A lot of people are spouting a lot of nationalist BS and rejoicing at the murder of yet another figurehead in the war on terror.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden was state sanctioned murder. Nothing more, nothing less. We need to realize this, before we murder anyone else.
There was no way that Bin Laden could have ever gotten due process if he had been captured. He would have been locked up in Gitmo for the rest of his life and tortured, ad hoc, for years to come because we think he has information about things he couldn't possibly be privy to.
If the president thinks he has the right to order the assassination of an American citizen without benefit of due process, what could Bin Laden expect? We can't 'risk' bringing any one in Gitmo to justice. We don't even try to protect the prisoners' civil rights. Do you think we would have given Bin Laden any more due process than we give the other men in Gitmo? We won't give Bradly Manning due process and he is an American who has not been convicted of anything.
Trying Bin Laden, if we could manage to find someplace that didn't mind having a terrorist tried in their jurisdiction, would have raised a lot of questions. Questions that no one wants answered. It would have challenged the government's version of the 9/11 attacks. They would have had to face an entirely new threat - the truth. No one, particularly the government, wants the story to change. And what the people think is completely irrelevant, except as it relates to how many back scatter x-ray machines we can buy; shoes that had to taken off in airports; civil liberties that can and are being infringed upon; billions of dollars of deficit financing that goes to the military-industrial complex; the creation of a surveillance state; the expansion of the powers of civil law enforcement; the expansion of American hegemony etc etc. etc.
And let us not forget the imbeciles that work for the TSA who otherwise would have had a hard time finding and keeping a job in fast food.
Bin Laden was the person who made all of these things possible. He is the source of all this. He spooked the herd and caused a stampeded. He was the focus of our hatred. We have a concrete view of who and what he was and we are not particularly interested in changing that. He was the incarnation of pure evil. So, what would have happened if he called our beliefs into question? Challenged our views on what happened on 9/11? And what would have happened if he were to be brought to trial and shown to be a guy who hangs out in a cave, smoking opium? We couldn't have that, so we murdered him. Then we went about waving flags in some kind of bizarre nationalistic pride.
We have so much invested in the myth of Bin Laden, that we couldn't see him as anything but evil incarnate,the monster lying under bed of democracy and our republic, that we couldn't have let him live.
As a people we love the myth that we, as country, are invincible and seek to perpetuate that belief at any cost.
We think Bin Lade was so invincible that we sent an army to kill one man and it still took us ten years to find him. Ten years. Either Bin Laden is really, really, really clever or our military isn't very good at what they do.
We, the American people, elected Bush and Obama and choose to give them the power of life and death without any accountability. And we made two really bad decisions. And in the last ten years, thousands of people have been murdered all over the world as result of those bad decisions. People disagreed with us and choose to assert their right to live as they wanted to. So, like Bin Laden, we killed them. And we think we are the 'good guys'? We are as barbaric as Bin Laden, supposedly, was. If Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, he killed about 3,000 people. We have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east in an attempt to force them to live as we do.
Killing people is not a good thing. Unless you work for the government.
Wait a minute, isn't that what Bin Laden did? Yep.
The most significant part of all this is that we didn't need to kill Bin Laden just so we could hang his head on the wall in the White House. The man hadn't done anything in the last ten years. He was completely redundant to Al Qaeda. Now, Al Qaeda carries out small, limited attacks against insignificant targets that have a major political impact. Bin Laden took the long view. Jihadists now are lucky if they can see past their suicide bombs.
There has not, nor will their ever be, another attack like 9/11. Osama Bin Laden may have been the mastermind of criminal act of horrendous proportions. Thing is, the jihadists have realized they can influence the west without any big, grandiose plans. All they have to do is drive a car full of 'explosives' into Times Square and not have it blow up. They don't need to blow up anything. The threat of blowing up something is enough to provoke a frenzy. They can achieve the same, or more, impact by not blowing stuff up as they did when they were blowing stuff up.
We are pissed and affronted by the reality that we don't have the means to protect ourselves from a couple of guys sitting round a campfire in the middle of nowhere, Afghanistan who will sacrifice everything to accomplish what they believe is right and moral. Somebody has to be responsible for two wars, countless thousands of people dead and that somebody was Osama Bin Laden. We invested him with superpowers. Able to reach out and plant a bomb in some idiot's shoes and in another idiot's underwear. Was he really that evil before we vested the idea of him being a 'super-terrorist'?
Bin Laden was portrayed as everything that went wrong since 9/11. He was a scapegoat invented by the US government. According to the government, the man was a menace to society. He killed people. He made videos of himself firing scary looking rifles. If he did mastermind the attacks on 9/11, our terrorist mastermind did it while he was living in a cave. And when his political influence ended about a foot outside of his cave.
The question is: What do we do now?
The reason we went into Afghanistan was to get Bin Laden. Well, we got him. So, what do we do now? Get out of Afghanistan? Tell me when to stop laughing. We will be killing people, or facilitating the killing of people, long after the myth of Osama Bin Laden fades into history. We may stop killing people in Afghanistan - the Soviets did - but I can guarantee you that we will find another country where we think it is in their best interests to bomb them back to the stone age.
War, killing, maiming and deficit financing of the military will go on forever. This is the 'Long war'. Today we're getting our asses handed to us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tomorrow, we will, probably, get our asses handed to us in Libya.
The names will change, but the war will remain the same. And it will go on long after my generation is gone. It will, probably, out live our children - those that don't get killed signing up to kill people for money to go to university.
And, for a lot of people who are so shallow that they think celebrating a man's death is a good idea; that is entirely acceptable.
