Wednesday 4 May 2011

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

We received the news of his death on May 2nd as we were preparing to leave Iraq. No matter which language of the t-v channel, news of Osama bin Laden's death was the headline. People celebrating in streets, politicians frantically positioning themselves, Obama declaring it a “great victory” for the United States – a tiresome litany.

Hmm.

Who was Osama? Was he, in fact, the leader of al-Qaeda? Did he order the destruction of the twin towers where 2500 civilians were killed? Is al-Qaeda a centralized organization or a loosely knit of collection of men who espouse a brutal Islamic fundamentalist jihad on the West?

Whoever he was, he was summarily executed by US hit-men. Do we believe in justice, the court of law and the opportunity to open a crime to “the facts”?

Ah. That is exactly what the United States, and others who manufacture and supply the world with guns and ammunition, do not want. The release of Saddam Hussein to his executors before hearing him on the witness stand, before hearing about those who supplied the means by which he betrayed his own people and about undercover agents who played roles in, and supplied weapons for, wars with Kuwait and Iran is highly suggestive of a trend to muzzling inquiry.

What could Osama have told us? Would we have learned why his family was spirited out of the US after 9/11 when almost every other plane on continental USA had been grounded? Perhaps we might have learned more about his actual role in the 9/11 incident – still believed by many academicians to have internal US involvement just as did the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A legal process would have served to demystify him, debunk his cause and undermine the brainwashing of his followers. An opportunity lost. As we were leaving Iraq, echoes of his elevation to sainthood was already occurring. We can expect the “blow-back” to be extensive.

It was an extra-judicial killing, outside due process of law, carried out unitlaterally by agents of one country (as far as we know). Sadly, the media is now hailing vengeance as an instrument of justice.





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