So where is Osama bin Laden’s vast army of devoted followers?

No evidence of any kind has been offered to support the claim that Osama bin Laden was killed in the way described, if at all. Apart from the fact that the story changed every few hours (initially, for example, we were told that he’d been buried at sea in accordance with Muslim tradition; then, when it was pointed out that there is no such tradition, they told us he’d been buried at sea to avoid giving him a burial shrine), there are too many inexplicable and inconsistent elements in the White House’s version of events. For instance, Obama – who would have to have given the order to kill (or, let’s talk plainly, murder) bin Laden – said he was “95% sure” that the man who was shot was bin Laden, and that “it looked like him”. Interviewed later on the CBS news show “60 Minutes”, Obama admitted: “There was no direct evidence of his (bin Laden’s) presence. At the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation.”

Are we to believe that an executive presidential order was given to kill an unarmed man whose identity hadn’t been ascertained beyond considerable doubt?

Obama implied, in the first interviews he gave after the alleged raid, that he and his national security team – including Hillary Clinton – had watched events unfold via a live satellite link. The White House even put out a photo which appeared to show the president and his team monitoring the raid live on TV. A few days later, however, on on 4 May, the head of the CIA, Leon Pinetta, was forced to admit in an interview on PBS that there had been no live footage of the raid! He said that prior to the commencement of the raid the signal had been cut off, and that this blackout had lasted some 20 to 25 minutes. Quote: “Once those teams went into the compound there was a time period of 20-25 minutes where we really don’t know exactly what was going on.” Which means that president Obama could not possibly have identified Osama bin Laden when he gave the order to kill the man he was only “55/45″ sure was him.

So at what stage did he give the order to kill? This question was put to Leon Pinetta. He replied: “The US navy seals made the final decision to kill bin laden, rather than the president.”
Oh really? I’m sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. The decision on whether to kill bin Laden or take him prisoner had huge political and security ramifications, as well as implications in terms of international law. There is no way that a decision of this magnititude and sensitivity would have been left to a Navy seal. To claim otherwise is nonsensical.

And if the man really was bin Laden, the head of a worldwide network of terrorists and the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, surely the correct course of action would have been to interrogate him at length before – or instead of – shooting him in the head? It is inconceivable to me that they would kill the leader of a global terror network without at least making some attempt to extract information from him. Hundreds of men suspected of being members of al Qaeda have been imprisoned and in many cases tortured for years in CIA detention camps, ostensibly in the hope of extracting information from them that might help to avert future terrorist attacks. And here, in their custody and putting up no resistance, was the alleged Godfather of terrorism, the man who knew everything there was to know about the global terrorist network – and they executed him on the spot?

When I read the initial reports of the raid to kill bin Laden, my first thought was, “What a load of baloney”. And my second thought was, “And next they’ll tell us that he was a few months from carrying out another big terrorist attack”. But then I thought, no, that would be just too corny. People are gullible, but surely they’re not that gullible. But, sure enough, the BBC headlines a few days later announced: “Bin Laden was planning another terrorist attack.” This information was supposedly gleaned from bin Laden’s computer files (this would be the same computer that they initially claimed he didn’t possess). The report stated that bin Laden was planning a bomb attack on the US rail system to mark the anniversary of the 9.11 attacks.

Odd, isn’t it, that he waited ten years to carry out a “follow-up” attack. If he was so big into anniversaries, why didn’t he carry out an attack on the first anniversary of 9-11? Or the third? Or the 5th?

And, gosh, how lucky for America that Superman – sorry, Barack Obama – found and killed him just in time to save the lives of all those people! Can we see those files? Don’t be silly. They’re classified – just like the photos, the videotape, the “DNA evidence” and everything else about this fairy tale.

The photographs of bin Laden’s body weren’t released because they were “too gory”. What – like the photos of Uday and Qusay Hussein? “That’s not who we are”, said Obama. No qualms about shooting an unarmed woman in front of a child, but anxious to avoid ruffling the delicate sensitivities of his fellow Americans (maybe) with photos of a dead body. And even this explanation was “revised” twenty four hours later, when the reason for not showing the photos became to avoid inciting his followers to violence!

In fact photos of dead leaders tend, more than anything, to demoralise their followers. And it has always been customary, when wanted criminals are killed, to put their remains on public view to prove beyond doubt – especially to their followers – that they really are dead. This has always been the procedure, from Billy the Kid to Che Guevara. The images don’t have to be gory. A good mortician can do cosmetic miracles with even the most damaged and disfigured features.

