Juliet Buck: Osama Bin Laden - The U.S. Of Empire’s Middle Eastern Boogey Man (RADICAL SAHM)

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Juliet Buck: Osama Bin Laden - The U.S. Of Empire's Middle Eastern Boogey Man (RADICAL SAHM)

Submitted by Rob Williams on Tue, 07/26/2011 - 12:09pm.



You know how you watch CSI and you point and laugh and roll your eyes at the rank silliness of all the 72" LCD touch screens, rotating holograms, state-of-the-art sample libraries, and instant DNA analysis? Well, it appears lots of people think that shit is, like, totally real.

"I know DNA . . . and you cannot, repeat CANNOT, take a tissue sample from a shot-in-the-noggin dead guy in a north-central Pakistan Special Forces op, extract the DNA, prepare the DNA for assay, test the DNA, curate the raw DNA sequence data, assemble the reads or QC the genotype, compare the tested DNA to a reference, and make a positive identity determination... all in 12 hours. So maybe they did get Osama. But there is no fucking way they had any genetic proof of it by the time they dumped the body over the side." – some guy that knows DNA

I'm not saying he isn't dead, but I am saying that the government is, like, totally lying about how he died, and in so doing revealing a fundamental contempt for the justice system. The government's behavior also confirms that the U.S. Empire is currently running on very rich fuel mix of third-grade-level storytelling and cognitive dissonance on steroids.
The corporate media meme is that bin Laden was executed without trial and his corpse "buried at sea" (no doubt this phrase is 2011's "hiking the Appalachian trail") because the U.S. would have been paralyzed by the media firestorm and controversy that a bin Laden trial would have caused.

Bull to the shit.

There are only two reasons to execute a guy and then dump the body rather than bringing him to trial: either it isn't him or your evidence is insufficient for a trial. Any other explanation constitutes a resounding condemnation of the capacity of the justice system to... well, adjudicate stuff. We didn't even forge ahead with the pretence of a trial under whose auspices we could have emerged at the very least united in the presumption that the executive branch does not have the right to unilaterally decide who is guilty and what constitutes justice. We could have maintained that this is for society as whole to decide and that that is what a fucking judiciary is for. That we didn't jump in with both feet for even a sham trial speaks unfortunate volumes.

After World War II the international community managed to have trials for high-ranking Nazis who outright murdered six million Jews (and gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill, and retarded people – basically, anyone that would ruin the holiday picture) and were in large part responsible for a war that killed 60 million people in a dozen different countries. As we speak, Ratko Mladic is on his way to Hague for trial having been accused of almost unfathomable war crimes. Falling back on the non-reasoning of bin Laden being some special strain of evil so pure and so virulent that his treatment defies adherence to the rule of law, while at the same time somewhat eagerly assuming ourselves incapable of riding the tumultuous waves of a trial is not only an admission that we are a less viable nation with less viable institutions than we were 65 years ago, but that Serbia is currently eating our law-and-order lunch.

Since we are on the subject of Nazis, if I hear one more spokeswhore prattle on about how bin laden was "the Hitler of our generation" I am going to hurl. Oh, how we love to fellate ourselves with the idea that bL and his dusty band of not-so-merry men actually constituted an existential threat to the United States. That a bunch of guys with box cutters and IED's could topple America Fuck Yeah!™ is both insane and pathetic. More informative is how the American people can swallow the following logic: bin Laden's death is a glorious victory over the threat of Al Qaeda and proof of American supremacy, AND Bin Laden's death does not diminish the threat of Al Qaeda one schmear and actually ratchets up the stakes of the "War on Terror" to the extent that Congress (which has its thumb securely up its ass in respect to the patently illegal war we are waging in Libya) used concern over retribution as a rationale to extend the vile and injurious PATRIOT Act for four more years without fact finding or debate. We simply can't be the greatest nation on earth if we shiver in the shade thrown by a few hundred very angry extremists, yet this is exactly the contradictory rhetoric being delivered and accepted.

When it's suggested that the government offer some "proof" of their purported exploits, they are quick to contend that the longer this stays in the news, the more inflamed bin Laden's acolytes could become. (And then they call you a "deather" and tell you to go share a padded cell with Orly Taitz.) Call me crazy, but methinks the carnival images of red-faced, chest-thumping puerile glee sent round the world half a dozen times is going set aflame whatever righteous tinder is out there all on its own. This is an excuse to not present evidence which might reveal either a 10-year-old time stamp on the video or unflattering details of his execution that do not fit the asinine semper fidelis narrative in play.

