OSAMA bin LADEN DEAD - CNN.com

Why Didn’t We Capture the Terrorist Kingpin and Interrogate Him?

Washington’s Blog
May 5, 2011

I’m as happy as the next red-blooded American that Bin Laden is dead.

For more than a decade, the government has said that Bin Laden is the world’s worst terrorist, a terrorist kingpin, the head of the worst terrorist group in the world.

But if we captured and interrogated him, he could have spilled a lot of beans which would help prevent future terrorist attacks.

Right?

But as the Atlantic reports today:

The White House now admits that Bin Laden wasn’t armed, so why wasn’t he captured? The government says that the Seals who entered the compound thought he was reaching for a weapon.

That might be true, although Bin Laden wasn’t exactly a healthy spring chicken. Indeed, Bin Laden was already pretty sickly by late 2001. (Don’t worry: This post won’t go down any rabbit holes regarding claims that Bin Laden died years ago.)

As CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen – who met Bin Laden and studied Bin Laden and his operation for many years – told CNN in 2002:

Indeed, the oldest – and second-largest – French newspaper claims that Bin Laden was in the hospital for kidney failure two months before 9/11. As the Guardian notes:




And CBS news reported that Bin Laden was ill on September 10, 2001, being treated in a Pakistan hospital with kidney dialysis:

In addition, it is rumored that Bin Laden had Marfan Syndrome – a disorder of the connective tissue, which usually shortens the life span (Abraham Lincoln had Marfan).

As Salon noted in November 2001:

Again, this post will not go down the rabbit hole to ask whether Bin Laden died prior to Sunday’s raid. I am only focusing on the fact that Bin Laden was probably not a movie script type healthy young terrorist when he was thought to be reaching for a gun.

In addition, Bin Laden’s 12 year old daughter purportedly claims that Bin Laden was successfully captured alive first and then later summarily executed by the troops. Hopefully, this isn’t true.

But assuming the government’s version of events is true, why didn’t the seals use knock-out gas and capture him? Even common thugs use knock out gas. For example, the U.S. state department warns:

(Be careful if you take any night trains in Italy).

If common hoodlams knock out their victims, you know that the U.S. military has stuff they can easily lob in and knock everyone out. Why didn’t the government knock out Bin Laden and then hall him off to the interrogation room?

Indeed, the U.S. may have gotten the clue about Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad location in 2008. As the Guardian notes:

So the U.S. could have knocked him out in 2008 and interrogated him.

As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. had multiple opportunities to get Bin Laden in 2001 and 2007:

And Gareth Porter reported yesterday that the U.S. didn’t even consider capturing Bin Laden as part of its Afghanistan war strategy:

We tortured a bunch of innocent farmers, children, grandparents and reporters … supposedly to get information about Bin Laden. But it doesn’t seem like the government was very interested in actually interrogating Bin Laden himself.


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Obama’s bin Laden speech photo staged

International Business Times
May 5, 2011

The White House hotly debated whether to release photos of Osama Bin Laden after Sunday’s raid on his Pakistan compound, but when it came to the President’s own photos, there was only one way to go: staged.

While the photo that ran on many newspapers and websites the next morning appeared as if it were taken during Obama’s address to the nation the night before, it was actually the result of an elaborate post-speech production.

“As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent,” Reuters photographer Jason Reed explained in his blog.

“Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.”

The procedure was put in place apparently as a method to mitigate the distracting noise of the photographer’s cameras and also give opportunity for journalists from different organizations to get directly in front of the president.

Reed describes how the president gave his speech to a single TV camera, then immediately after finishing, he pretended to speak for the still cameras.

The move is not without precedent. Several presidents have staged photos in recent history of the White House, according to John Harrington, the president of the White House News Photographers Association.

“I am aware of it happening in previous administrations,” Harrington tells Poynter Institute.

“The times where I have known of it happening before is when the president is in the Oval Office and you are working in a very tight space.”


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Hillary Clinton Claims ‘Allergy Not Anguish’ Reason For Photo As Evidence Points to PR Stunt

Clinton: allergy, not anguish in my bin Laden photo

Reuters
Thursday, May 5, 2011



RELATED: Staged: White House “Situation Room” Photos Part Of Bin Laden Fable

(Reuters) – An allergy and not anguish may explain why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had her hand to her mouth while watching the commando operation to kill Osama bin Laden, she said on Thursday.

“Those were 38 of the most intense minutes. I have no idea what any of us were looking at that particular millisecond when the picture was taken,” she said on Thursday when asked about the photo during a visit to Rome.

“I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So it may have no great meaning whatsoever,” Clinton added.

Full story here.

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Shot Dead With Money Sewn Into his Clothes': Bin Laden was Captured Alive and then Executed, 'Claims Daughter, 12'

- Bin Laden had £450 sewn into his clothes, ready to flee
- Wife confronted U.S. forces and was shot but not killed
- She was NOT the human shield who tried to protect him
- US and Pakistan in 'custody battle' over wife
- British bishop: 'This isn't justice, it's revenge'
- Ken Livingstone: Killing makes Obama look like a 'mobster'
- Flags burned at pro-bin Laden protests in Quetta, Pakistan

Osama Bin Laden's daughter has claimed he was captured alive in his Pakistani hideout and then shot by U.S. special forces, it was reported today.

