Friday, May 13, 2011

Osama bin Laden

The same day as the events in Pakistan, the Irish SAS carried out a raid on Debenhams Department Store in Dublin. Irish intelligence had reported that Summer Bed Linen was on the Third Floor.

Besides all the corny jokes, there is one good thing to have come out of the US Navy Seals’ assassination of an old man in his home in front of his 12-year-old daughter. That is, the American authorities have established their right to execute anybody at any time in any place, without trial. Well, it’s a good thing if you’re a US patriot who believes that the rule of law doesn’t apply to The Empire. Not if you’re not, perhaps.

Considering the number of professional torturers in the US Armed Forces and associated Agencies, it seems thoughtless of the Seals to have killed him immediately. Presumably the victim’s wives and children will be introduced to the joys of water-boarding and anal rape (and why not?), but surely it would have been just as much fun to do it to the old man. God help Osama’s former cooks, barbers and valets scattered throughout the American gulag. From Guantanamo to Bagram, the screams will thrill an entire generation of CIA thugs. What tales they will have for their kiddies at bed-time.

A man walks into a bar and asks for an Osama bin Laden. The barman asks, “What’s in it?” The man says “Two shots and a splash of water.”

Whoever was in charge of the Seals’ operation should have thought twice before imposing the cover-up, though. Didn’t they learn anything from the JFK fiasco? The thing that makes the official version of that incident so dodgy is the assassination of Oswald. Almost fifty years later, most people in the world believe that Oswald was a patsy, and that the government lied. If they had kept him alive, they could have tortured him and his wife and his mother and the fifty nearest crippled orphans until he confessed. Or until one of them confessed. If you snuff the man you identify as the criminal, you can never close the credibility gap. As one blogger put it, Barack Obama is our Jack Ruby.

Killing the man advertised as being the master-mind of 9/11 means that the official version will always have its doubters. Sure, they shot somebody, but who was it?

There’s a photograph doing the rounds showing a boundless sea with a black sandal floating on top. The subject-line reads “Proof of Bin Laden’s death.”

The same people who are assuring us that it was bin Laden that they assassinated once told us that Iraq had WMDs. A million dead Iraqis later and four million townsfolk living in tents in the desert- still no sign of WMDs. They also told us that the tightest national defence system the world has ever seen was bamboozled by nineteen barefoot boys with box-cutters, without inside help or connivance. And, that WTC Building #7 crumbled to dust in its own footprint under the weight of odd bits of debris from the Twin Towers. It might have been worth pulling a few fingernails to discover how Osama’s goat-herders managed that engineering miracle.

The scary thing is that they (“They”) don’t seem to care whether we believe them or not. I am not being anti-American here, by the way, just anti-thug. Oh, and anti-psychopath, I guess.