey Ael a din Hassai, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Study, and reported on Paul mason’s BBC blog.
A triumph for democracy and freedom? I not so sure. The walls around the compound might have been designed as a prison, rather than as a fortress. Obviously once the Americans made the decision to attack the villa, nothing was going to hold them back from eliminating their target. Was bin Ladin hiding, or being kept prisoner?
Decades ago Israel captured and put the Nazi Adolf Eichman on trial for his crimes. This process de-mytholigized him and made him appear, stripped of his power and bravado, a very ordinary figure indeed.
Trial for bin Laden would have shown that we are still nations that value the law and due process, a Chicago-style hit is nothing worth crowing about. Obama a more effective terrorist than Osama, big deal.
Did bin Laden have to die because he was always an ‘asset’ for either the American or Pakistani intelligence services, and the myth of him leading a threatening organization is just too valuable to be deflated?
Re Its1789
I always though the de-mythologizing of Eichman made it all the more scary.
That it wasn’t some race of Übermensch who caused the holocaust but petty bureaucrats showed how easily it could happen again.
Otherwise I agree with what you say. Still Nixon prevented action taken against (West) Pakistan over the genocide in East (Pakistan) in 1971 which is when IMHO a lot of the problems with Pakistan started.
Adolf Eichmann wasn’t an evil monster, rather he was a petty official with crazed, romantic, ideas about the ‘volk’ and ‘race.’ By turning an ordinary man, with extraordinary and dangerous delusions, into a myth, one does these ideas a service. The really scary part is that such an ordinary individual, given so much power without restraint, can cause so much damage in the ‘right’ circumstances. It’s the circumstances we need to be aware of and prevent, because ordinary men are capbable of repeating them.
I also thought the ‘trial’ of Saddam was a sordid farce and his execution a tawdry obscenity.
Perhaps I’m just thouroughly sick and tired of all this killing and slaughter on a mass scale?
I always felt that Saddam and now Bin Laden have been killed to shut them up, which doesn’t have much to do with freedom and democracy, but with bald political espediency.
Personally I’m not sure that Obama is a better kind of terrorist mastermind than Bin Laden, though he does of course, have more sophisticated public relations. I’d like to have seen Bin Laden on trial in the same court as Tony Blair and George Bush.
Golly, they’ve tracked down Santa Claus, shot him right between the eyes before he could get to his sledge. Gnomes overwhelmed, reindeer bolted, sleighbells everywhere. Collateral damage: One Tooth Fairy (behaving suspiciously, fucking deserved it). Altogether now, USA! USA!
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Jeez, they swallow any old crap, don’t they?
“Adolf Eichmann wasn’t an evil monster, rather he was a petty official with crazed, romantic, ideas about the ‘volk’ and ‘race.’ By turning an ordinary man, with extraordinary and dangerous delusions, into a myth, one does these ideas a service. The really scary part is that such an ordinary individual, given so much power without restraint, can cause so much damage in the ‘right’ circumstances. It’s the circumstances we need to be aware of and prevent, because ordinary men are capbable of repeating them.”
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Well, look. Eichmann just happened to be one of the Nazi war criminals who escaped until fairly late. His comrades had mostly been tried and many executed at Nuremburg and elsewhere almost twenty years before. And the whole “banality of evil” thing may have a certain truth but it was, by and large, a creation of Hannah Arendt. Her book on the Eichmann trial is worth reading, certainly, but not uncritically.
Thanks Craig.
Sorry Craig, I think that this one is better.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/
Yes brilliant and illuminating to some. Osama was killed as an act of fratricide or cutting down one’s brother; part of the now obsolescent intelligent fraternity of cold war mentality, OBL knew too much – but what he knew has been recorded…
In the 1970s a young Bin Laden was caught up in the fundamentalist movement then sweeping Saudi Arabia when calls for less ostentation on the part of the Saudi rulers and for a halt to the cultural influence of the kingdom by the West struck a deep chord of sympathy across the kingdom. Today in a twist of fate that same movement is stirring again. As a new Islamic awakening descends on the Middle East it has become clear in the minds of the global intelligence chess players that deception and false flag are useless in a connected world of ordinary people and it is those same people or *us* that must be empowered to deliver change.
Do not agree, he got it wrong in many places.
Not so brilliant Craig. It buys wholesale the mythology that OBL was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks when even the FBI doesn’t think there is any “hard evidence” to justify having him on their most wanted list for that crime.
The writer is apparently totally unaware of basic physics. Were these alleged Muslim terrorists so clever they were able to suspend the laws of physics on 9/11?
The writer is also apparently totally unaware of the scientific literature on 9/11 and in parrticular the article by 8 scientists published in the peer reviewed Open Chemistry & Physics Journal April 2009 revealing the existence of highly secret military grade nano-thermite in the 3 world trade centre towers.