By the way, where ARE all these millions of devoted followers we’ve heard so much about over the past ten years? If they really existed they would surely have been on the streets raising hell as soon as reports of their leader’s murder was announced. In the event, Arab reaction to news of bin Laden’s death was muted, to say the least. No doubt there will soon be a “terrorist attack” or two to emphasize the “fact” that the threat has not receded, but the fact is there would have been an immediate reaction from bin Laden’s legion of followers on learning of his death – if they existed, which they clearly do not.

The claim that bin Laden was buried at sea to avoid burying him in a grave that could become a shrine to his followers is also patently bogus, since putting the body on view for a few days – or even for a few hours and inviting journalists to inspect the corpse and take photographs – would not have precluded burying him at sea a day or two later. So what, one has to wonder, was the big rush? Why were they in such a hurry to permanently dispose of that body (if there really was a body)?

Unable or unwilling to provide tangible evidence of bin Laden’s execution, the White House then claimed that DNA testing had established bin Laden’s identity “to 99.99% certainty”. They would have to have had samples of at least two of his closest relatives on hand in order to make a match to that level of certainty. A White House spokesman stated, when asked about this, that the FBI had obtained a DNA sample from his sister, who died in Boston of brain cancer in 2005. So they came prepared with a DNA laboratory and specimens of the DNA of members of his family? And they had the foresight to have a molecular geneticist on board the ship? This would seem to suggest that they knew in advance that bin Laden’s face would be unrecognizable. And while it is theoretically possible to match DNA in a matter of several hours (they claim to have done it in two) – assuming you have all your equipment, samples and experts to hand – this would involve a lot of forward planning, and even then the results would be unreliable. It is not possible to make a reliable DNA match – the kind that would stand up in a court of law, for example – in two hours.
Furthermore, as they admitted themselves, they had samples of DNA from bin Laden’s relatives, obtained from hospitals. Isn’t it highly probable, therefore, that they also had bin Laden’s DNA? He was, after all, a patient at the American hospital Dubai and would have given blood samples. And before he became the world’s most wanted man he worked with the CIA. So they had numerous opportunities to take samples of his DNA.

And so Barack Obama was able to launch his re-election campaign at Ground Zero, the hero of the hour. All thoughts of the US’s precarious economic situation had been pushed out of the collective American mind. How lucky for him that he’d been able to track down and kill bin Laden just a few months before the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, and just days before the commemoration ceremony! According to the polls, his approval rating – which had been plummeting in recent months – jumped 25% overnight. A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t have come up with a better plot line.

The president was eager as a beaver to make a link between Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks. “The terrorist leader that struck our nation 9/11 will never threaten American again,” he said. The crowd cheered, and nobody cared – or cared to remember – that there was never any evidence implicating Osama bin Laden in the 9-11 attacks. He wasn’t wanted in connection with these attacks, and in fact the FBI stated explicitly that they had been unable to find evidence linking him with 9-11. Obama, who formerly practiced as a lawyer, was well aware of this. Nevertheless he milked the bogus association for all it was worth. His performance was reminiscent of that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose ratings soared after Saddam Hussein’s capture. The Bush administration had, by that time, managed to convince more than 50% of Americans that Saddam was behind the 9-11 attacks. As that master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

The mainstream media, to their eternal shame and discredit (yet again), dutifully repeated this spurious association without question or qualification in their coverage of bin Laden’s alleged killing, with one news report after another referring to Osama bin Laden as “the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks”. There was no “suspected of being”, or “believed by some to have been”. No, it was simply “Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks”. Did the media know something that the FBI, after a five year investigation, had never been able to find out?

As for the alleged raid itself, the details given out by the White House changed every few hours when the previous details didn’t add up. Proof was on the way, they assured us, in the form of photographs of bin Laden’s dead body. Two day’s later, however, the photos had failed to materialize, and in response to demands for proof they released what they said was “home movie” video footage of Osama. This turned out to be a few brief video clips of a bearded man sitting in an armchair watching TV with his back to the camera.

The sound had been removed, making it impossible to identify “bin Laden” from his distinctive voice. (Previous fake videos of “bin Laden” had been debunked because people who knew him personally said that it wasn’t his voice.) The person who shot the video took great care to shoot from an angle that only showed the side of “bin Laden’s” face, and the footage was interspersed with old stock footage of bin Laden, presumably to give a sense of continuity. “Bin Laden” himself studiously avoids looking directly at the camera.

