UPDATE: 6:54 PM May 4, 2011.
This just in from Al Jazeera
Lawrence Wilkerson speaks to Al Jazeera
During the Bush presidency we (Wilkerson includes himself & Pres. Bush & VP Dick Cheney )took our eye off the ball by invading Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden
In the video Wilkerson appears a bit bitter and personally betrayed by Bush & Cheney when he served in their administration.
Now back to our regular programming on Bin Laden followed by Birtherism equals racism/nativism.
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- What does the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have in common with Guantanamo Bay?
They're both intended to send a message that the United States has sunk deeper into savagery and abandoned any commitment to conventional norms of behavior. That's the message, and we hear it "loud and clear".
The rest of the world doesn't share our "enlightened" views about justice. They're still stuck in the past believing in archaic ideas about due process, habeas corpus, and civil liberties. They don't see the virtue of kidnapping, beating, and waterboarding. They don't cheer when people are butchered and dumped in the sea. They don't build Stalinesque gulags and torture chambers to show how forbearing and merciful they are. They're leaders don't go through the ritual chest-thumping exercise on national TV when someone's been assassinated. They don't understand what a wonderful country the US is. All they just want a little breather from all the violence. Is that too much to ask?
From: America: "The beautiful" or "The mother-in-law with the booming voice"? By Mike Whitney May 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House"
Did America's desire for blood for revenge for its pound of flesh has once more outweighed its belief in justice , the rule of law and common decency?
Some of the accusations and allegations in the following articles are not knew but are still without credible answers:
Did the Bush Regime deliberately or by incompetence allow Osama Bin Laden to escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan shortly after 9/11?
Did the Bush Regime botch having Osama Bin Laden delivered alive to them by the AfghanistanTaliban government.?
Did the USA show its disrespect for the Rule of Law by its assassination of Osama Bin Laden? (or for that matter other individuals it assassinated or renditioned or disappeared or tortured
Did America since 9/11 lose its sense of justice, the Rule of law or its basic sense of morality and common decency?
Did America forget that it claimed the War on Terror was a war to defend and spread basic human rights, the rule of law and democratic rights and freedom?
Joan Walsh at Salon.com in her article questions whether there is an appropriate response to the death of Osama Bin Laden that is is one response ie stoic better than that of celebrating and chanting USA or high fiving. Maybe there is no set appropriate way to react to such an event.
In the end she suggests that what matters most is the reaction of leaders in the US government who were in charge of the operation and who were seeing or hearing the event unfold in real time which from what we know was not some sort of gleeful or giddy response but was rather more serious and grave.
Obama, Osama and MLK :The frenzy over a "fake" King quote reveals a desire to outsource our moral decision-making to someone else by Joan Walsh at Salon.com, May 4, 2011
We can't help focusing on feelings, in the absence of hard information. We're social animals; we trust our "feelings" to tell us something real. So I had very intense feelings looking at the now iconic picture White House photographer Pete Souza snapped of the president and his team as they "watched" the bin Laden operation in the Situation Room Sunday night. (There's no hard information about what they were actually watching.) You've seen it. It's riveting. Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed. The only person looking as grim is the president himself; he's slumped in his chair, looking hard at the screen. Vice President Joe Biden looked stricken; the New York Times reported that he was fingering rosary beads. The military leaders in the room were more granite-faced, but I was reassured to see our civilian leaders grimacing at the reality of killing bin Laden and his family members – even if they'd make the same decision tomorrow. Their "feelings" -- at least what appear to be their feelings -- reassure me they approached the decision with the moral gravity it deserved.
If Hillary Clinton had been pumping her fist and yelling "USA, USA!" after the killing I'd have been aghast, and said so. The range of "appropriate" feelings -- and the way you telegraph them -- is more clear-cut when you're talking about our leaders. Being reassured by seeing their feelings, while we wait for information, makes sense. But ultimately we need, as citizens, to decide if we believe this was a just decision, a moral decision and a decision that made the U.S. safer (which may add up to three different things.) We can't simply outsource that judgment, whether to King, Obama or our favorite pundits. Wasting time adjudicating whether people are expressing the right reaction in the right way is a silly distraction.
Also see for a commentary on the use of violent Video games to relive the killing of bin laden.
Let the Osama bin Laden killing games begin! Why do we need to relive a death -- in cheesy computer animation?
BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS at Salon.com May 4, 2011
Was Osama captured before being shot? BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT at salon.com, May 4, 2011
U.S. Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave bin Laden a Free Pass By Gareth Porter May 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House"
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- WASHINGTON, May 3, 2011 (IPS) - When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid- October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden's terrorist career for the next nine years.
