By Barry Grey  | 5 May 2011

It took less than two days for Washington’s official story of the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden to unravel, revealing amidst the rubble of the initial lies a cold-blooded extra-legal execution.

The American media, in accordance with its willing and eager role as propaganda arm of the government, is doing its best to limit the damage from the retraction of earlier claims and continue utilizing the murder of Bin Laden and four others, including a woman, to intimidate, debase and brutalize public opinion.

On Monday, Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, told a press conference that Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs after having “engaged in a firefight,” weapon in hand. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” Brennan added.

Less than 24 hours later, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted that Bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot in the head.

Carney was obliged to correct another falsehood put forward the previous day by Brennan. The counter-terrorism official had reported that Bin Laden’s wife was killed after the terrorist leader used her as a human shield to protect himself. On Wednesday, Carney, reading from a brief statement drafted by the Pentagon, said Bin Laden’s wife had been wounded in the leg, not killed, and had not been used as a human shield.

The White House further acknowledged that it had misidentified which of Bin Laden’s sons was killed—it was Hamza, not Khalid. It said that the woman killed in the raid was the wife of Bin Laden’s courier. She was allegedly caught in the crossfire between the SEALs and Bin Laden’s defenders on the first floor of the three-story compound in a well-off section of Abbottabad, Pakistan.

According to official US accounts, Bin Laden and his family members were on the third floor when the attack came early Monday morning, Pakistan time.

The original version put out by Brennan was designed to debunk the view that the purpose of the mission was to execute Bin Laden and bolster the claim, made for legal reasons, that the commandos had orders to capture their target if he did not resist.

“If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat,” Brennan said, “the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that.”

In his press conference Tuesday, Carney continued to claim that the commandos were prepared to take Bin Laden alive if he did not resist. Asked by a reporter how he could resist without a gun, Carney said vaguely that there were “other ways” to resist than with arms.

On Monday, Brennan made much of Bin Laden’s supposed use of his wife as a human shield. In line with the policy of demonizing and dehumanizing those singled out to serve as bogeymen and pretexts for US military aggression, Brennan said: “Here is Bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

This, it was soon revealed, was concocted out of whole cloth.

There is evidence that the new official version is no less a tissue of lies. Al Arabiya on Wednesday cited senior Pakistani security officials who said a 12-year-old daughter of Bin Laden who survived the attack and is in Pakistani custody told them the US forces captured her father alive and shot him dead in front of family members. The Pakistani officials added that Bin Laden was killed in the first few minutes of the operation and on the first floor of the compound.

This flatly contradicts the US government story that the commandoes had first to shoot their way into the first story in order to get to the third floor, and that they confronted Bin Laden in the midst of ongoing firefights with his defenders. Al Arabiya reported that there was no gunfire from the residents of the compound and that Pakistani officials who investigated the scene after the raid found no weapons.

The newspaper wrote: “According to information Pakistani officials collected from detained persons, Osama was neither armed nor did inmates at the compound fire at the US choppers or commandos.

“‘Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers. Their chopper developed some technical fault and crashed and the wreckage was left on the spot,’ a well-informed official explained.

“Security officials said they did not recover any arms and explosives during their detailed search of the compound on Monday and Tuesday.”

This report was almost universally ignored by the US media. At the daily White House press briefing on Wednesday, Carney announced that the White House would give out no further details on the raid, lamely asserting the need to protect counter-terrorism sources and operational methods.

The clumsy efforts to cover up the flagrant illegality of the raid—both the violation of Pakistani sovereignty and the extra-legal execution of Bin Laden and others—point to the broader context of unanswered questions and non-credible claims. US politicians and media outlets have railed against Pakistan for harboring Bin Laden in a mansion a few hundred yards from the Pakistani equivalent of America’s West Point military academy, in a town populated by retired military personnel and active military regiments, and only 35 miles from the capital city of Islamabad. There has been no explanation, however, as to how Washington could be unaware of Bin Laden’s presence.

If, as American officials are broadly asserting, Pakistan was aware of Bin Laden’s fortified safe house, how could Washington, which counts Pakistan as one of its closest allies in the “war on terror” and maintains the closest relations with the country’s intelligence and military establishment, be unaware?

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani implicitly raised this question on Wednesday, when he declared that Pakistan shared intelligence “with the rest of the world, including the United States,” so if there were what he called “lapses” in Pakistan “that means lapses from the whole world.”

