It was a fantastic week for manufacturers of patriotic novelty souvenir flags, firstly because of the British royal wedding lining the streets of London with a sea of red, white and blue union flags (anyone possessing flags of any other colour having been arrested the previous day, just in case) and then with a surprise last-minute bulk order for the stars and stripes coming in on Monday, following the news that U.S.special forces had found and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Yes, a good week for the flag sellers indeed, whether you were waving them, or burning them, they really couldn't care less.
So it was clearly a good week for President Obama too, despite Fox News taking full advantage of what will probably not be their last opportunity to make their favourite "accidentally on purpose" captioning mistake. (see picture).
What isn't so clear, however, is pretty much everything else. I guess that is unsurprising really, considering that the man himself was twisted up inside half the currently active conspiracy theories on the planet, but surely you would expect that the Americans would want to make this one look as above board and by-the-book as possible? Considering they have invaded a couple of countries, killed tens of thousands of people and spent trillions of dollars in the process of supposedly looking for the fucker?
Well, the very first thing I heard about it was that they had killed him and almost immediately dumped his body in the sea. Which sounded mightily convenient to me. I always at least half suspected that Bin Laden had died of kidney failure sometime in early 2001, admittedly making him responsible for releasing more post-humous material that Tupac and Biggie combined but it made a lot more sense than an old man on a dialysis machine running around the Afghan mountains giving US Special Forces the slip.
Things went from curious to curiouser with the news that the pictures of a dead Bin Laden released through the media were actually photoshopped fakes, followed hot on the heels by news that the US would not be releasing any pictures confirming what happened because of the potential for "negative consequences", not that it stopped them from televising Saddam Hussein's last drop. Meanwhile the western worlds media outlets was absolutely on-fire with all kinds of gloating, crowing and sick jokes guaranteed to have the negative consequence of reaffirming to half the planet why the USA is indeed the Great Satan.
The official story seems to have mutated every single time someone has asked a question about it. First it was a mission to capture or kill Bin Laden that met with fierce armed resistance in which the target was shot during a prolonged firefight. Then it transpired that the special forces teams actually met very little armed resistance (one armed guard) and Bin Laden was unarmed when he was gunned down in what may sound quite a lot like an assassination, but wasn't an assassination at all, oh no, not according to the White house.
I have really only just scratched the surface of the convoluted contradictions surrounding what happened on the 2nd of May, and have not even touched upon the ramifications of where Osama was found - not in an underground lair, complete with doomsday device and shark-tank, deep in the Tora Bora mountains, or even in the disputed tribal regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in a villa in a suburb of Abbotobad, home of the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst where their military elite are trained.
To be honest, almost every single aspect of this story stinks!
If Bin Laden had died years ago and this was just an opportunity for President Obama to score a much needed propaganda smackdown, then I am fairly sure that George W Bush would not have failed to take up that opportunity himself, some time before the end of his own administration. If they had captured Bin Laden alive and without a fight, you would think the obvious thing to do would be to put him on trial for the numerous acts of mass murder he has taken credit for - truth, justice, the American way and all that? Or maybe they would want to ask him a few questions about this global terrorist organisation he was apparently the mastermind in direct control of?
So maybe, just maybe someone decided they wanted the best of both worlds?
Did they capture him, and then rather than put him in a position to spill all kinds of inconveniently-juicy-secrets which may potentially have found their way into the press, they only said they had killed him and then spirited him off to some secret prison in a third-world hell-hole, and had the electrodes attached to his testicles before you could say Camp X-Ray? That way they could torture the hell out of him for as long as they wanted and then kill him at their leisure, without all the pesky inconvenience of having to put him on trial and convict him first, or of giving him a burial place that could become a pilgrimage for fanatical nutcases from all over the world.
That sounds like common-sense to me.
I am by no means an apologist for cunts like Osama Bin Laden, but our Governments in the USA, UK and Europe really do try to represent us as "the goodies" in the war against terror, we are supposed to be the the ones fighting for peace, liberty, freedom and democracy. Aren't we supposed to do the right thing? If they had the opportunity to bring him to trial for the things I am pretty certain he did, such as the murder of 3000 people on September 11th 2001, then surely that is exactly what they should have done? Not bumped him off and then disposed of the body like in some kind of mafia style gang-land execution.
Personally I would have liked to see him spending the rest of his days sharing a prison cell with Slobodan Milosovic (former president of Serbia responsible for anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars) I'm sure they would have gotten along famously, but unfortunately, one way or another, people who commit the really huge crimes never seem to come to trial.
Perhaps some people are scared that it might set a precedent.
So instead we are left with this murky, unsatisfactory, fundamentally confused conclusion where the body of Osama Bin Laden may well be dead (by now anyway, I'm not sure how long a 54 year old man who must have had a kidney transplant at some point in the recent past would last under CIA enhanced interrogation) but the idea of Osama Bin Laden is still going strong.
So I guess we'll just have to wait for the WikiLeaks on that one!
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