Arabic news network Al-Arabiya quoted 'senior Pakistani security officials' who said the 12-year-old saw her father executed and his body dragged to a helicopter.

A Pakistani official rejected U.S. accounts of a bloody firefight, saying: 'Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the U.S. forces and their choppers. Their chopper developed some technical fault and crashed and the wreckage was left on the spot.'



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Read more: Shot Dead With Money Sewn Into his Clothes': Bin Laden was Captured Alive and then Executed, 'Claims Daughter, 12'

White House Press Secretary “Floundering Under Pressure” Of Flip-Flopping Bin Laden Fable

Jay Carney is floundering under pressure, say Washington insiders

Toby Young
London Telegraph
Thursday, May 5, 2011

There is increasing concern in Washington that Jay Carney, the new White House Press Secretary, isn’t up to the job. Even when faced with an innocuous question that requires only that he trot out the official line, he looks completely stunned, as if the questioner is Bob Woodward asking him about Deep Throat. He gathers himself, embarks on a stuttering reply, pauses for what seems like an eternity, then starts gabbling, tripping over his words, rephrasing what he’s just said, then looking plaintively back at the questioner as if to say, “How did I do? Was that okay? Or would you like me to try again?”

“I think he’s doing very badly,” says a political contact based in Washington. “And I’ve heard others say that he’s really struggling.”

This is a pivotal moment in Barack Obama’s presidency, a moment when the eyes of the world are locked on Washington. In the global battle for hearts and minds, it is essential that the leader of the free world exudes an air of calm authority at this time. Yet the White House’s handling of the media in the aftermath of Sunday’s events has been breathtakingly amateurish, planting seeds of doubt about the legality of the operation and about Osama bin Laden’s death that would not otherwise be there. The constantly changing narrative – or “fact pattern”, as one White House official described it – suggests that the president and his advisers have been caught on the hop and have no clear strategy for dealing with the fallout from bin Laden’s death. This is epitomised by the halting, timid delivery of Jay – “How’m I doin’?” – Carney, who must bear some of the responsibility for this communications failure.

Full story here.

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9/11 Families Snub Obama’s “Photo-Op”; ‘Show Us The Bin Laden Proof’

MONICA MORALES
Sun Sentinel
Thursday, May 5, 2011

As 50 carefully selected families prepare to join President Barack Obama for a ceremony at the World Trade Center site Thursday, one of the invited 9/11 families have decided to pass on the Commander-in-chief’s visit.

“There is no closure,” a sobbing John Vigiano said. “There is none.”

“I’m honored the President of the United States is coming to New York,” he said. “[But] to me its just going to be a photo op.”

Jeannie Evans, of Elmont, who lost her baby brother firefighter Robert Evans on 9/11 will also not be there Thursday. She wasn’t invited.

“Why not show us proof, that Bin Laden was killed? I would like to see that,” wondered Evans.

Full story here.

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Christiane Amanpour in 2008: Bin Laden Living In Comfortable Villa In Pakistan

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Excerpt from Real Time With Bill Maher, aired on October 3rd, 2008. Christiane Amanpour revealed that at least one person in US intelligence suspected Osama Bin Laden was residing in a comfortable villa inside Pakistan, not a cave.

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Paul Craig Roberts: What Is The Agenda Behind The Bin Laden Fable?

Prison Planet.com
Thursday, May 5, 2011

The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. What agenda or agendas is the “death of bin Laden” designed to further?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury.


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Abbottabad residents: Operation of killing Bin Laden a hoax

"US President Barack Obama's dramatic announcement that the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden was shot dead in a compound in Pakistan's north western city of Abbotabad surprised the world.
At a distance of about a hundred and thirty kilometers from the federal capital, the garrison city of Abbotabad is a picturesque valley in the foothills of the Karakarom.
Abbottabad is an important military center being the headquarters of an Army brigade.
On May 1st US President Barack Obama's announcement surprised the people of Pakistan but most of all the Government and the armed forces.
Obama calls it an intelligence driven operation.
An eyewitness of Pakistan said, "We are not fools, it's America, and the dirty American policies. Whenever they want to take control of an area, they act this way. Osama was never here, America wants to destroy the image of the Pakistan army."
Pakistan president Asif ali Zardari has denied that Pakistan knew about Osama's presence in the country.
And those who live close to this compound say bin Laden was never in that house.
An eyewitness of Pakistan said, "I have lived here all my life, I have never seen Osama Bin Laden come or go from here. We are a close knit community. At least we would have seen him once, but we did not. And even if he was killed, the Pakistan army should have conducted the operation"
When I spoke with the members of the anti terrorist squad, surprisingly even they couldn't confirm Bin Laden's killing.
Then what are the facts?
Muhammad Imran is a Taliban expert.
Taliban expert Muhammad Imran said, "The people who are living in the adjacent areas and who are the neighbors of this compound, they have a focus on one point, there are certain issues that need to be addressed and I think with the passage of time the story will unfold about what actually happened. Apparently we believe that Bin Laden was here and was killed during the operation, conducted by the american marines."
There are a number of contradictory theories and growing speculation following Osama Bin Laden's death as to how and why the operation was carried out in the way it was.
Locals living in the neighborhood say that this operation was a hoax. And if such a high profile target WAS living here, then why didn't the Pakistani army carry out this operation? Why wasn't Pakistan kept in the picture. These are the questions that need to be answered by the United states"