Gilani went on to assert that the United States possessed the most extensive and sophisticated surveillance technology and networks, including spy satellites, and was in a better position to track down Bin Laden than Pakistan.

Punching a hole in the official story given out by President Obama Sunday night that the US first became aware only last August of the likely presence of Bin Laden in the Abbottabad compound, another senior Pakistani official, Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, told the BBC that Pakistan had drawn the attention of American intelligence agencies in 2009 to suspicions about the building.

It is far more plausible that the US wanted to keep Bin Laden alive to serve as a useful focus of the post-9/11 “war on terror,” which has been used to justify wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, until other strategic considerations, both foreign and domestic, argued for his elimination. Once the decision was made to get him—at a point when his real influence was generally agreed to be negligible—Washington had every reason to kill him, rather than capture him and bring him to trial for his crimes.

The last thing the US wanted was for the longstanding and intimate ties between Al Qaeda and US intelligence—dating back to Bin Laden’s days as a CIA contractor in the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrilla movement in Afghanistan—as well as Al Qaeda’s ties to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the “war on terror” to be exposed to the public.

There was also, no doubt, the belief that a sudden and bloody “hit” against Bin Laden would send a useful signal to other figures who have run afoul of the United States, such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Libya’s Gaddafi. The latter barely survived a targeted assassination attempt just one day before the killing of Bin Laden.

There has been some criticism of the execution of Bin Laden internationally. Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told German TV, “It was quite clearly a violation of international law. The operation could also have incalculable consequences in the Arab world in light of all the unrest.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called on the United States to give the United Nations full details about Bin Laden’s killing. “The United Nations has consistently emphasized that all counter-terrorism acts must respect international law,” she said.

However, the Obama administration has vigorously asserted that the action was entirely lawful, and there has been virtually no dissent from within the political, media or academic establishment. In testimony Tuesday and Wednesday before the House and Senate judiciary committees, Attorney General Eric Holder hailed the killing of Bin Laden as a testament to American justice.

He told the House committee that the action was “lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way.” He told the Senate, “I’m proud of what they did. And I really want to emphasize that what they did was entirely lawful and consistent with our values.”

The Media’s Moral Degeneracy

Congressional Democrats have competed with their Republican counterparts in their praise for the elimination of Bin Laden. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, declared that the operation “will be a great source of pride to every American… It’s incredible what our people can do.”

Not deterred in the least from its propaganda in support of the killing by the admission that the victim was unarmed, the New York Times published a celebratory editorial Wednesday headlined “The Myth of Mr. Obama’s Weakness.”

“President Obama’s display of leadership in directing the killing of Osama bin Laden,” the principal organ of American imperialism wrote, “raises the prospect that American politics can move away from mindless debates over the president’s loyalties and fortitude…

“Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image abroad.”

Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an op-ed piece entitled “Cool Hand Barack,” approvingly compared Obama’s performance to that of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

The Washington Post, in an editorial Wednesday headlined “Targeting Mr. Gaddafi,” wrote: “For the record, we think targeting Mr. Gaddafi and his sons—if that is what is really going on—is as legitimate as striking Al Qaeda.”

Sections of the US political and media establishment are seizing on the success of the raid to justify the use of torture and rehabilitate the barbaric practices developed first under Bush. In an interview on “NBC Nightly News” Tuesday, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a point of declaring that the team of Navy SEALs was authorized to kill Bin Laden. “The authority we had on Bin Laden was to kill him,” he said.

Panetta went on to claim that intelligence obtained by means of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture, against detainees in Guantanamo and CIA prisons had contributed to tracking down Bin Laden. He confirmed that those techniques included waterboarding.

The Financial Times published a column Wednesday entitled “Waterboarding Resurfaces as Tool that Helped Track Down Prey,” which cited New York Republican Congressman Peter King declaring that “we obtained vital information several years ago about the courier for Bin Laden—we obtained that through waterboarding.” The piece continued: “For those who say that waterboarding does not work, Mr. King concluded with the answer to end all questions: the practice gave the US ‘vital information that directly led us to bin Laden.’”

In a similar vein, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called former President George W. Bush to thank him. “We have all recognized in our public comments that his role was important in having this success,” she said.

Barry Grey is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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By Phil Rockstroh

Osama bin Laden is dead. And so is the U.S. republic. We had to destroy our freedoms in order to save them. What is left to save from the next rampaging dragon when the knights, sworn to kill the monster, destroy everything in their path in the pursuit of him? One killer is dead. Now what are we going to do with all the killers in our midst who killed him.