The first question that comes to mind – or at least to my mind – looking at this footage is: why would anyone take video footage of someone watching TV coverage of Osama bin Laden – unless they were trying to convince viewers that the person in the video was bin Laden? If the video had been made by devotee’s of bin Laden – which they’d presumably have to be if they were in his secret hideout – making videos for posterity, wouldn’t they make sure to get their leader’s face in every shot? Look at Adolf Hitler’s hiome movies for comparison. In one shot we see Adolf drinking coffee. In another he is patting a dog. But always he is clearly identifiable. There is no question whatsoever that it is Adolf Hitler we are looking at.

If the “bin Laden” videos are supposed to be “home movies”, the same objection applies. Who would make home movies while being careful not to film the face of the subject? Go and have a look at your own home videos, and see how many clips you can find that only show the backs of people’s heads. And why take footage of bin Laden watching himself on TV? And why is he on every channel? Are we meant to believe that he’s watching live news reports of himself (in a house with no satellite dish and no TV cable)? And why is this “bin Laden” using his right hand to operate the TV remote control when bin Laden was left-handed?

This whole performance is as fake as it is farcical. It wouldn’t fool a two year-old. Or so you would think. But incredibly, it has fooled millions of people. Even normally intelligent and astute observers like Noam Chomsky have accepted this blatant pile of hooey as fact.

If the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden were merely a pretext for ending the “war on terror” – a way of tying up loose ends, as it were – and removing all the paraphernalia of surveillance, security checks, body scans at airports and so on, we might even roll our eyes and go along with the yarn. But no, the alleged death of bin Laden is being cited as justification for stepping up these “security measures” and increasing the number of troops on the ground in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. No sooner had the supposed killing of bin Laden been announced than the US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was telling a press conference in Rome “Let us not forget that the battle to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates does not end with one death,” she said. “We have to renew our resolve, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but around the world.”

It is worth reminding ourselves that this is the woman who claimed, when she was vying for nomination as a presidential candidate, that on a trip to Bosnia she had come under sniper fire and had to make a desperate dash for the airport building. She was forced to admit that she had lied – or “mis-spoke”, as she put it – when CBS video footage of the trip showed her standing on the tarmac, smiling and obviously perfectly safe, while a group of children read poetry to her. So we know for sure that Hillary is no stranger to the concept of inventing heroic tall tales as a popularity booster.

But the most depressing aspect of all this isn’t the fact that the story is patently bogus from start to finish – we have come to expect this kind of thing from the American government – but that it has been accepted unconditionally by so many people, and in particular journalists who ought, at this stage, to know better. The media have become little more than the mouthpiece of the US government and the Pentagon, publishing press releases verbatim and without any attempt at critical evaluation.

The alleged raid to kill Osama bin Laden has been widely reported as fact without any corroborative evidence to support it, when it is as plain as the nose on your face that the details given out by the White House simply do not stack up. This is really disgraceful and represents a new low in journalistic standards. The most basic rule of journalism – that information must be checked and independently verified before it is presented to the public as fact – appears to have been completely abandoned. Clearly no lessons have been learned from previous occasions when the media failed to scrutinize claims emanating from the White House – including the claim by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was six months from launching a nuclear attack on the US. Colin Powell stood up in front of the UN and the world to make this claim, brandishing “photographic evidence” of chemical weapons factories, missile launch pads, planes that had been redesigned to launch chemical weapons and even audio tapes purported to be of Iraqi generals discussing plans to attack America (in English). At least a quarter of a million people died as a result of the military action that was taken on the basis of that piece of fiction. The invasion of Iraq was only possible because it had popular support, and that support largely came about as a result of uncritical media coverage. And now we are seeing the same thing happening again.

The issue here is not whether Osama bin Laden is dead, or whether he was killed. Most of the people who are skeptical of the US government’s version of events accept that he is dead (indeed, many believe he has been dead for years). The question is, when and how did he die? Who killed him? Why was he killed? How and when did US intelligence learn of his whereabouts? When did Obama know? Why did Obama give order to kill a man on the basis of “55/45″ identification? How was he positively identified if, as it is claimed, the house was in darkness? Why wasn’t bin Laden interrogated? Why was his wife handed over to the Pakistani authorities (who are suspected of colluding with al Qaeda), instead of being taken into US custody and questioned? How did she sustain a gunshot wound to the back of her leg if she was shot lunging towards a SEAL? Where is al Qaeda? Why did the US government produce and release a fake video? Why did they release a fake photo? Why did the US dispose of the body so hastily? Where is the evidence linking bin Laden to the 9-11 attacks? Which countries refused to take bin Laden’s body?
These and many other questions have still to be answered.