The Growing Coverup: Osama and “The Big Lie”

Larry Chin
Global Research
May 6, 2011

The Obama administration and the corporate media are concocting an ever-more elaborate and spectacular theater around the “heroic” murder of the CIA intelligence myth/CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Not content to simply to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for political gain, the administration is heaping new layers of lie and cover-up to the original crime.

The growing cover-up

The desperation is palpable. Just days since the “big announcement”, Obama administration officials have already been*forced to backpedal, issuing multiple corrections, adding to the confusion over the location of the killing, whether bin Laden was armed or unarmed, whether there was a “fire fight”, if an alleged wife was involved, the burial at sea, whether to release “graphic photos”, etc. The mainstream corporate media—following approved CIA/White House narratives—is spewing and regurgitating a tidal wave of red herrings that add to the inconsistencies.

Seasoned observers will not be fooled, no matter how many Obama lies, doctored photos, fake footage, lurid new testimonials and CIA pronouncements are pushed forth. As put simply by*Paul Craig Roberts:

“As the alleged body has been dumped into the ocean, nothing remains but the word of the*US*government, which lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, about yellowcake, about Iranian nukes, and, according to thousands of experts, about 9/11. Suddenly the government is telling us the truth about bin Laden’s death?* If you believe that, I have a bridge in*Brooklyn*that I’ll let you have for a good price.”

The “war on terrorism” is a fabrication,*war propaganda that continues to serve as the eternal pretext for global resource war. That 9/11 was a false flag operation—that the official story is a lie and cover-up—has been definitively proven in numerous investigations, such as Mike Ruppert’s*Crossing the Rubicon, Michel Chossudovsky’s*America’s “War on Terrorism”, the work of*Paul Thompson, and others.

Osama bin Laden is a product and asset of the CIA.*“Al-Qaeda” is a covert operation, a*“database” of intelligence legends, exhaustively detailed in the work of Chaim Kupferberg (Part 1 and**Part Two).*Pakistan’s ISI, a virtual branch of the CIA, was central to 9/11 and a player in subsequent “terror” operations. It is not surprising that*Pakistan*and the ISI is at the heart of the “death of bin Laden” as well.

The “death of bin Laden” changes nothing about the factual record that indicts (among others) Bush/Cheney, Anglo-American military-intelligence, and elite war/oil interests.

Tragically, none of this matters. The minority of individuals with unscrambled brains is not the target of this imperial charade.

Euphoria, brainwashing, and “imperial mobilization”

To borrow from the lexicon of world planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, 9/11 was a successful**attack “on the order of*Pearl Harbor” that “united” the American people behind an “imperial mobilization”—the “war on terrorism” for oil. With 9/11, the masses fully supported nearly a decade of war, atrocities, subversion, and unprecedented government criminality.

The militant and unquestioning public embrace of “war on terrorism” lies underscores how that the 9/11 has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Anglo-American war criminals who orchestrated it.

Now Barack Obama, who has spoken incessantly over the years about wanting to “unite” America again “just as it was after 9/11”, has been granted his moment to “unite” the masses again, but do an even better job of population control than Bush/Cheney (who, in their clumsiness and hubris, partially “squandered” their “political capital”). The swaggering Obama will “get it right”. He is a better actor, the more devious and mendacious corporatist who was selected for this specific purpose.

Obama has been*itching to be the “Osama killer” since before he was elected.

The 9/11 “shock effect” remains fully potent, as evidenced by the frenzy, euphoria, and stomach-turning jubilation of crowds of Americans joining in celebration orgies over a fictional murder of the fictional Osama bin Laden, a fictional revenge. Even the “intellectuals” and “experts” are treating this charade as if it is real. Corporate media headlines have declared that “the world has changed”, and the masses love it.

The post-9/11 era has spawned an entire generation of vicious and ignorant drones, whose moral compass has been shaped by war, lies, violent entertainment, and brainwashing. The future American police state will be built upon this new culture of thuggery. This is*“Obama’s Animal Farm”.

To Obama, this is “what makes*America*great”.

Rescripting reality

In Orwellian fashion, the legend of the death of Bin Laden changes nothing in reality, but turns the mass perception of this reality upside down.

Suddenly, an unpopular Obama and his failing presidency are recast, in true Bush/Cheney fashion, as a heroic—and now successful— “war president”. He is now Obama the 9/11 avenger, protector of the American people, and the great military master.

