No tales from dead OBL

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
5/9/2011



Assuming the real Osama bin Laden was still alive when Obama ordered the US Navy SEALs to raid his Abbottabad lair, and considering that no firefight ensued during the assault as officially reported, why did they have to kill this most wanted “terrorist leader?” Was it out of sheer spite or rage, or a vicarious long distance revenge thrill? Or was it something else?

Washington says it had never intended to capture Bin Laden, only to kill him. US officials have repeatedly tried to equate this with “justice.” Three people died in the assault and a video of the “spy thriller” showed blood splatters where there were neither weapons nor empty shells. Is this the “rule of law” America speaks of? Doesn’t this smack of old Westerns and Charles Bronson vigilante flicks?

Even setting all that aside, the real question remains: Doesn’t the US want to know the details of how bin Laden so masterfully executed the so-called 9/11 terror attacks?

A bin Laden caught alive would have been a treasure trove of information: How did he elude the world’s largest intelligence dragnet (by the CIA, Mossad, and all the allied intelligence operations combined) for 10 years? What were the details of his group’s 9/11 World Trade Center attack plans; and who were the contacts?

A living Osama bin Laden would have also been crucial in finally breaking the back of al-Qaeda’s global network (if ever one does exist outside the realm of US intelligence assets). Flushing out these details would have helped prevent the kind of “terrorist backlash” Uncle Sam is now telling the world to brace for.

From a pragmatic standpoint, wouldn’t keeping Osama alive have been more prudent than simply killing him then saying that the photos of his cadaver can’t be shown as these may further inflame hatred toward the West? Didn’t the US for a minute think that the many countries it calls its allies would certainly have wanted to mine bin Laden for intelligence in solving their own terrorism problems, such as RP’s supposed al-Qaeda cells in Mindanao ?

The more one thinks about it, the more the killing of an unarmed target smacks of “a dead man tells no tales” scenario. Whether it was really bin Laden himself or, as some high Pakistani military sources as well as intelligence researcher Webster Tarpley put it, a “pseudo-bin Laden,” the bottom line is the same: His death gives the US a happy closure (however, tenuous that is). The important thing for now is to give the American people a final end to the story.

Never mind if that leaky closure breaks open again as the corpse was hurriedly sank into the sea. Never mind if a forensic autopsy that could still squeeze some final answers is sure to never occur. All that is of utmost significance is the way the US government insists that it meant only to kill, never to capture — making it out as a state out for bloodthirsty vengeance instead of peace.

Human civilization started organizing international bodies, such as the League of Nations and today the UN, to “end all wars.” These institutions established conventions for conflicts across the globe, the rules of engagement, as well as bodies to try war crimes and such.

However, Obama and the US today, and for the past decades, clearly have had none of these. But should we still be surprised at their barbarity after having seen the atrocities at Guantanamo, the extrajudicial “renditions” of suspects to third countries, the massacre of countless civilians by US Predator drones, or the killing of Gaddafi’s grandchildren and son for which US and Nato express no compunction and apologies for? Even a look back at our own Philippine history will reveal the US’ barbarity in its murder of at least a million of our ancestors.

If any, an occasional admission of collateral damage, with one or two trials (out of thousands of cases against US servicemen) is all that has ever come about. Obama’s effusive triumphalism over the “bin Laden” kill project only infuses a dehumanizing, lawless mindset of “endless war” instilled by the likes of “Clash of Civilizations” prophet Samuel Huntington.

Oddly enough, the real underlying debate in the world today is between that “Clash of Civilizations” paradigm and what Eastern nations such as China and Iran continuously proffer as a “Dialogue of Civilizations.”

Unfortunately, in the midst of the blood and hate-mongering, as well as the promotion of “tit-for-tat” terrorism by the most powerful terror state (the US ) against enemy terror bands (e.g., al-Qaeda), dialog is a lost cause. That is, unless the peoples of the world wake up to the subtle psychological ploys in these “spy thrillers” by Western media.

Allowing the global warmongers to get away with their lies is ushering the world into “endless war” and, imminently, pocket nuclear battles. These are already happening with the depleted uranium contamination in such Iraqi towns as Fallujah and in the Nato bombing of Libya .

In 2001, many among the so-called “conspiracy theorists” already predicted that the US was building up toward war when Dubya Bush pronounced the three words that started it all, the “Axis of Evil.” The wars, of course, did come.

Now, after the bin Laden kill, instead of an end to these terror wars, Hillary Clinton warns the world of al-Qaeda retaliation. Yet, as Western covert forces have time and again committed much graver acts of terror and blamed it on others — no different from Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag — the worst case scenario is a “dirty bomb” somewhere in a population center, which will then be blamed on Western targets (Libya, Syria, Iran, etc.) to justify tactical nuclear weapons use.

Ultimately, the goal is the re-colonization of Africa and the Middle East; then a tightened encirclement of China. It’ll be a repeat of the start of the War in the Pacific where the West embargoed oil to Japan.

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