Since 9/11/2001, due to the lust for revenge of the people of the U.S., hundreds of thousands of innocent Islamic people are dead. These human beings were killed in our name. Be very careful when you proclaim: “I’m glad ‘we’ got bin Laden. He deserved it.” Be very grateful most of us don’t get what we deserve.

To appropriate a classical understanding of the situation: Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, dramatized that civilization begins when (in fact, civilization is not even possible until) retribution yields to justice i.e., The Furies, goddesses adorned with serpent-seething headdresses and an abiding passion for retribution, must be transformed into the Eumenides (the kindly ones). They must cease their seeking of revenge (which engenders endless revenge cycles, inflicting a trauma-wrought callowness on the people of a culture) and become the enemies of those who bear false witness and stand against the democratic process.

In contrast, in the U.S., a state policy of genocide against its native inhabitants determined the geographical dimensions of the nation itself, and, in many ways, determined the inner dimensions of its collective mindscape, which created and maintains the death cult calculus of U.S. militarist imperium. (The U.S. military still envisages its enemies as “Red Indian savages.” Witness: Osama bin Laden having been given the moniker, “Geronimo.”)

Hence the isolated, alienated U.S. populace (its males in particular) clutch, to the point of fetishizing, their guns, because they feel powerless before the depravations of an exploitive system rigged to benefit a small class of privileged insiders. Much damage is done by this compensatory fantasy: Vulnerable children and teens are bullied by their troubled peers to the point of clinical depression and suicide; in domestic situations, crimes of passion take deadly turns; and episodes of mass shootings erupt across the landscape of exploitation, alienation and anomie.

The collective mode of mind of the corporate consumer/militarist empire leaves both the hoi polloi and the privileged unable to even approach the problem of their alienation…thick walls of self-protection must be breached…In the U.S., individuals have become so withdrawn into themselves, it seems as if Home Depot outlets sell ready-to-assemble, prefab bubbles of self-enclosure, with optional mounted gun turrets.

How is it possible for troubled individuals to live in a culture in which the response of their government (mirrored in its movies, television programs, and video games) to almost every problem abroad involves military force and imperialist coercion — and not have these death-leveling policies leave their mark on the psyches of the populace?

All too frequently, in the increasingly desperate and denial-ridden nation, deranged chickens come home and reap havoc in the roost (also known as The Law Of Perpetual Poultry Return). As above with its government, so below with its populace: With troubling frequency, in shooting rampages, unhinged individuals stage freelance, military-style commando raids, defending (in the tormented perception of their besieged minds) their internal homeland.

The rigid hierarchical structure of U.S. corporate oligarchy (but veiled by the internalization of its upward class mobility hagiography) imposes a type of domination and control compulsion (and attendant low-level hysteria) in the psyches of the nation’s males. Hence, the need for disproportionate amounts of control to displace their own sense of being dominated by brutal power (e. g., they feel so deeply diminished by their own submissive position in the economic order that the men and boys of the nation are driven to taunt other males by bandying demeaning invectives, such as, “You’re my bitch.”)

What they are expressing is the displaced anger, engendered by their helplessness before the dictates of the corporate state. An insidious order that determines the course of their day: At what hour, they will rise (at the insistence of an alarm clock) to meet the day; what they will eat (generally, processed or fast food); the roads and routes they will travel (stranded in the grinding limbo of commuter traffic); who they will be in contact with during the day (the dharma-decimating exigencies of the workspaces of the neo-liberal economic order). In short, how their day unfolds (exploited for the benefit of the oligarchs of the corporate state) and how their day ends (on edge, enervated, muck-brained, in hyper-attenuated communion with some form of the mass media hologram).

The inimical effect of this mode of being has come to be known as “the American way of life.” Therein, individuals, reduced to mere assets of the economic elite, grow bereft of the means and motivation for personal transformation. Moreover, the culture — always an organic, collaborative effort between individuals and the collective mind of an age — withers into an economic, as well as, psychic wasteland, because the means of social engagement have been denuded due to the full-spectrum domination of both cultural real estate and individual mindscape by the corporate state.

Corporate domination of everyday life has left the soul with a scant amount of wiggle room. But it has not always been so, even in the Deep South, in the belligerent ignorance and staggering naivety, of my youth.