The al Qaeda leader was able to escape into Pakistan a few weeks later, because the Bush administration had no military plan to capture him.
The last Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, offered at a secret meeting in Islamabad Oct. 15, 2001 to put bin Laden in the custody of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to be tried for the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, Muttawakil told IPS in an interview in Kabul last year.
The OIC is a moderate, Saudi-based organisation representing all Islamic countries. A trial of bin Laden by judges from OIC member countries might have dealt a more serious blow to al Qaeda's Islamic credentials than anything the United States would have done with bin Laden.
Muttawakil also dropped a condition that the United States provide evidence of bin Laden's guilt in the 9/11 attacks, which had been raised in late September and reiterated by Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef on Oct. 5 - two days before the U.S. bombing of Taliban targets began.
Another tantalizing question is about the use of deadly force on an unarmed man.
So did the USA need to kill Osama Bin Laden or could they have taken him alive
Did they fear what Osama might say embarrassing the US government or the governement of one of its allies such as Pakistan ISI security force which quite possibly had indirect if not direct contact with Osama or those close to him
So did Pakistan shelter Osama Bin Laden or did they really not know where he was. These allegations have been made before about Pakistan.
"Osama bin Laden 'Was Not Armed and Did Not Use Wife as Human Shield' :Osama bin Laden did not use one of his four wives as a human shield in his dying moments, contrary to earlier reports, as White House officials began to "clarify" early accounts of Monday's commando raids by US special forces. By Peter Foster May 03, 2011 "Telegraph" via Information Clearing house
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- US officials had claimed that Osama Bin Laden had been "firing behind" his wife when he was shot through the eye by a US Navy Seal, painting a powerful image of the world's most wanted man cowering behind a defenceless woman.
In the original account of the firefight, John Brennan, a US counter-terrorism official briefing the media, said "There was family at that compound, and there was a female who was, in fact, in the line of fire that reportedly was used as a shield to shield Osama from the incoming fire".
However US officials have now conceded that Bin Laden was not armed during the assault, did not fire back and that his wife was only injured in the assault, most likely in the crossfire, according to unnamed officials quoted by the US website Politico.
"A different guy's wife was killed", said the website, quoting an unnamed official who had briefed US television media, with the official adding that Bin Laden's wife was "injured not killed", having been shot in the calf.
America: "The beautiful" or "The mother-in-law with the booming voice"? By Mike Whitney May 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House"
-
- What does the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have in common with Guantanamo Bay?
They're both intended to send a message that the United States has sunk deeper into savagery and abandoned any commitment to conventional norms of behavior. That's the message, and we hear it "loud and clear".
We don't need our Harvard-educated president to crow about his latest gangland "hit" to know that America has turned into a moral swamp. That's obvious in every area of policy, foreign and domestic. It's just that certain incidents draw more attention than others, like when a drone incinerates a home full of women and children in the Pakistani outback or when F-16s reduce a city of 300,000 (Falluja) to rubble leaving behind a legacy of birth defects, cancer and grinding poverty. These are the real "headline grabbers", like shrugging off the sovereign rights of an ally, invading their airspace, and deploying special ops to conduct a Rambo-style massacre in a civilian section of town.
The rest of the world doesn't share our "enlightened" views about justice. They're still stuck in the past believing in archaic ideas about due process, habeas corpus, and civil liberties. They don't see the virtue of kidnapping, beating, and waterboarding. They don't cheer when people are butchered and dumped in the sea. They don't build Stalinesque gulags and torture chambers to show how forbearing and merciful they are. They're leaders don't go through the ritual chest-thumping exercise on national TV when someone's been assassinated. They don't understand what a wonderful country the US is. All they just want a little breather from all the violence. Is that too much to ask?
So the next question is why was Osama's body buried at sea.
Why was his body not turned over to relatives
Did the US make enquiries how best to deal with his body
Islamic scholars criticize bin Laden's sea burial AP By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press – Mon May 2,
CAIRO – Muslim clerics said Monday that Osama bin Laden's burial at sea was a violation of Islamic tradition that may further provoke militant calls for revenge attacks against American targets though there appears to be some room for debate over the burial — as with many issues within the faith — a wide range of senior Islamic scholars interpreted it as a humiliating disregard for the standard Muslim practice of placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca.
Sea burials can be allowed, they said, but only in special cases where the death occurred aboard a ship.
Bin Laden's burial at sea "runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values and humanitarian customs," said Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand Imam of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning.
A radical cleric in Lebanon, Omar Bakri Mohammed, said, "The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don't think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration."
