bin Laden is Dead
Caelan MacTavish
Far be it from me, a civilian with no experience in espionage or counter-terrorism, to second guess the American intelligence agencies. But I have a hard time believing that Osama bin Laden is alive.
If this “evil mastermind” somehow survived the relentless and chaotic bombing of Afghanistan in late 2001, why isn’t he doing anything now? Why is he “holed up” in Pakistan? Why haven’t there been more attacks in response to our very visible torture of Muslims around the world?
Lest we forget, before 9/11, bin Laden was on dialysis. He was unable to live without being hooked up to a kidney pump that urinated for him. Forgive me if I find his survival in remote tribal areas of Pakistan to be not only unlikely, but outlandish.
Even though Israeli intelligence considers bin Laden not to be a threat—because they, too, think he is dead—we keep getting new tapes of his interviews. Odd, since on 9.28.01 he categorically denied having anything to do with 9/11, and then a confession tape magically appeared in December. Is the U.S. government capable of creating multiple forgeries to keep the bogeyman over our shoulders? Considering the extent to which Bush has shown he will go to distort the truth, it does not seem absurd that he would exploit a dead man for his own purposes.
Actual survival is not necessary for a supervillain in the minds of the people. Much like Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s classic 1984, by providing the American populace with an untouchable nemesis, we have become permeable to the same types of propaganda that Orwell’s dystopia presented.
Bin Laden fits the role of supervillain perfectly. To begin with, he is rarely referred to in the American press as bin Laden, but colloquially as “Osama.” This gives everyday civilians a sense of camaraderie with this nefarious terrorist, and brings him into their lives. By keeping his reference to a first name basis, the press has provided a villain familiar to all Americans. While farmers in Poughkeepsie may not be high on the list of potential terrorist casualties, they will consider themselves at high risk because they know the enemy. They are, after all, on a first name basis with him.
The mistake of the spin doctors in creating this supervillain is that they attempted to shift the spotlight onto a man who was still alive. When President Saddam Hussein was removed from power and chased from Baghdad, most Americans were still too shocked and disoriented from the collapse of the country’s tallest skyscrapers to notice the bait and switch. But as time wore on, more people realized that bin Laden and Hussein were not the same person.
The spin doctors that work for the oil-rich Bush Administration were quite obviously trying to make Hussein their new supervillain, most obviously from his new nomenclature in the American press as, simply, “Saddam.”
Unfortunately for them, there was never an actual threat from Iraq towards the American People. Hussein was an inferior supervillain, and without a live bin Laden, they have been without a means of controlling the easily frightened American populace.
Their next move will be to create another villain. Look for another attack, coming soon, to an election near you.
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Feb 13, '06
If the USA really wants to kill Osama, all we have to do is send him on a hunting trip with Dead Eye Dick!
The big guy will be dead by dinner... accidentally, of course.
Feb 13, '06
ur an idiot and talking out of your ass
Feb 13, '06
Likewise, so is anyone who spells "you are" as 'ur'
Feb 13, '06
Caelan.....come on son. I usually enjoy your contributions. This time you are displaying a bit of paranoia that is really off base.
If the progressive movement's best days are filled with conspiracy theories or banal jokes about a hunting accident we are doomed.
Cmon folks....there's work to do.
5:16 p.m.
Feb 13, '06
caelan, yesterday i was the paranoid one in here (and got defended by Doretta, who apparently bugs some folks at times, but she got my point which was nice). being paranoid is not a bad thing, especially when "they" ARE out to get you. and we KNOW "they" are.
but i do get your point: whether bin Laden is dead or alive, he's not the problem. there will never be any shortage of terrorists or terrorist "masterminds" on either side. hate and fear are behind all this, along with huges doses of greed and religious self-righteousness. the enemy is no one person or group of people, not even al-qaeda nor the bushies. the enemy is that which we carry within. "let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." st francis had it right on that score, and god may or may not play a part in each of our peace-making, be "we" do. each one of us. when we defeat the fear, hate and such within ourself, we no longer are prey to the pseudo-enemies beyond.
Feb 13, '06
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,
The United States of America has spent half a trillion dollars trying to find the TALLEST MAN IN PAKISTAN dragging a dialysis machine through the mountains.
But, hmmm, what was the last name of W's first business partner and Daddy's current partner at Carlyle Group?
Binladen. Look it up.
Feb 13, '06
If finding OBL is such a cake walk, maybe some of you armchair Tom Clancy's would like to volunteer for a seek and destroy mission.
