OBL Dead

Osama Bin Laden is dead killed by a special unit of US forces in Pakistan. He was killed in his compound located in an urban area 30 miles from Islamabad.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan must have known about his whereabouts during all these years. Saudi Arabia is in a difficult position now in the ME, with all those revolutions at its door, and badly needs US protection for the survival of its backward monarchy. Bin Laden is the price for this unconditional protection.

Bin Laden leaves behind him a trail of murders, wars, violence and multiple religious sectarianisms: Muslims versus Christians, Sunnis versus Shias. He discredited Muslims and Arabs all over the world and served well the US and Israel's imperial interests in the 'greater middle east area'.

UPDATE
US special forces told to kill, not capture, Bin Laden.

Reactions: 'Sunni Hamas condemns killing of Arab holy warrior'. Palestinian resistance movements are all corrupted by Saudi Arabia's money. Deprived of support and having to sustain a harsh occupation, Palestinian leaders turn to the wrong country, wrong ideology and wrong man...Ismail Hanyia's statement on Bin Laden is confirming what zionists say about Hamas. How dumb of him to call Bin Laden 'Arab holy warrior'. We need an Arab spring in Palestine now!
Sunni Lebanese Muslim preachers, Saudi kooks and Hariri tools, hail Bin Laden for attacking at the heart of the US. These people feel no shame. Bin Laden was fabricated by Saudi Arabia and the US, then served to us, and we should feel relieved at his death, not mournful and not a bit proud about his criminal enterprises.

Some perspective:

Angry Arab on the celebrations.

Angry Arab on OBL and his sponsors.

More from Angry Arab (this is an extract and I took the liberty to put it in paragraphs, it is known that Angry Arab doesn't like paragraphs):

Now, turning to the US, I also believe that in the wake of any US military operation, we are fed a large amount of lies, fabrication, sc fi scenarios, and exaggerations.  

I mean, other than Bin Laden has been killed by US troops, I am skeptical of the rest.  

Let us begin with the one about that Bin Laden received a "Muslim burial at sea."  I mean, do they think that Arabs/Muslims are idiots?  Burial at sea? Is that a new military term for tossing his body from the air?  Burial at sea? Who are you kidding? Just say what happened: most likely, soldiers scrawled slogans on his body, and then yelled: Allahu Akbar, you motherfucker, and then tossed his body in the water.  

Then the story that I instantly wrote about yesterday: the notion that the find was the product of painstaking hard work and research by US intelligence agents. I remember that we were told how US intelligence agents in Iraq did a family tree and complicated charts of the relatives and bodyguards of Saddam to locate him.  Later we learned that: a bodyguard of Saddam turned himself in to US troops and asked for the bounty.  There is now a beginning of insinuations US troops found him due to a tip.  Here is the beginning of the story in the US press.  First we were told that a courier was spotted by US agents.  Now we are told that Pakistani agents were the first to spot him.  

We were first told that a man in the compound took a woman as a human shield and that she was killed.  When I now hear a "human shield" story, I know that I am about to be lied to by Israeli or US military to justify yet another killing of civilians.  Later we were told that Bin Laden was the one who took a woman as a human shield.  I am sure that the human shield story will disappear later. Just remember the original early story of Pat Tillman: I mean some in the US military are experienced in movie scripts.  

To their credit, Politico has noticed the various inconsistencies and lies and the changes in the early accounts.   And `Abdul-Bari `Atwan of Al-Quds Al-`Arabi, who knew Bin Laden and liked him says in his editorial today that an aide to Bin Laden said that he requested that his bodyguards shoot him if he ever faced killing by enemies.  `Atwan leans to that theory for his killing: that his own bodyguard shot him.  I think this is very likely and may emerge later.  Is that why the body was thrown in the sea? Because Americans want to believe that an American bullet killed him?  Does this matter? Well, yes.  

The US has lied so much that it is understandable that it is not believed by Muslims especially that Arabs/Muslims can't celebrate the American celebrations of their killings, even if the person killed is Bin Laden: who may not be loved by Arabs and Muslims (and who clearly failed to win support among the masses) but any US president is hated more than Bin Laden. That is the key element to help you understand the complicated Arab/Muslim attitudes to Bin Laden and his death.  This explains the stupid foolish statement by Isma`il Haniyyah who called Bin Laden "mujahid" (holy struggler).  

Oh, and now Fox News is giving credit where it is due: it crediting torture for locating Bin Laden.  

And the stupidity can be seen in Arab media too: New TV who I generally like, yesterday aired a report on the possible successors to Bin Laden.  It said that Abu Zubayda is the most likely to emerge as the key commander of Al-Qa`idah. Can some one tell New TV that Abu Zubyayda won't be able to assume his duties because he is sitting in Guantanamo? 