This burnished new image, which is preposterous as the one given to George W. Bush during his reign of terror, grants Obama his own new “political capital”. Two years of flummoxing and failure, wiped out. Attacks from all sides, stopped. Obama has a political weapon to fend off attacks from the right-wing. They can no longer attack Obama for being weak on foreign policy. At the same time, Obama’s corporate liberals (who care only about gaining political points on the Republicans) can return to deluding themselves about Obama’s populism, appeal and effectiveness, despite two years of absolute failure and purposely broken campaign promises. With one stroke, Obama is being handed the 2012 election.

Suddenly, Obama is not only just as “great” as Bush, but an even “cooler customer”, who singlehandedly ordered and carried out a covert operation that Bush/Cheney could not.

(This writer had expected the “I Killed Osama” prize to be granted to Bush/Cheney. Apparently, their handling of Iraq/Afghanistan did not earn them the permission.)

What real objectives will be met with this new propaganda? As noted by*Paul Craig Roberts:

“My initial interpretation of the faked bin Laden death was that Obama needed closure of the Afghan war and occupation in order to deal with the*USbudget deficit.* Subsequent statements from Obama regime officials suggest that the agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm. The military/security complex will become richer and more powerful, and Americans will be rewarded with vicarious pleasure in victory over enemies.”

Just as the Nixon administration declared a false “victory” in aborting the disastrous war in*Vietnam, Obama can declare a similar “mission accomplished” with his “Osama Kill”. This will allow the administration to redeploying forces from*Afghanistan*to elsewhere in the region.*Pakistan,*Saudi Arabia*and other critical oil-related geography remain in US cross-hairs. The new image of Obama the “heroic anti-terrorist” will convince at least some international leaders to cooperate with the administration. The mass resistance to the US-backed regimes in the Middle East, Africa and*Central Asia*will be at least partially neutered.

The CIA, soon to be under the command of Iraq/Afghanistan war criminal David Petraeus, is also given a new green light to continue their “war on terrorism” atrocities. This massive criminal mafia is viewed as a heroic protector of*America.

A redeployment of forces back to the*US*is long overdue, for the continued buildup of*“Obama’s Animal Farm” within US borders. The militarization of the*US*homeland will be ratcheted up, in order to stop domestic unrest, union protests, and popular responses to the*continuing collapse of the US economy.

“Al-Qaeda”, under new leadership, will be continue to be unleashed. The next phase of the CIA deception is likely to involve the legend of jihadists avenging Osama bin Laden, including, if necessary, “new 9/11s”.The so-called Al-Qaeda number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who himself has “died” multiple times, will be the new boogeyman, along with other recently named*“operational chiefs” such as Adnan Shukrijumah.

The final atrocity

To add a grotesque and sickening final insult, the swaggering Barack Obama will grandstand at*New York’s Ground Zero, in a staged celebration of a fictional murder, on the hallowed ground where thousands of people actually died at the hands of the*US*government and its covert operatives.

Obama even invited George W. Bush to share his “victory lap”.

This act of exploitation will dispel all illusions about the criminal nature of this liar who has done Bush/Cheney one better by stooping even lower into the depths of depravity.

The original Big Lie gets its bookend Big Lie.


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Day of the Dead: The Hit Man as Hero

CHRIS FLOYD
Empire Burlesque
May 6, 2011

Already the*story is starting to unravel, mutate, transmogrify. Government statements that were presented as gospel truths in every media outlet in the world, and which served as the basis for ten thousand earnest, serious commentaries, turn out, one day later, to have been false.

We had been told – by the president’s top “counterterrorism adviser,” John Brennan – that Osama had been “engaged in a firefight” when he was gunned down by American agents. This was not true; it turns out that he was unarmed when they shot him in the head. We were told that the base coward used his wife as a human shield while he pumped hot lead at America’s boys. This was not true. There were no human shields – although Osama’s wife was shot in the leg, while another woman, wife to a bin Laden aide, was shot and killed by the agents.

Of course, even these new officially released“facts” must be taken with a grain of salt, since they spring from the same impenetrable murk of the security*apparat from whence the original story of the raid emerged. Will these new details change tomorrow?

(Meanwhile, actual reporters doing actual reporting*independently uncovered another falsehood in the first story: the compound that was raided in Abbottabad was not a “million-dollar mansion,” but a rather ordinary house in a middle-class area, worth about $250,000.)

In any case, we are told by the Fightin’ Patriotic Progressives who now stand foursquare behind the apparat that we should not trouble our little heads over these “discrepancies.” Such things are to be expected in the “fog of war.” (But didn’t the president and his national security team – including John Brennan – actually watch the raid unfold on live video feed? Didn’t Brennan see what happened with his own eyes?)