The other reason we can't be allowed to see these images or images like them is because doing so may disabuse us of the notion that war isn't a horrible, indiscriminate, brutal, wasteful, soul-killing venture and that seeing the dead body of a mythical creature construct like bin Laden might trigger the realization that he was just a man and not the potentially world-ending cataclysm that the self-serving conflict industry has very deliberately made him out to be. This kind of Oprah- brand light-bulb moment would put a serious cramp in Lockheed-Martin and Co.'s style, as well as that of the resplendent epauletted birds of prey roosting in the overburdened upper branches of the military. I'm not a fan of reductionism, but in this case it's pretty simple: those who profit from war want war to continue, even if they have to tell you that you are both wet and dry at the same time to sell it. The "War on Terror" is just a means to an end: a deeply militarized surveillance state capable of global-resource domination in the interest of the Corporatocracy.

As if...

Now, to the Amateur Hour storytelling. Bin Laden's death was initially breathlessly described using the following details:  He was living in a luxury million-dollar mansion (bad Muslim!), he was both armed and actively engaged in a firefight with U.S. forces when he was killed (suicide by SEAL!), and he used his wife as a human shield during the battle (pussy!).

Amazingly, not only have all of these seemingly intentionally inflammatory details proved to be false but they also appear to have been gleaned from a 1990s Steven Segal screen play. Seriously, the only missing detail was them bursting into the room just as bL was about sodomize the senator's corn-fed daughter and then having him beg piteously for his life while admitting to being a McDonald's-loving, Laverne and Shirley-watching hypocritical fraud.

The pathology of this narrative cannot be overstated, especially given that most people wouldn't have cared if they had just marched up and shot him in the back. Or in his sleep. Or in a coma.  The posturing artifice and myth of the "War on Terror" is so delicate, and the American people's acceptance of even the most fatuous rationale is so complete, that the truth is both not an option and unnecessary. For instance, only in a state of suspended disbelief powerful enough to watch Tron 2 can one simultaneously believe that the invasion of Afghanistan was worth the blood and treasure, and that, in light of recent events, an invasion of Pakistan is not. For the love of Pete, they harbored him after the fact!

Lots of ink has been spilled celebrating the efficiency of bin Laden's assassination. No dead villagers to dig the bullets out of this time! A nice neat job, booya! Well, if you ignore the fact that we have been at war in the region for more than 10 years, killed around a million people, created tens of millions of refugees, spent trillions of dollars leant by China (and thus put ourselves into a supplicant political position), and inflamed the hatred of untold numbers of people who rightly object to being murdered and occupied, it was neat. If you ignore the fact that we were the first big investor in Al Qaeda, that we financed, armed, and trained the Mujahedeen back when they were being good little terrorists fighting the Soviets, it was neat. In short, if you ignore the fact that we created the terrorist threat and a blow back-flavored Petri agar to grow it in, then today is a proud day and you should run out and buy a T-shirt. Bonus points if it has an eagle on it.

Even if you wholeheartedly accept that bin Laden was responsible for coordinating the 9/11 attack and that there had to be a non-proportional response i.e. ("He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue" in Afghanistan), a study published in The Lancet, the only peer-reviewed study of the Iraqi death count, found that as of 2006, more than 655,000 Iraqi deaths had been caused by the U.S. occupation of Iraq. An invasion and occupation of a country that did not attack us or even harbor those who did, that waited years for a suitable pretext and, in the end, was rationalized by intelligence we damn well knew to be false, has – as of five years ago, mind you – killed 2.5 percent of Iraq's population.

Let's dispel with some dubious logic: engaging in an activity with the end game being death and destruction (what "they" do) is morally indistinguishable from engaging in an activity where death and destruction are just profitable by-products (what "we" do). Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if a foreign army invaded our country, killed seven million people, and forced our president to hide in a hole before being hung.

Then riddle me this: If we feel entitled to kill more than a million people to ostensibly avenge 2,751 deaths, what are the families of those million innocent dead entitled to do to us? Unlike the conjured menace of one Middle Eastern boogey man, that is a thought that should keep you up at night.

http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2011/0 ... dical-sahm