Homer counseled that we should straddle time with our backs to the future, our faces to the past. Thus this digression:

In the year, 1970, in the summer I turned fourteen, in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia, the Allman Brothers, among other bands, would perform free, impromptu concerts for a tie-dye clad, reefer reeking, bell bottoms-caressing-the-Georgia-red-dirt gatherings of “freaks,” — which was the preferred tribalist term, as opposed to the media-created, socially pejorative — hippies…which, when bandied among counterculture insiders, was generally applied ironically.

Although the park was located only a few miles from my family’s home, undertaking the trip presented a degree of peril. To make ones way to the park included traversing a tough, in-town, white working class neighborhood (now a gentrified into soul-sucking blandness, yuppie enclave) where, from the perspective of its denizens, their world, and all they held in reverence and reference, was under siege. And, although inchoate, their animus was instantly distilled, simply upon a glimpse of the untamed tresses of a singular, thin of wrist, dirty hippie, commie faggot — whose mere presence was considered an affront to their pomade-crowned, muscle car-thundering parcel of redneck paradise.

Accordingly, the locals were pledged to do their part to fight the scourge…by increasing their intake of PBRs and Jack Daniels, and, upon sight of said dirty hippie interlopers, bestowing ass-stompings — and for no-extra-charge — involuntary haircuts upon errant longhairs caught in their midst.

Yet as the era progressed, the savage dance between hippie freak and redneck belligerent changed in tone and tempo, an extemporaneous type of metaphysical jiujitsu occurred, in which the predator was subdued and seduced by the prey…as if by cultural contact buzz, redneck fury yielded to counterculture insouciance.

“When the individual feels, the community reels” … Aldous Huxley

Briefly, this was the anatomy of the seduction: In their pursuit of fleeing freaks into the park, the young males of the cracker tribe happened upon a few of the things of this vast and vivid world even more compelling than the possibility of ass-kicking…in the form of attractive young women.

Yet to the young men, the hippie sphinxes, sirens, waifs, and gypsy queens were baffling, unapproachable; these women were less than taken by their greasy, pompadoured forelocks and aggressive bearing. In short, and to appropriate the parlance of the era, the hippie chicks didn’t get off on their “bad vibes…it, like, really harshed their high.”

But these great, great grandsons of the Lost Cause proved much more malleable in countenance than the ossified in memory, now enshrined in marble statuary, of their confederate forefathers.

Consequently, a kind of cracker Lysistrata started to unfold. The pomade lacquer faded from stiff pompadours, yielding to lank, draping locks of hippie plumage. The habit of rebel bellicosity was sublimated into an avidity to “boogie.” The zealots of ass-kicking became the acolytes of acid and devotees of the gospels of kicking back and getting down.

As time passed, on weekends, as the Allman Brothers preached Sunday sermons vis-a-vis guitar and drum solos, these newly minted freaks could be found in positions of repose and reflection upon the grassy hills of the park, eating Orange Sunshine and drawling, “aw mahn, Dwayne’s guitar is shootin’ sparks into mah brain…”

Or as Marcel Proust put it, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”

Yet, in our time, the fervor of the 1960s seems, in the words of a Latin proverb: “Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus” — The mountains have labor pains and a ridiculous little mouse is brought forth.”

As the psychedelic nimbus of the early nineteen seventies transmogrified into a Nixonian shit-storm, and the long, silent war waged by Disaster Capitalists on the US working class dissipated their hopes and buffeted their sense of wellbeing, a familiar class system wrought aura of misery and meanness began to reassert itself.

The Dixieland Woodstock Nation increasingly began to resemble a southern-fried Weimar Republic, as the Corporate State Altamont grew increasingly pervasive, punitive, and imposed more and more demeaning demands upon the lives of working class Americans.

Yet the present paradigm and its dependence upon a corporate consumer/militarist mindset persists because: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”–Thomas Paine.

Osama bin Laden was taken out by a rival gang of terrorists: And, across the land, the parade of death-reveling fools prattles onward. Hence, the desperate, diminished souls of the empire are driven to contort themselves, collectively, into all manner of positions of casuistry, in a vain attempt to rationalize being complicit in the crimes of the state. Thus, in the compulsion to see ourselves as good and decent folk, we mistake the involuted course of our own dim and brutal thoughts for the darkness and evil of others.

Therefore: This is why self-knowledge is crucial: “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.”- Carl Jung.

Over the last few days, witnessing the blood-dimmed spectacle of witless celebrants frothing in glee at the news of the revenge killing of Osama bin Laden, I feel as though I’m having the dubious privilege of peering into an alternative universe where annoyances such as common decency whither into extinction, as all the while, vile, lurid delusions bloom like hot house flowers.