CONGRATULATIONS! TO THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT.

Way to go!

: )

Now we look to you to do the right thing by your neighbours under siege in Palestine.

When will America realize that Israel doesn’t want peace?

Surely no-one can now be in any doubt that Israel has no interest whatsoever in reaching a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians.

This was the best opportunity it has ever had – or is ever likely to have – to bring the conflict to an end.

If Israel wanted peace, all it had to do was agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders and stop building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The fact that it has consistently refused to do so makes Israel’s true long-term intentions abundantly clear: it plans to continue with its strategy of ethnic cleansing, ghettoization and land-grabbing until it has taken over all the land that was Palestine.

Complete domination of the entire region has always been Israel’s aim.

Again and again it has deliberately scuppered efforts made by US presidents and others to find a resolution to the problem.

And what successive presidents have failed to understand is that there is no problem, as far as Israel is concerned.

The sporadic missile attacks by Hamas do very little damage (more Israelis are killed by being struck by lightning than are killed by Hamas rockets), but they provide Israel with the pretext it needs to justify the increasingly brutal “security measures” it inflicts on the Palestinian people.

One or two deaths a year is a small price to pay, from the Israeli government’s point of view, for complete control and ownership of the whole of what used to be Palestine.

Israel is not, and has never been interested in peace. In fact peace is the last thing Israel wants, since without the ongoing hostilities it would have no grounds for building barriers, separating Palestinians into cantons that are really open prisons, bombing populated areas of Palestine and Lebanon, grabbing more and more land, torturing prisoners and imposing a vicious siege on Gaza.

And without the ongoing Arab “threat”, Israel would find it difficult to justify the $4bn in aid it receives from the US government each year.

Let there be no misunderstanding about this: Israel has no intention of ever giving back the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies. The plan is, and has always been, to take over the entire region and eventually get rid of the indigenous Palestinian population altogether.

In a statement moments after the end of the 10-month partial freeze on the building of settlements, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to continue seeking a “historic” deal. How absurd. Do the Israelis really expect the Palestinians to agree to a deal in which Israel continues to illegally occupy Palestine and carry on building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land? Of course not. This is a classic Israeli ploy to shift the blame for the breakdown to the Palestinians. By pretending to want to carry on talking, the Israelis hope to make the Palestinians appear to be responsible for the breakdown. If the Palestinians walk away from the talks, the Israelis can say, “See? We were willing to keep talking, but the Palestinians walked away!” But if the Palestinians carry on talking despite the resumption of work on the settlements, this will be taken as a tacit acknowledgment that they are willing to accept less than they are demanding.

America: The country where journalists dare not speak the truth

Helen Thomas

Apparently it is now an outrage in the land of the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of political expression to express an unfavourable opinion of the terrorist, apartheid state of Israel.
Helen Thomas said nothing that the majority of people around the world would disagree with (as a number of polls have shown). Only in the United States – where for decades people have been brainwashed by the media and the entertainment industry to regard Israel as a benign, friendly state that can do no wrong – is it considered heretical to question Israel’s right to occupy Palestine.

Thomas went on to “outrage” American Jewish groups (who have honed being outraged into an art form) by suggesting, when asked where the occupying Israelis would go, that they could go back to the countries they came from.

She’s quite right, of course. The majority of Israeli Jews – the actual figure is around 80% – are immigrants who came to live in Israel under the apartheid state’s absurd and racist “right of return” law. Many now live in settlements built on Palestinian land. And the majority of these “settlers” have dual nationality and retain properties and business links in their country of origin. There is nothing at all outrageous in the view that they should get out of Palestine and go back to wherever they came from.

What is outrageous is the idea – which appears to have widespread acceptance in the US – that the indigenous people of Palestine can be evicted from their homes and forced to live in squalid ghettos – as “refugees” in their own country – where they are persecuted on a daily basis and deprived of their most basic human and civil rights.