Or if not fog, then the original misinformation can be put down to “subconscious” mythologizing,*as Digby tells us. (“I think it was mythologizing for the sake of mythologizing, even if it was subconscious.”) Our leaders wanted an old-fashioned cowboy shoot-out for the big climax of the bin Laden story, and so, somehow, the counterterrorism chief of the United States just, you know,*subconsciously rearranged the facts to fit the myth. But as Digby sternly warns us: “Let’s not get stupid. The fact that they embellished doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” That’s true; but “the fact that they embellished”*does mean that we would be, well, stupid to accept anything that belches forth from the Secret State at face value.

I don’t mean to pick on Digby; but the post linked above serves as an almost perfect example of the moral schizophrenia that has gripped the progressive movement since the advent of Obama. At one point, she rightly notes that no one would have been bothered if the Administration had admitted from the start that bin Laden was unarmed when they killed him. As she says, the assassination scenario was duly praised by such rock-ribbed liberal icons as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert; and she notes, astutely, “I don’t think there’s any political downside, and in fact it probably makes them look more macho in the eyes of the people.”

(Indeed; all manner of liberals have been exulting in the new image of Obama the Heroic Hit Man. For example,*Juan Cole and*James Wolcott –* both long-time scourges of the witless, brutal militarism of the Bush Regime – posted up a lolcat-style photo of a cool, grinning Obama in shades, emblazoned with the tagline, “Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate – I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden.”)

Digby then goes on to offer up another telling – and damning – insight:

Besides, the question of whether the president could order an assassination was settled some time ago. They assert the right to keep prisoners in jail forever and kill*American citizens, and nobody cares, so why in the world would there be any domestic blowback for ordering the death of the world’s most wanted man?

Here is where the schizophrenia sets in. It is obvious, from this and other posts, that Digby is horrified and outraged at Obama’s open claim of this universal license to kill and imprison with impunity. That is, she fully recognizes that the United States government is led by a man who believes he can murder anyone he pleases, at any time, at his own arbitrary decision. She knows that he has used this power over and over, most extensively in Pakistan, where even by the most conservative estimates hundreds of innocent people – including many women and children – have been killed in Obama’s drone missile campaign.

She knows, in other words, that Obama has killed hundreds of innocent people.*Hundreds of innocent people. Little children, women, old folks, young marrieds, fathers, mothers, teenagers – he has killed them in their own homes, in the streets of their villages, in their cars, at their weddings and funerals and birthday parties and family gatherings, raining down missiles, without warning, with no way to escape, no defense, killed them, the babies, the children, the old, the sick, ripped their bodies to shreds, buried them under rubble, tore off their heads, set them on fire to die in the purest agony. She knows this. She decries this. She believes it is wrong. Yet the general thrust of her widely read blog is that this man who does these things, who commits these horrors, who claims these murderous, tyrannous powers, should, at all costs, be retained in power so that he can carry on doing these things which sicken and horrify her.

But this is not simply a case of lesser evilism in a system where all the alternatives are grim* – i.e., “Well, Göring is a monster but he’s probably marginally better than Hitler; let’s support a bloody coup to install him as Führer”. No; Digby and many other progressives whose writings show they are perfectly aware of the atrocities that Obama has committed and the evil policies he embraces – such as the unrestricted license to kill – still display an active affection and celebratory support for him. To them, even though he has killed these people and claimed these awful powers, he is still one cool guy.

Witness their delight at Obama’s comedy routine at the Correspondent’s Dinner last week, when he poked fun at the pathetic Donald Trump, garnering big yocks from the Beltway elite – even as NATO missiles*were killing three young grandchildren of Moamar Gadafy: more child sacrifices offered up on the altar of our modern Molochs. They didn’t even notice.

Oh, they often shake their heads sadly or waggle their fingers sternly at some action or policy of Obama’s. They often can’t understand why he does these things – cut taxes for the rich, bail out the bankers, torture Bradley Manning, form commissions to gut Social Security, escalate and prolong the Terror War, kill hundreds of people with drone missiles, etc., etc. But nothing douses their fundamental (fundamentalist?) fervor to keep him in power and to scorn those who oppose him. Nothing keeps them from seeing themselves as his true and faithful “base,” still waiting for him to return to them, despite his many betrayals. (Subconsciousbetrayals, no doubt.)

And we can expect more encomiums to the president’s eloquence and heroism from these quarters on Thursday, when, with the good taste and tact so characteristic of our bipartisan ruling class, Obama goes to the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City to celebrate the shooting of an unarmed man in the head.

Yes, the president of the United States, accompanied by various Establishment worthies and doubtless a few dignified clerics, will stand at Ground Zero to glorify a killing that his own minions tell us will change nothing whatsoever: the wars will go on, “vigilance will be redoubled” (i.e., civil liberties will continue to be eroded, black ops will continue in the 70 countries or more where America is carrying out covert operations), the Secret State will keep growing, the universal license to kill and snatch and incarcerate and torture will remain in full force. So what exactly is being celebrated?

A cynic – or someone being skeptically “stupid” in the Digbyian sense – might say the occasion is more exploitation than celebration: exploiting the grief of the families of 9/11 survivors who will be trotted out to express their tearful gratitude to the president who has given them “closure” – and who will reap the poll bounce from this moment of “national unity,” just as his predecessor rode a similar exploitation of death to his own re-election.

