This is quite unexpected. War(on terror)mongers have used the continuing spectre of Bin Laden, the apparent evil genius at large, to push police state laws and aggressive foreign policy since 2001. To now claim Bin Laden is dead removes that spectre. Surely for their War On Terror to continue it would be better to keep the apparent death of Bin Laden quiet and maintain his unseen menace?
Not quite. There’s a very good chance that this will be followed up by claims of mass Al Queda recruiting for a series of revenge attacks on the west, in response to the loss of a Jihad “martyr”. And the natural response of the War(on terror)mongers will be demands for more police state laws and more attacks against other countries.
On the other hand, there will be a great deal of speculation, comment and accusation that the US have staged Bin Laden’s death. Off hand I can think of five good reasons to question the recent assasination announcement.
1) Former Pakistan president, Benazir Bhutto, claimed over three years ago that Bin Laden had been assasinated by Omar Sheik. David Frost, conducting the interview for BBC, ignored the comment despite its journalistic value and political implications. During the interview Bhutto talked of plots to assassinate her, an act which was carried out two months later.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnychOXj9Tg
2) Questionable authenticity of Bin Laden’s original “smoking gun” admission video. The second video below was paraded around western media as “proof” of Bin Laden being the mastermind of 9/11. Compare it with the first video, an apprent Al Jazeera leaked Bin Laden speech. Do these two “Bin Laden’s” look like the same person?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiKyWJRRjnU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0xgGSmfVek
3) Bin Laden repeatedly denied responsibility for 9/11 attacks. Prior to the above video “proving” Bin Laden as responsible for 9/11, the terror “mastermind” repeatedly claimed through Al Jazeera that he had nothing to do with the attacks, though he did praise the perpetraitors.
4) Evidence of pre-9/11 planning for a War On Terror. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 foreign policy book The Grand Chessboard laid out a pre-9/11 agenda for a US takeover of middle eastern “geopivotal states” to secure access to the Eurasian Balkans’ natural resources. The events of 9/11 gave the political impetus for his masterplans to go ahead.
5) UK government admitted it was unable to provide evidence conclusively linking Bin Laden to 9/11 attacks. In a public statement, released via The Guardian, the UK government puts forward its case for claiming Bin Laden carried out 9/11. It begins with this statement, “This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama (sic) Bin Laden in a court of law. Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document.” This a very convenient justification for not presenting evidence. Basically, the document amounts to a claim of “trust us because we say it’s so.”
So is there any truth to the recent reports of Bin Laden being assassinated in a US operation? Was he already dead years ago? And did he really have any involvement in 9/11?
Should our war(on terror)mongers attempt to revive a clamp down on human rights and the triggering of new wars, it is up to us to counter the ideological basis of a new war on terror by raising these and similar questions.