The Israeli occupation is an outrage. The siege of Gaza is an outrage. The deliberate murder by Israel of thousands of innocent civilians – most of them women and children – in Lebanon and Gaza was an outrage. The hijacking of the aid ships in international waters last week and the execution of nine activists was an outrage. Yet not one politician in government – either in Europe or in the US – has dared to condemn Israel outright, or to break off diplomatic ties with this murderous apartheid regime. But when one veteran journalist dares to speak her mind and express a view that most people in the world would agree with, she is vilified and treated as if she were a terrorist, and forced to resign from a job that she’s been doing for six decades.

Far from rushing to her defence, many of Helen Thomas’ fellow journalists have stated that she ought to have been more tactful in her choice of words. But why should anyone be required or expected to tiptoe delicately around the sensibilities of a regime that is engaged in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, torture, assassination and mass murder on a daily basis? Does Israel exercise tact when it drops massive bombs on civilian “targets”, or when it razes Palestinian homes to the ground to make space for the construction of Jewish settlements?

As former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once declared when his foreign Minister Shimon Peres warned him against taking actions that might alienate Americans:

“Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear: don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We control America, and the Americans know it.”

How right he was.

When can we expect the US to condemn Israel for amassing nuclear weapons?

US President Barack Obama has condemned Iran after it acknowledged the existence of a second uranium enrichment plant.

“This site deepens a growing concern that Iran is failing to live up to its international responsibilities,” he said.
“Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow.”

Except Israel, of course.

As we know, Israel is exempt from all the international rules, laws, regulations and treaties that apply to other countries.

“Iran must comply with UN Security Council resolutions,” Mr Obama added.

But Israel can disregard UN resolutions with impunity, and has done for decades.

Iran has never attacked its neighbours. Israel has. Repeatedly, slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians. Yet no action of any kind has ever been taken against it. Attempts to do so have always been thwarted by the US veto.

Israel is guilty of state terrorism, war crimes, crimes against humanity, illegal occupation, torture, assassination, land grabbing, ethnic cleansing, and yet it is Iran – which is guilty of none of these things – that is being threatened by the US government (and, laughably, by the bumbling, nodding dog British PM, who has turned ineffectuality into an art form).

I’m not in favour of Iran having nuclear weapons – no more than I am in favour of the US, Russia, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea having them – but this whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.

If the US, Britain, France and the other nuclear powers want to persuade Iran not to pursue the nuclear option they should start by getting rid of their own nukes. Or demanding that Israel – which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – give up its nuclear arsenal.

Coincidentally both the US and Britain have, in recent days, announced plans to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. It’s almost as if they knew they would be delivering this ultimatum to Iran and wanted to be able to point out that they themselves were committed to nuclear disarmament.

But, of course, that would mean that they knew in advance about Iran’s “secret” nuclear facility and carefully picked their moment to announce this to the media.

The idea that nuclear weapons can be eradicated by gradual reduction is absurd in any event. What difference does it make whether a country has 10,000 nuclear warheads or 100?

Unilateral reduction is merely a device to justify exerting pressure on countries which are in the process of “going nuclear”. Countries like the US are never going to give up their nuclear weapons, and that being the case they will never be in a moral position to dictate to other countries on this issue. And “do as I say, not as I do (or else!)” has never been, and will never be, a reasonable or persuasive argument.

Netanyahu says peace is possible if Palestinians give up everything

The odious Benjamin Netanyahu has been speaking after a meeting in Downing Street with bumbling UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Mr. Netanyahu’s message was that peace was possible if Palestinians gave up their resistance to Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of their country. He repeatedly asserted that a demilitarised Palestinian state was needed if peace was to be attained.
There was no mention of a demilitarised Israeli state, of course, since, as we all know, Israel needs its US-sponsored army to protect itself from the people whose land it has stolen.
So basically his proposal is that Israel should be allowed to keep all the Palestinian land it has “confiscated”, and retain its huge arsenal of arms (which includes chemical, biological and nuclear weapons), while Palestinians are allowed to remain in the “refugee camps” and tent cities to which they have been banished by the Israeli government (ethnic cleansing by degrees), and give up all armed resistance to the occupation of their country.
Gee, that sounds like a good deal. For Israel.
But I have a better idea. How about if Israel gives up all its weapons, dismantles its army, navy, air force and the hired thugs it calls its police force, and gives the land it illegally occupies back to its rightful owners. And then compensates them for putting them through 60 years of hell. How would that be, Mr. Netanyahu?