Oh, but let us not be stupid. Let us acknowledge that the president kills innocent people and “asserts the right to keep prisoners in jail forever and kill*American citizens” and puts out false information (subconsciously, of course! Always subconsciously!) about murky operations which we must take on faith like dutiful subjects in militarized state, not fully-fledged citizens in a republic – but let us still revel in his triumphs, delight in his eloquence, and work with all our strength to make sure he continues to invert, pervert and subvert every progressive value we hold dear.

That’s not “stupid” at all, is it?

***

UPDATE: Administration officials*are now denying that Obama’s national security team watched the execution of bin Laden on video feed, as was originally reported. Officials now say that the team was receiving “minute-by-minute updates” — via unspecified technology* — and that, according to CIA honcho Leon Panetta, “there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.” That would be the 20 or 25 minutes when the actual killing took place, presumably.

It’s hard to understand how this wild story about the team watched the whole thing unfold in real time. Just one of those crazy urban myths, I guess. Or perhaps it was because of this bit of “subconscious mythologizing” that was offered up by the president’s own chief adviser on counterterrorism, John Brennan, just two days ago:

“We were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation from its commencement to its time on target to the extraction of the remains and to then the egress off of the target… we were able to monitor the situation in real time and were able to have regular updates and to ensure that we had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation. I’m not going to go into details about what type of visuals we had or what type of feeds that were there, but it was – it gave us the ability to actually track it on an ongoing basis.”

I suppose really vague language like “we were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation” from the start to the kill to the “extraction of the remains” and the grand skeedaddle*could be twisted by stupid conspiracy theorists into some kind of cockamamie notion that Barry and Hill and, er, John Brennan, had, well,*monitored the operation in real time. But now we know better.

UPDATE 2: There will doubtless be more backtracking and backfilling and sidestepping and subconscious mythologizing in the days to come. For it turns out that the crack crew of American agents left a whole group of eyewitnesses to the operation behind — including the 12-year-old daughter of bin Laden, who saw her father killed — and was also wounded in the attack.

As the Guardian reports, at least 10 people were left behind after the raid — presumably because the raiding party did not have room to cart them off after losing one of their helicopters before the kill. Pakistani officials found the survivors — including bin Laden’s wife and the wounded daughter — when they arrived on the scene just after the American exit. All of the survivors had been handcuffed, Pakistani officials said. The Americans also left four dead bodies behind: three men and a woman, taking only bin Laden and his dead son. From the Guardian:

Local authorities arrived on the scene of the raid as American special forces were leaving. It is believed that the attackers originally planned to evacuate all those in the compound but the breakdown of a helicopter meant there was no space to take them.

Instead, only the bodies of Bin Laden and his son Hamza, who was in his early 20s, were taken to the aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson and buried at sea. Survivors were left with their hands fastened with plastic handcuffs, a second Pakistani official said, adding that initial communications with the survivors had been difficult as the Pakistani police and military arriving at the scene did not speak Arabic.

The survivors are now being held by the Pakistanis, who say they will return them to their home countries as soon as the respective governments ask for them. At the moment, they are not allowing American agents to interrogate them — strenuously or otherwise. But no doubt as the survivors’ stories begin to emerge — and yes, they will have their own spin and agenda, just like Obama and his subconsciously mythologizing security apparatchiks — we will see several more “corrections” of the “historical record” now being woven and re-woven in front of our eyes.


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US Government Contractor Claims “Al-Qaeda” Has Confirmed Bin Laden Fairytale

SITE organization was behind release of fake “Al-Qaeda” tapes released at politically opportune times stretching back years



Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, May 6, 2011

One of the groups behind the endless fake Bin Laden tapes and a contractor for the US government tells us that “Al-Qaeda” has confirmed the death of Osama. Although Bin Laden has been dead since 2001, the fact the US government is having to rely on the* notorious SITE Institute to prop up the crumbling Bin Laden fable that was manufactured on Sunday night shows how desperate the White House has become in its bid to sell the public on more terror fearmongering.

“Al Qaeda released a statement on jihadist forums confirming the death of its leader, Osama bin Laden, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant messages,” reports CNN.

“The statement, translated by SITE, lauded the late militant, threatened to take action against the United States, and urged Pakistanis to “rise up and revolt.”

SITE’s claim that “Al-Qaeda” has confirmed the official White House version of events concerning the death of Bin Laden, thereby lending presumed credence to a narrative that has quickly attracted derision and suspicion even amongst mainstream journalists, is about as credible as if Barney the Purple Dinosaur had made a statement assuring us that Osama was killed on Sunday evening.

SITE is a US military-industrial complex front and has been caught red-handed releasing fake Al-Qaeda tapes on numerous occasions.

The SITE organization is nothing more than a contractor for the U.S. government, receiving some $500,000 a year annually from Uncle Sam, the majority of which is paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The group was founded by Rita Katz, the daughter of an executed Israeli spy. Katz has worked closely with the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security.