The noxious redolence of these fleur du mal can have an enervating effect on one’s will to resist and fight back.

But resist one must. And remember to savor the glorious failure of even a hopeless cause. The most naive and banal response would be to propagate the tired canard of the vacuous, crackpot realist mindset that: “That’s just the way it is…that’s just how things work…that’s the way it is, always was, and always will be.”

Dead ass wrong: That is the way a particular system is being operated at a particular time. Moreover, no system operates in stasis therefore are open to systemic change and random fluxes, by a host of variables, known and unknown. Although outcomes, for better or worse, and all combinations therein, are uncertain, thus the world before us remains an extraordinary thing to behold.

“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”  – Carl Jung

Even though the earthly remains of Osama bin Laden are now entombed in the sea, the U.S. empire will continue to founder, its people have been made no safer nor have we been placed in an enhanced position to prosper. What would prove helpful would be to cease engaging in this constant, tedious dance with our homicidal shadow self, because every written-in-blood name, listed on every dance card at the Empire’s Ball, bears one’s own name.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

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PRESS COMMUNIQUE

Yale Skull-and-Bones members. George H.W. Bush stands next to clock, fourth from left. MNN.  May 4, 2011.  US President Obama made the decision to send assassins to disfigure and brutally murder someone he said was Osama Bin Laden.  Rather than capture and question a mastermind, they kill him and cowardly feed him to the sharks.  Obama invited his powerful government decision makers to become desensitized to human slaughter by watching a live stream public killing. Obama misnamed it “Operation Geronimo”.  Factually the Apache Warrior was a respected military genius who brilliantly evaded the US and Mexican armies simultaneously.  In 1889 he was forced to surrender when they threatened to capture and kill his people.  The US ignored these conditions. Geronimo’s skull was taken to the Yale Skull and Crossbones Secret Society for use in their covert initiations of the elite.  Using his name to murder Osama Bin Laden indicates they are behind this bloody carnage and bragging about it.   Their message is, “We will eliminate anyone who opposes our worldwide totalitarian agenda and war against brown-skinned people”. Osama Bin Laden was supposedly in a house near the US run Pakistani military academy.  The US Navy Seals wore helmets with cameras to film the operation.   They came down in choppers, shot him in the face in cold blood, took his body and dropped it into the ocean. Obama’s staff watched it to be part of and to own it.  Like a school of sharks circling a bleeding body, they went into a feeding frenzy, transfixed as they watched the supposed Bin Laden die in agony.  The President stirred up the blood lust to prepare his officials for the attempted conquest and expansion of US imperialism. Obama whet the public’s appetite for blood by organizing street celebrations and to promote vicious spectator sports, akin to snuff films. This is reminicent of the Roman Coliseum blood spectacles where people were forced to watch their men kill each other to get used to how cheap their lives were. Hitler mesmerized the German youth to march off to war by carefully conditioning and selecting those that would kill, torture and purge the world without blinking an eye. President Obama told the media that Bin Laden fired shots from an automatic and used his wife as a shield.  This lie had to be retracted.  He was unarmed and did not hide behind his wife. Are we sure it was Osama Bin Laden?  The victim’s face was blown apart.  Initial pictures [now recognized as fakes] looked like photo shop amalgamation of another dead man made to look like Bin Laden. Bin Laden was never charged with 911 because there was no evidence. The President and Congress congratulated themselves on the ruthless killing.  Their message is, “We don’t arrest.  There is no judicial process.  We kill you and then dump your body”, just like the mafia. The President is trying to assert the law of the Obama jungle, “We can eliminate anyone who speaks against our totalitarian agenda”.  Dictators worldwide are being encouraged to do the same. In our way when any warrior dies, we honor them, their nobility and dignify them with a respectful burial. We Indigenous are being targeted to usurp our birthright and our rightful voice as the true spokespeople of Great Turtle Island and the Western Hemisphere.  White and Black people know they don’t naturally belong here and can’t legitimately speak for us. To stop these indignities to our fellow humans, we must teach the Great Law of Peace and assert our voice. Kahentinetha, MNN Mohawk Nation News Kahentinetha2@yahoo.com For more news, books, to donate to help pay legal fees and to sign up for MNN newsletters go to www.mohawknationnews.com More stories at MNN Category “Art & Culture”.  Address:  Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0 Store:  Indigenous authors – Kahnawake books – Mohawk Warriors Three – Warriors Hand Book – Rebuilding the Iroquois Confederacy.