Feb 13, '06
C'mon Caelan... write about Enron/PGE or the Portland public schools' average class size or anything else that matters here in Oregon that you can do some basic factchecking on.
Feb 14, '06
This administration has a proven track record of lying and manipulating facts to try to control public opinion to further their agenda. To take a closer look at anything that seems odd and keep an open mind is prudent, not paranoid. When people are afraid to look it reminds me of that line from a Frank Zappa song--"It can't happen here". Thanks for the post Caelan.
Feb 14, '06
Truer words
The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear: Keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real...." ---General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
Oceania is at War with Eurasia. Oceana has Always has been at War with Eurasia.
Feb 14, '06
As much as I'd like to dismiss this post as just so much youthful silliness, there's a part of me that thinks that this scenario is not outside the realm of possiblity for the Bush administration. I don't think we've yet found the depths to which they will sink in order to accomplish their goals.
Feb 14, '06
Wait a minute. Categorically denied having anything to do with Sept. 11, 2001? !!!! I tried hitting the hyperlinked "denied" in the article, but the link was not found. Can someone elucidate this for me? Why would bin Laden deny having something to do with sept. 11? I thought the whole point of being a terrorist was to get recognition for your cause. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If the Israelis think bin Laden's dead, he may be. Whatever. But now I'm just confused.
4:36 p.m.
Feb 14, '06
Here's an entry (appropriately footnoted) from the Wikipedia, that supports Caelin's statement. It doesn't provide clarity, but it does provide accuracy.
September 16, 2001, bin Laden responded by reading a statement, "I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation," which was broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel. [8][9][10] This denial was broadcast on U.S. news networks and worldwide. The second public response was read on September 28 by Daily Ummat, a Pakistani newspaper. In it, bin Laden stated "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle." [11][12] A stark contrast from an earlier Fatwa calling for the killing of American civilians in 1998 [13]
In November 2001, U.S. forces recovered a videotape from a destroyed house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan in which a man who apparently is Osama bin Laden talking to Khaled al-Harbi. [14] In the tape, bin Laden admits to planning the attacks. The factuality of the tape has been questioned in the Muslim world: "But the BBC's Middle East correspondent, Frank Gardner, says that at street level in the Arab world, many believe the tape is a fake, a PR gimmick dreamed up by the US administration." [15]. The tape was broadcast on various news networks in December 2001.
Feb 14, '06
A big HIGH FIVE for Alice!
Feb 14, '06
Ok, I have no idea where or whether bin Laden is living, but I can tell you that Caelan's linguistic "evidence" is baloney.
The mainstream press almost universally calls bin Laden "bin Laden." Look if you don't believe me. The exceptions are pretty much always snarky opinion pieces or direct quotations. He's "Osama" only to some of the publications that cop attitudes to define their niches.
Saddam has long preferred that the Iraqi people address him as "Saddam"; as I understand it, it's part of his strategy for maintaining a cult of personality. Most U.S. journalists have followed suit since the days when he was an ally -- no "new nomenclature" about it -- partly because of longstanding precedent for letting people choose how they'll be described, and partly from sheer relief that it got them out of differentiating "President Hussein" of Iraq from King Hussein of Jordan every single time either of them did anything. (The New York Times, of course, has always called him and will always call him "Mr. Hussein." They're the ones, you may have heard, who called Meat Loaf "Mr. Loaf.")
So, let's see. Caelan's -- Mr. MacTavish's -- remaining "evidence" involves his assumptions about the resources available to a wealthy man in a part of Pakistan I bet Mr. MacTavish hasn't visited, and an alleged interview with bin Laden cited by somebody who says, "Everyone familiar with the content of the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum knows bin Laden is telling the truth," and blames the Israeli government for the 9/11 attacks. I don't have the knowledge to debunk these claims as I did the assertions about journalists' word choice, but I think I prefer not to accept them at face value.
(p.s. If you Preview your posts before shipping them off, you can right-click on the links you made and double-check that they actually go someplace. If you're reading a post whose poster didn't do this, try going into the URL and deleting everything before the last "http." In this case, I also had to delete the quotation mark at the end.)
3:52 p.m.
Feb 16, '06
He's either dead or he isn't. If he's alive but invisible, he has the Schrodinger's Cat thing going for him. That is that he's both alive and dead simultaneously until someone lifts the lid and looks in the box.
Until that time, his ambiguous status is perfect for both the terrorists and their authoritarian opponents in the White House. Each side can trot out a new recording or sighting when they need to get scare or enrage their troops, and he can be ignored the rest of the time.....
<hr/> <h2>Everybody's happy.</h2>