SITE’s website content was found to be largely copied from the U.S. State Department. “SITE’s “Terrorism Library, on cursory investigation, looks to be a straight data scrape from the U.S. Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2003, Appendix B,” notes SourceWatch. This organization is nothing more than a dummy group which acts as a conduit for Pentagon propaganda.

Everything about SITE indicates that it is nothing more than a trojan horse that is regularly used by the military-industrial complex to release staged Al-Qaeda videotapes as part of the ongoing propaganda offensive to justify the brutal, pointless and manufactured war on terror.

SITE was miraculously able to obtain the highly suspicious September 2007 Bin Laden video tape before it was released by the so-called Al-Qaeda group who had made it.

SITE has been positively endorsed by Blackwater USA, the infamous military contractor co-founded by former Navy Seal Erik Prince that was found to have been involved in several massacres of innocent Iraqi civilians.

SITE’s continued existence relies on fleecing the American taxpayer by way of contracts with the U.S. government and constantly invoking and hyping the hugely exaggerated threat of alleged Al-Qaeda groups in the Middle East.

The organization has proven itself adept at releasing Al-Qaeda propaganda tapes at the most politically expedient times for both the Bush and Obama administrations. For example, just two days after it was revealed that Al-Qaeda mastermind and CIA stooge Anwar Al-Awlaki had met with Pentagon top brass only a matter of months after 9/11, SITE released a video tape of Awlaki re-affirming his commitment to global jihad and praising the actions of the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber.

On the same weekend, SITE released a tape of Adam (Pearlman) Gadahn also praising Farouk AbdulMutallab and Faisal Shazad, the alleged Times Square bomber.* Adam Pearlman is blatantly an Mossad spy who is releasing fake Al-Qaeda videos to bolster the geopolitical agenda of both the United States and Israel.

We are being asked to believe that Pearlman, a former hardcore Jewish Zionist who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as “bloodthirsty terrorists,” and enjoyed regularly beating up Arabs is now preaching the cause of global jihad. Pearlman’s grandfather was none other than the late Carl K. Pearlman; a prominent Jewish urologist in Orange County. Carl Pearlman was also a member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, which was caught spying on Americans for Israel in 1993.

SITE claimed it obtained the Pearlman video from As-Sahab, Al-Qaeda’s supposed media arm. As we previously documented, SITE’s sister organization IntelCenter was caught adding its logo to a supposed Al-Qaeda tape at the same time as the As-Sahab logo was added, indicating the two organizations were one and the same.

Since the official narrative behind the Bin Laden myth has quickly crumbled as the White House flip-flops on the actual account of what happened, in addition to being caught staging the “situation room” photos which were erroneously passed off as depicting Obama and Hillary Clinton watching the assassination of Osama live on TV, holding together the flimsy fairytale of the Bin Laden fable is proving difficult.

That’s why we can expect more lurid fearmongering to distract from increasing suspicion towards the events of Sunday evening, like the supposed Al-Qaeda plot to derail trains in the U.S. on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a plan described as “aspirational more than operational,” and one already rendered mythical based on the fact that no trains even operate at speeds over 500mph in the United States.

FLASHBACK: Israeli Connected SITE Institute Hypes Dead Grecian Formula Terrorist

FLASHBACK: Proof Bin Laden Tape Is 5-Year-Old, Re-Released Footage

FLASHBACK: U.S. Government Caught Red-Handed Releasing Staged Al-Qaeda Videos

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.


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Osama Bin Laden: The Movie

Orwell Was Right
Friday, May 6, 2011


Sequel coming soon…


The recent fanfare on May 1st 2011 from the screenwriters in the mainstream media over the US government’s announcement of the US Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden reminds us once again how mainstream journalism requires Orwell’s memory hole in order to function. After all, this isn’t the first time we’ve been told bin Laden is dead. Like a bad action movie franchise bereft of new ideas and forced to regurgitate the same tired concepts with each sequel, rumours of bin Laden’s death have surfaced so many times since this uber-boogeyman allegedly carried out 9/11 that one can’t help but wonder if this “criminal mastermind” is actually a cat…

Like the infamous James Bond*supervillain,*Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Osama bin Laden has demonstrated an incredible knack for teetering around the edge or coming back from the grave when you least expect it (usually when the President is running low in the opinion polls). After his swift identification in the corporate press as the mastermind of 9/11 – without any evidence to support this – he denied all involvement in the attacks, stating shortly after in an interview with Karachi-based newspaper Ummat, “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.”

Nevertheless, despite this denial and the inability of the US government to provide the proof requested supporting their allegations, the media immediately got behind the military-industrial-complex and began beating the drums for war against Afghanistan. Conveniently ignoring further requests for proof from the Taliban, who offered to hand him over if presented with evidence of his guilt, they happily suspended the standard principle of innocent until proven guilty in favour of a bloodthirsty, jingoistic call for large-scale bombing campaigns, saturated with appeals to the most base form of patriotism coupled with “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” emotional blackmail.