Why Bin Laden might have been dead for years and why the US chose to announce his death now.

The grey areas of post 9/11 terrorism: Jihadi who helped 7/7 bombers freed by the US

Just in, from the Guardian: Claims Islamist was US informant while assisting London terrorist.

A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar "began co-operating even before his arrest", has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004.
Babar facilitated the London bombers' knowledge of bomb-making when he invited around a dozen British jihadists to attend a camp that he had helped set up in north-west Pakistan in the summer of 2003.
In a debriefing with US law enforcement agents in 2004, Babar told US prosecutors about Khan, whom he knew as "Ibrahim". British terrorism investigators showed Babar an unclear surveillance photo of Khan in August 2004, but Babar failed to identify him.
He has said that when he saw pictures of Khan in newspapers after the bombings he alerted the US authorities straight away: "I told them [the American authorities] that was the person that was Ibrahim. I had mentioned Ibrahim before July 2005."
After his guilty plea in 2004, Babar spent a good proportion of his four and a half years outside the regular prison system. He flew to testify in trials in the UK and in Canada and met law enforcement officers from around the world.

Court transcripts.

The 7/7 question that remained unanswered.

It is after September 2001 that Babar's story begins to fray at the edges. What kind of person would fly to Pakistan to support the Taliban just after an al-Qaida operation nearly killed their own mother? As one lawyer in a 2006 British terrorism trial put to Babar while he was in the witness box: "Someone who does that either is so appalled by the acts of al-Qaida that they are going to go and spy for America on jihadis – or they are a very hardline jihadi indeed."

There are also questions about how he was able to fly from the UK to Pakistan and then on to the US without being stopped or questioned, even though his ITN interview about killing Americans, which offered US security officials plenty of identifying details, had been syndicated on television stations around the world.

During the various trials at which Babar made an appearance, it was also revealed he was able to visit a US consulate in Pakistan many times and apply for a green card for the Pakistani wife he married while on jihad duty in 2002, without a question being asked.

Notice how converts to Islam can be found in most terror plots. Follow the trials of the plotters, those who get the lighter sentences are informants who, most of the time, instigated, trained, and helped terror operations with logistics and more...  Was Babar one of the few real Muslims willing to work with the US against other Muslims in such a way teaching them how to plot, bomb and then be caught?  Was this the reason why most terror plots had to rely on converts?

UPDATE: Freed NY terrorist advocated violence

Ex-MI5 chief: Response to 9/11 was 'huge overreaction'

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.
"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.
In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.
Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

Read here the interview she gave to The Guardian

With Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the official authorisation and public acceptation of torture in the name of security, the Iraq war which shattered an entire nation as well as hundred thousands lives and put the middle east in turmoil, and the politisation - not the criminalisation - of terror, I think we are way above an overreaction, we are in a delibrately planned large scale coup against civilian society conducted by a military-industrial cartel with the complicity and the responsibility of the citizen of the 'free' societies.

The 7/7 bombing trial

Stef's posts are great, most of the time. What I like is that he combines his analysis of the farcical aspects of the judicial elements of the WOT in the US and the UK with a fierce critique of the consumer society in which we live, as he does in this post. The common point is that in our 'free world' we buy pretty much everything from unhealthy food to propaganda without questioning the storyline of those who are selling these items to us.

Stef is a proud member of the Conspiraloon alliance.

The cost of wars for US households and the world economy

A grim analysis from Spiegel

The War On Terror and The Terror Inside

The meaning of words is also in their history. We should be reminded that the War On Terror is meant, first and foremost, not against those whom we call terrorists, but against internal political opponents and internal dissent. We should recognise that it is on the internal front that the the war on terror has produced results up to now. Bin Laden and his acolytes are roaming free and producing more terrorists while we, citizens of the free world, are paying a high price for Bush's and the Neo-Cons war on terror; restriction of civil liberties, banalisation of torture, marginalisation of honest dissent, criminalisation of the innocents, absence of a people friendly social agenda, neglect of the social agenda alltogether. Thanks to François Furstenberg for reminding us of our homegrown terror inspired, not by Bin Laden, but by Bush's and the Neo-Cons' policies.

"If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the Western liberal tradition.

On this principle, the Terror demonized its political opponents, imprisoned suspected enemies without trial and eventually sent thousands to the guillotine. All of these actions emerged from the Jacobin worldview that the enemies of liberty deserved no rights.