The weight of evidence is that bin Laden died of renal failure in December 2001. To accept the US government’s patently self-serving version of events from last Sunday, absent even rudimentary forensic proof betrays a naivety that suggests the author has never acquainted himself with history.
Maybe the US want their military forces out of Afghanistan, because they would rather deploy them elsewhere, what with all the uprisings in the Middle East.
Agreed – It’s very well written, thanks for the link.
No such thing as an un-Freudian slip. Choice of code-name Geronimo unconsciously squeals to the skies the genocidal dynamic so tragically at the heart ~ still ~ of the American Dream turned Nightmare.
More slips showing. These, in circumstances, almost out of Borges:
http://on.mash.to/jmydDh
An excellent article indeed. Thanks Craig! But thanks also to Spectral and others who comment on this and point out what a tragedy the US has brought about in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
From the moment it was revealed that Usama bin Laden had been killed in a villa near Pakistani military installments it was obviuous that the Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) had been helping Al Qaeda to hide Usama Bin Laden for years. I wrote about this even before it was confirmed by the Wikileaks in comments on the Swedish blog Mavera.
But in my analysis there I was sadly very mistaken on one point: I believed that the Pakistanis were somehow hopeful of being able to use Usama Bin Laden as a negotiation card when dealing with the US to make them stop the disastrous drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas that are now destabilising the country.
Sadly the Pakistanis (ISI) knew nothing about the US attack on the villa of Bin Laden. Thus the attack marks the very last nail hit into the coffin of whatever little was left of Pakistani national souvereignty. Obama calling this a testimony to the greatness of America – how cynical.
I visited these tribal areas in the Nortwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan in the early 1990:s. There was a delicate peace between the tribal leaders and Pakistani authorities based on the latter never ever poking their noses into local affairs. That peace was broken when US drone strikes started to kill civilians in those areas. ISI desperately tried to preserve peace by helping Al Qaeda when Usama Bin Laden was travelling in those areas, always giving notice to them whenever the CIA was getting close.
On Friday 22 April this year one of Obama’s drone strikes killed five women and children in Pakistan. That Easter day used to be a day when Christians used to be calm and contemplate the sufferings of Jesus Christ on the cross and how he suffered for the sins of all of us. I am a hopeless agnostic. But in this case I think it is only one of God’s miracles that could help the wonderful people of Pakistan to regain the souvereignty they so much deserve.
The original official version of the so called death of Bin Laden was a ‘pack of lies’ – deception requires an astute mind and President Obama should know better.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8491113/Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-White-House-backtracks-on-how-bin-Laden-died.html
I await the ‘gruesome, photograph of a dead OBL! The burial video is a waste of digital space.
If you think that article was brilliant, Craig, then I have misjudged you.
Intelligent people are saying if they really killed the world’s most wanted, they’d wouldn’t have buried the evidence in the sea now would they?
“Were these alleged Muslim terrorists so clever they were able to suspend the laws of physics on 9/11?”
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Absolutely. Get over it. You wouldn’t want YugoStiglitz (aka Larry) calling you a moron, would you?
“Were these alleged Muslim terrorists so clever they were able to suspend the laws of physics on 9/11?”
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Absolutely. Get over it. You wouldn’t want YugoStiglitz (aka Larry) calling you a moron, would you?
Ha ha! Vronksy, your posts really make laugh.
Maybe now they want to extend their conquests by going after the country that ‘harboured’ their enemy.
Look. Craig was an ambassador and there are bits of meat in his soup that get caught between the teeth. He has to believe in the Queen, al Qaida, Usama bin laden and fairies, or else he would be an anti-former-british-ambassador non-entity like us. Mark Golding is right when he states that our leaders now realize that they have to deal with a ‘ connected world of ordinary citizens ‘ who no longer believe any of the media myths.
Usama bin Laden was doing the political, media thing of his generation, while the Arab spring is currently doing the personal, integrity thing of today. The political, media thing was all the time orchestrated by those who were expert at that game. The Arab spring has been orchestrated by the West.
The media is telling us that the outcome of the Afghan war is a vast, US mopping-up exercise of Afghanis who have resisted the US. That’s not the last word. The reality is different from the media reporting. What has changed is that Muslims ( and some non-Muslims ) have finally seen through the West’s veneer of humanity and Usama has achieved his aim of waking up the Muslim Ummah. Meanwhile there has been some success in persuading Muslim youth to trust Western style people power. Like you let your children beat you sometimes at football or chess. It’s not going to last long. Everyone is convinced of that.
No, the last word will be with Usama, that your big friend is not the US UK or IS. Your big friend is Allah only, while the rest of the human ant swarm are desperately trying to work out how to rebuild the broken nest. We know who kicked it down and we know how to rebuild it. They are the Zionists. We are the Muslims. That’s what we do again and again, and it’s what we do best.
Ha, ha, yes Vronsky, your earlier “Santa Claus” post was also hilarious!