Once the war was on, however, the US government seemed to forget about bin Laden. President Bush expressed how disinterested they really were in capturing him just six months after 9/11:

“Deep in my heart I know the man’s on the run if he’s alive at all.” Bush later corrected himself, in his trademark blundering manner:

But what had actually happened to bin Laden? Admittedly, few in the media were about to challenge the Bush administration’s lack of enthusiasm for tracking the supervillain down, but nevertheless rumours of his death soon began to circulate. In January, 2002, Pakistan President Musharraf believed him to be dead on account of his kidney disease, saying, “”I don’t know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. … I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan.” In July of the same year, The New York Times reported that bin Laden was dead: “The news first came from sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan almost six months ago: the fugitive died in December and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan.” In the same month, FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson echoed these beliefs, saying, “”Is (bin Laden) alive or is he dead? I am not really sure of the answer … I personally think he is probably not with us anymore…” And again, in October 2002, Afghanistan’s puppet leader also claimed that bin Laden was “probably dead”. He explained on CNN, “The more we don’t hear of him, and the more time passes, there is the likelihood that he probably is either dead or seriously wounded somewhere.”

Further hints at bin Laden’s possible death came from various intelligence agencies, with sources inside Mossad claiming that any new messages from bin Laden were “probably fabrications” and sources from Pakistani intelligence, who claimed he was already dead and “attributed the reasons behind Washington’s hiding news on the death of Osama bin Laden to the desire of the hawks of the American administration to use the issue of al-Qaida and international terrorism to invade Iraq.” Perhaps a prophetic statement, for following on from this steady flow of rumours of his demise in 2002, bin Laden somehow managed to emerge from hiding – or beyond the grave – to help boost Bush’s approval ratings, once again becoming the poster boy for al Qaeda and dominating news coverage in the build up to the invasion of Iraq. This was the era of the bin Laden tapes dismissed by many experts as being fakes, much like the alleged “confession” video released in December 2001, not credible enough for even the FBI to consider hard evidence (when asked why bin Laden was not wanted for 9/11 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, Rex Tomb, said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”). He showed up once again in another video of dubious veracity just before the 2004 Presidential elections – his appearance effectively handed Bush his second term in office.

In 2007, news of bin Laden’s death came once again, this time from Benazir Bhutto, who claimed he was murdered back in 2005:

Iin 2008, former CIA case officer Robert Baer also suggested in an interview on National Public Radio that bin Laden was no longer alive. Questioned further he replied, “Of course he’s dead.” As he points out in his article for Time magazine, When Will Obama Give Up the Bin Laden Ghost Hunt?, the last reliable sighting of him was as far back as late 2001 – a fair statement, given the obvious lack of countervailing evidence.

The latest bin Laden propaganda extravaganza will no doubt go down in history as one of the most flawed, contradictory and downright absurd Pentagon psychological operations in recent history. Already the story has been changed repeatedly: first bin Laden was armed and used his wife as a human shield, then he was unarmed; amongst the first pieces of “proof” to come out was a photograph so obviously fake that someone with little to no experience with Photoshop could knock up a superior composite in half an hour. When this was proved to be a fake the media displayed its usual lack of credibility by ignoring the implications of faked evidence and moving on swiftly to the next lie. Such is the extent of the flip-flopping from the US government and the corporate press that one can’t help but wonder if they’ve suspended all pretence of common sense and have reached the point where they simply don’t care whether or not the public believe a word they say. Like true propagandists, when caught out on their lies they simply replace them with fresh lies and label anyone who holds them to account for their deceptions “conspiracy theorists”.

Those debating whether or not he was armed, or if the action was “lawful”, or, ultimately, even if he’s actually dead or not are missing the point. By engaging with these issues they are ostensibly lending credence to the propaganda. It’s a classic example of the media creating “controversy” within the spectrum defined by the official narrative and allowing lively debate to proceed within those confines. Likewise, those who are naively expecting the death of bin Laden to bring the troops back home from Afghanistan will no doubt find themselves sorely disappointed; it has been made clear repeatedly since the alleged killing that al Qaeda are now more than ever likely to attack. Like all half-baked serial films, Osama bin Laden: The Movie has been left with a cliffhanger, one which was made clear in the recent WikiLeaks “revelations” that there would be “nuclear reprisals” if bin Laden were killed or captured – a perfect excuse for greater expansion of police powers and quite possibly setting the stage for another false flag attack. Little wonder the timing of these events leads one to believe they’re scripted…


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Don't you just love how the media photos of this guy (who is just who they call Barack Obama) are the same 1 picture just altered in ways that the hypnotized, brainwashed, general public will believe to be new ones. 1 picture, and a ton of edits and releases. Oh, the magic of computer photo editing software. Of course it's a hoax. You'd have to be completely hypnotized/brainwashed to believe otherwise.

You'd think that by now, with all the evidence proving to contradict the media, that more people would start to wake the F*** up. But, alas, no. They choose to go on believing everything they are told from "reputable" sources, instead of listening to their instincts on what is right and what is wrong.