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term “terrorist” has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to “Islamofascism.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur. "

Paul Krugman's 'Fearing Fear Itself'

USrael's Lies: The New Orientalism and the Elusive Peace

Israel does not want peace. That's not only Gideon Levy's conclusion but also the conclusion of some in the Bush camp as it appears (i.e. Robert Novak). Indeed, nothing for now can move Israel and the neo-cons from their attitude toward conflict and peace in the ME, because public opinion in the US and the west in general are kept in ignorance of facts about the region. Western policy about the Middle east is divorced from facts and from informed public opinion, thanks mainly to the work of the neo-cons.

''To these people the interests of Israel are paramount, and if Israel is not interested in a two state solution that involves handing back settlements then neither are the neo-cons. And no matter what game they play publicly, their policy line remains tied to whatever the state of Israel wants.''

A blatant example of this willful ignorance is the death of investigative journalism and the reduction of the media, even the most prominent ones, to simple mouthpieces of their governments and their leaders. Homeyra points out to an article on the neo-cons where there is mention of the fact that most of them come from the news media which they tranformed into their echo chamber, a subjective one by their own admission. Le Monde yesterday published answers to questions sent to the three front runner candidates for the presdiential elections in France. The questions were about ten 'crucial' issues in foreign policy, as determined by le Monde. A third of the questions was about Iran, more than a third was about internal and foreign affairs issues related to Europe including attitudes toward China and Russia, and there was a question on Darfur, a recently zionist sponsored 'humanitarian' cause. There was no mention of the Israeli-Arab conflict, no mention of Iraq, and no mention of Palestine. Half of the questions on crucial foreign policy issues in France, as determined by le Monde, can be seen as neo-con issues. Le Monde is a center left mainstream French newspaper. The sounds of the drumbeats in the echo chamber are reaching distant neighbourhoods.

Dix enjeux de politique étrangère
LE MONDE | 16.04.07

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I realised yesterday that the neo-con thinking has become invasive, even among people and countries outside their own circles. This work of disinformation was achieved by a joint effort from Israel and its neo-con allies through means including shock and awe wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lying, intimidation, mayhem, threats, and most of all, the devaluation of facts on the ground which were replaced and substituted by false narratives bearing no relation to Truth.

Take for example the present zionist narrative on the Israeli-palestinian peace process, the one that was fabricated since 9/11 with the help of the 'War on Terror'. We all know that the 'war on terror' has produced more terror, displaced three to four millions Iraqis from their homes while eight to nine millions need humanitarian assistance, killed another million of them, and destabilised the whole Middle East, not to mention Afghanistan. On the other hand, the 'war on terror' served as the main line in a narrative preventing any effort to reach peace in Palestine. The following were the main premices of the 'War on Terror' narrative:

-Sharon could not talk to Arafat because Arafat was a terrorist;
-Sharon could not talk to Abbas because Abbas could not reign in on terrorists;
And when Abbas was sufficiently weakened and Hamas took over democratically after having stopped suicide bombings:
-Sharon, and consequently Olmert, could not talk to Hamas because not only Hamas are terrorists but they don't recognise Israel's 'right to exist'. Israel was frightened asking for the protection of the international community because, in Palestine, terrorists in government don't recognise its 'right to exist';
The international community followed Israel in this path and Israel felt enough support to conduct daily invasions and armed assaults on Gaza (Remember Jennine, Beith Hanoun ?) as well as daily harrassement of Palestinians, which continue to go on as I am writing. Israel felt enough support to conduct a bloody criminal war on Lebanon to get the pro-Bush Sanyura government rid of Hezbollah 'terrorists' which are roughly 40 % of the country's population and more if you count their popular support from other communities, killing, in one month, more than a thousand civilians, displacing a quarter of the population, destroying infrastructure and dropping some one million cluster bombs intended to kill well after the ceasefire.

During this time, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were caving to international pressure to form a unity government so the west could send aid, halted at the election of the Hamas government, to palestinians who are in critical conditions and starving. Rice, Bush and Olmert tried their best, and behind the scenes, to stop a unity government, by giving money and arms to corrupt Palestinian factions (Fatah) pushing Gaza into a civil war. Things were starting to look really ugly when Saudi Arabia, the first official US and Israel implicit ally in the region, worried by a rise of anti-Saudi sentiment in the Arab street and among Muslims, stepped in and brokered a unity government. The Palestinian Authority government that resulted has not only a third of its members from Fatah, an organisation seen now as 'moderate' by the US and Israel (it wasn't moderate enoug for them when it was time to negotiate with Arafat), but it has also more than a third of its members from the civil society and independant groups. Israel ignored the government. The saudis relaunched their peace initiative, with an implicit agreement from the present Palestinian government, Israel continued to ignore it, until a week ago. Meanwhile, Olmert is mulling the Arab peace offer. If it is good for him on the internal level, he may engage in talks but he seems reluctant to accept it as such. Read here how Israel and most Israelis view the peace initiative, which is minimal to a two state solution, and here an appraisal of the initiative.