A U.S. official said the burial decision was made after concluding that it would have been difficult to find a country willing to accept the remains. There was also speculation about worry that a grave site could have become a rallying point for militants.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.
President Barack Obama said the remains had been handled in accordance with Islamic custom, which requires speedy burial, and the Pentagon later said the body was placed into the waters of the northern Arabian Sea after adhering to traditional Islamic procedures — including washing the corpse — aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.
But the Lebanese cleric Mohammed called it a "strategic mistake" that was bound to stoke rage.
In Washington, CIA director Leon Panetta warned that "terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge" the killing of the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Bin Laden is dead," Panetta wrote in a memo to CIA staff. "Al-Qaida is not."
and now back to the Nativist/Racist Birthers
The authors of an article at Salon.com argue that even the killing of Osama Bin laden will not make president Obama more acceptable as an American born citizen of the United States because their test for legitimacy is not just being born an American citizen but also having extensive ties to previous generations of "real " American citizens and that his loyalty is to America first and not to a foreign government or a foreign ideology (socialism/Collectivism) or religion (a secret Muslim or an atheist). Birtherism is another form of Nativism that is that Obama 's parents were both loyal to the United States and born in the USA themselves. As soon as evidence is made clearing up the Birther birth certificate claim they then move the line back further to his parents and then to his grandparents etc.
Is Obama "American" enough for the far right now? BY ANDREW BURSTEIN AND NANCY ISENBERG at Salon.com,May 4, 2011
Birtherism has a distinctive history. If you go to the birther.org website, you will find a history lesson along with their creed: "The Birthers: Dedicated to the Rebirth of the Constitutional Republic." Much like the Tea Partiers, birthers have linked themselves to America’s founding fathers. Their fealty to the Constitution is centered on a single phrase in Article II that requires the president to be a "natural born citizen."
What does the all-important phrase mean? Birthers interpreting Article II say that "the president must above all else be loyal to this nation." It is a "self-evident" truth that such loyalty is drawn from nature–and they are quite explicit about what that means: "kinship, our most primitive and natural form of citizenship, from blood"; a nativity which comes "from the soil," or "place of birth." It is an ideal of kinship that energizes the birther movement—the transmission of civic identity by descent, through bloodlines, from parents to children.
The website also makes it clear that, for birthers, a natural-born president must have natural-born parents, and that civic identity only exists in a homogeneous population. "If the parents were split in their loyalties," the website declares, "the child would be split in loyalty to America." Mixed heritage is thus a liability, for it undermines proper patriotic breeding. Indeed, for the birthers, the breeding question is inextricably linked to a person’s genetic vulnerability.
President Obama was raised by his white, midwestern mother, and her parents. But his actual upbringing matters not a bit to birthers. For most of them, Obama is his father’s son, because kinship is measured though the traditional order of the father’s line. To make their claims stick, birthers have had to erase President Obama’s mother from the fanciful narrative of his African birth. Just as Glenn Beck indelicately declared that Obama had an instinctive hatred of white people, birthers divorced him from his mother’s family. The father he hardly knew remains the dominant force in his life; the president cannot be an American because he is loyal to his patriarchal line, that is, to his father’s race.
Obama guilty of ‘presidenting while black by leonard Pitts, may 3, 2011
But let us not dismiss the birther imbroglio without calling out the bigotry at its core. Yes, that word will bring howls of protest from people who will declare that race had nothing to do with their demands for Obama’s original birth certificate.
And I believe them. Or at least, I believe they believe what they are saying.
Thing is, bigots do not usually stand up and say, “I am a bigot.” They hide this from themselves, much less from you or me. Indeed, Mel Gibson, last heard telling his girlfriend she would be raped by a pack of effing N-words, just said in an interview that he is not a racist.
In assessing bigotry, then, one learns to judge actions over words. And the actions of many Americans have screamed their discomfort with the idea that a black man is now the man. A computer abstract of his birth certificate, a perfectly ordinary document that satisfies passport requirements of the U.S. State Department does not satisfy Donald Trump? Give me a break.
Some have suggested that Obama’s opponents — like George W. Bush’s — are simply out to delegitimize his presidency. Wrong. They are actually out to delegitimize him.
I mean, we just saw: the president of the United States required to show his papers, like some brother caught driving too nice a car in too nice a neighborhood after dark. Presidenting while black, I suppose.
Nor does even that suffice to prove his bona fides, as diehards now challenge the validity of the new document and Trump turns his attention to supposed irregularities in Obama’s academic transcripts.
It never stops.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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