This is not the America I know and love. Not at all.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden was state sanctioned murder. Nothing more, nothing less. We need to realize this, before we murder anyone else.
There was no way that Bin Laden could have ever gotten due process if he had been captured. He would have been locked up in Gitmo for the rest of his life and tortured, ad hoc, for years to come because we think he has information about things he couldn't possibly be privy to.
If the president thinks he has the right to order the assassination of an American citizen without benefit of due process, what could Bin Laden expect? We can't 'risk' bringing any one in Gitmo to justice. We don't even try to protect the prisoners' civil rights. Do you think we would have given Bin Laden any more due process than we give the other men in Gitmo? We won't give Bradly Manning due process and he is an American who has not been convicted of anything.
Trying Bin Laden, if we could manage to find someplace that didn't mind having a terrorist tried in their jurisdiction, would have raised a lot of questions. Questions that no one wants answered. It would have challenged the government's version of the 9/11 attacks. They would have had to face an entirely new threat - the truth. No one, particularly the government, wants the story to change. And what the people think is completely irrelevant, except as it relates to how many back scatter x-ray machines we can buy; shoes that had to taken off in airports; civil liberties that can and are being infringed upon; billions of dollars of deficit financing that goes to the military-industrial complex; the creation of a surveillance state; the expansion of the powers of civil law enforcement; the expansion of American hegemony etc etc. etc.
And let us not forget the imbeciles that work for the TSA who otherwise would have had a hard time finding and keeping a job in fast food.
Bin Laden was the person who made all of these things possible. He is the source of all this. He spooked the herd and caused a stampeded. He was the focus of our hatred. We have a concrete view of who and what he was and we are not particularly interested in changing that. He was the incarnation of pure evil. So, what would have happened if he called our beliefs into question? Challenged our views on what happened on 9/11? And what would have happened if he were to be brought to trial and shown to be a guy who hangs out in a cave, smoking opium? We couldn't have that, so we murdered him. Then we went about waving flags in some kind of bizarre nationalistic pride.
We have so much invested in the myth of Bin Laden, that we couldn't see him as anything but evil incarnate,the monster lying under bed of democracy and our republic, that we couldn't have let him live.
As a people we love the myth that we, as country, are invincible and seek to perpetuate that belief at any cost.
We think Bin Lade was so invincible that we sent an army to kill one man and it still took us ten years to find him. Ten years. Either Bin Laden is really, really, really clever or our military isn't very good at what they do.
We, the American people, elected Bush and Obama and choose to give them the power of life and death without any accountability. And we made two really bad decisions. And in the last ten years, thousands of people have been murdered all over the world as result of those bad decisions. People disagreed with us and choose to assert their right to live as they wanted to. So, like Bin Laden, we killed them. And we think we are the 'good guys'? We are as barbaric as Bin Laden, supposedly, was. If Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, he killed about 3,000 people. We have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east in an attempt to force them to live as we do.
Killing people is not a good thing. Unless you work for the government.
Wait a minute, isn't that what Bin Laden did? Yep.
The most significant part of all this is that we didn't need to kill Bin Laden just so we could hang his head on the wall in the White House. The man hadn't done anything in the last ten years. He was completely redundant to Al Qaeda. Now, Al Qaeda carries out small, limited attacks against insignificant targets that have a major political impact. Bin Laden took the long view. Jihadists now are lucky if they can see past their suicide bombs.
There has not, nor will their ever be, another attack like 9/11. Osama Bin Laden may have been the mastermind of criminal act of horrendous proportions. Thing is, the jihadists have realized they can influence the west without any big, grandiose plans. All they have to do is drive a car full of 'explosives' into Times Square and not have it blow up. They don't need to blow up anything. The threat of blowing up something is enough to provoke a frenzy. They can achieve the same, or more, impact by not blowing stuff up as they did when they were blowing stuff up.
We are pissed and affronted by the reality that we don't have the means to protect ourselves from a couple of guys sitting round a campfire in the middle of nowhere, Afghanistan who will sacrifice everything to accomplish what they believe is right and moral. Somebody has to be responsible for two wars, countless thousands of people dead and that somebody was Osama Bin Laden. We invested him with superpowers. Able to reach out and plant a bomb in some idiot's shoes and in another idiot's underwear. Was he really that evil before we vested the idea of him being a 'super-terrorist'?
Bin Laden was portrayed as everything that went wrong since 9/11. He was a scapegoat invented by the US government. According to the government, the man was a menace to society. He killed people. He made videos of himself firing scary looking rifles. If he did mastermind the attacks on 9/11, our terrorist mastermind did it while he was living in a cave. And when his political influence ended about a foot outside of his cave.
The question is: What do we do now?
The reason we went into Afghanistan was to get Bin Laden. Well, we got him. So, what do we do now? Get out of Afghanistan? Tell me when to stop laughing. We will be killing people, or facilitating the killing of people, long after the myth of Osama Bin Laden fades into history. We may stop killing people in Afghanistan - the Soviets did - but I can guarantee you that we will find another country where we think it is in their best interests to bomb them back to the stone age.
War, killing, maiming and deficit financing of the military will go on forever. This is the 'Long war'. Today we're getting our asses handed to us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tomorrow, we will, probably, get our asses handed to us in Libya.
The names will change, but the war will remain the same. And it will go on long after my generation is gone. It will, probably, out live our children - those that don't get killed signing up to kill people for money to go to university.
And, for a lot of people who are so shallow that they think celebrating a man's death is a good idea; that is entirely acceptable.
This is not the America I know and love. Not at all.