During the five years and a half since 9/11, chances for peace in the ME were squandered by a simple narrative, the 'war on terror' narrative, making all Arabs and Muslims potential terrorists, ennemies of the West, unfit for talks and undeserving peace. It is a convenient lie and it is a new dehumanising tactic for the New Orientalism enabling the continued and renewed occupation of Palestine, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the invasion and bombing of Lebanon, the extraordinary renditions, torture, at scales unseen before, by modern western democracies, enabling Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the reorientation of the international foreign policy agenda away from the Israeli-Arab conflict to new satellite but nonetheless important conflicts like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Somalia. And it does not stop there. Al-Qaida, which is an objective ally of the neo-cons in the 'war on terror', because Al-Qaida exists as long as the 'war on terror' exists (see the Adam Curtis documentary, 'The Power of Nightmares'), was trying recently to spread this 'war' to the Maghreb, Algeria and Morocco. The Algerian government, which dealt with a murderous and state threatening wave of Islamist terror whose scale was much wider than 9/11 related directly to an internal social and economical malaise, and which is trying to revive the state, the economy, and national reconciliation, was very very angry with the US ambassador's reaction to the recent bombings in Alger. It accused the US embassy, who issued a warning on future and imminent Al-Qaida terror attacks in Alger, of interference in internal affairs of a sovereign state. The present US ambassador in Alger had a previous job in occupied Iraq as an ambassador. The Algerian government is labeling the shocking attitude of the US ambassador as the 'Iraqi' attitude, a coloniser attitude. Algerians fought a bloody war of decolonisation and they are, more than other Arabs, very sensitive to the colonialist attitude.

L'attitude des Américains mise en cause à Alger après un avis d'alerte aux attentats
LEMONDE.FR | 15.04.07

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L'ambassade des Etats-Unis à Alger redoute de nouvelles attaques dans la journée
LEMONDE.FR | 14.04.07

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Lets listen to professor Edward Said speaking on Orientalism.

Thanks Kel.

By labeling Arabs and Muslims as terrorists and potential threats to the US and the West, Israel, the neo-con, and their much cherished 'war on Terror' have recreated Orientalism. This New Orientalism, no less dehumanising, is much more rapacious; it supresses any humanity to Arabs and Msulsims and manages to deny them the status of victims and to convince the world that it is Israel who is the victim in this conflict. The 'War on Terror' is a convenient lie hiding an inconvenient truth; the unjustice done to Palestinians, Muslims, and the Arab world, by Israel.

This New Orientalism is unlike others because it uses as a proxy an occupying state, Israel, which is politically and strategically, and at the same time, an integral part of the ME and an integral part of the West. Unlike other occupation endeavours, and with the exception of the European occupation of the new World, this one, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, is here to stay. If it refuses peace, if it refuses to merge into a uniquely Middle Eastern state strategically and politically different from the West's military power and in peace with its neighbours, and if the West refuses to dissociate itself from this occupation, the only logical outcome, and history is here to testify to this outcome, will be a dramatic outcome and either one of these:
The end of the existence of the Palestinian state. It happened already;
The end of the Israeli state. It could not happen given the military and economic power of Israel;
The extermination and dissemination of the Palestinian people. This is happening before our eyes.

If Israel does not want a two state solution, giving a viable state to Palestinians and retreating behind the 1967 occupation lines, neither a one state solution integrating all Palestinians and giving them rights equal to Jewish citizens, the only outcome will be the slow extermination of the Palestinian people. This is the simple truth we are trying to hide from by listening to neo-con lies.

UPDATE: I am relieved that no Arab or Muslim was behind the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday April 16th. Otherwise, Bush would have to invade the Arab or Muslim country of the shooter. That's the meaning of the war on terror; waging wars with organised armies against a bunch of fools and thugs. Now, is Bush going to attack South Korea ?

The UK sent seventeen year old soldiers to Iraq

15 UK soldiers under 18 years of age were sent to fight in Iraq since 2003, despite the ratification by the UK of the UN protocol on children soldiers, UK defence minsitry admitted yesterday. The admission came as an answer to a question from a Lib Dem in the parliament. The soldiers were 17 years old, among them 4 girls.

Londres a envoyé en Irak des soldats de moins de 18 ans
LEMONDE.FR | 05.02.07

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