Ding dong bin Laden's dead

[Edward theurj Berge]

binLaden's dead, ding dong the wicked terrorist is dead. (Sung to the tune of the Wizard of Oz song about the wicked witch.)

Ok, yes it feels good to get vengeance on the bastard responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the US. The blood lust is thick and heavy in the US with not just his death but the manner is which it was executed, shot in the head at close range. The left eye, to be exact. An eye for and eye and all that. We feel relief that he was murdered in cold, calculating foresight, which by the usual legal standard is 1st degree murder. Ah, but this is war, where all is fair, eh?

Now I'm not a bleeding heart liberal though I am most certainly a progressive. I get that war is sometimes necessary, and that part of war is killing. And I'm also in favor of the death penalty in certain criminal cases, so I'm not completely anti-killing. After all, "death to all fanatics,"* the famous slogan of Hassan i-Sabbah, the reputed leader of the Hashashin assassins** at one time, is one of my favorite catch-phrases. Still, I have pause to wonder about the animal fury that we've taken up as a people on the news of this execution.

Is it a legitimate moment of revenge? A necessary time-out to revel in justice done? And/or does it reduce us to the level of the savage murderer that perpetrated the crime against us? Does it incite further acts of terrorism when said terrorists see that we are just as blood-thirsty as they, in the name of our God? And where does religious forgiveness play into this? How do we meet pragmatic and insular political ends through the usual religious motives of compassion and love? Just wondering.

* Which slogan ironically includes those who utter it, since they too are fanatics and must kill themselves. It's a sort of Sufi koan to wake one up to their own contradictions.

** Double irony that our elite Seal force that executed bin Laden were modern day Hashashin assassins.

[kelamuni]

This just in: Osama not dead!! Spotted eating mechoui and sipping tea with Elvis and JFK in a souk in Casablanca.

 

 

 

xibalba said:

 

Kela, look at that  pic

the gathering  at the White House.

They are follwing the killing of Bin Laden in real time.

They look like a bunch of geeks playing video games style "counter-strike".

 

Robert Gates to the right seems annoyed, he rather prefers another version "battlefield".

Hiallry has missed, she must reload with new weapons.

The fastest at typing on the Keybooard seems to be Obama.

The general is a mess.

the pizza boy is soon coming to deliver the quatro staggioni, calzone, frutti di mare, kansas pizza, tea party pizzas, etc...

That´s very ambiance  "the society of the spectacle" of Guy Debord or "simulacras" of Jean Baudrillard.

hahhahahahha

kelamuni said:

but i thought obama was osama? i'm confused...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w53TMpk6QNc&feature=fvsr "just say 'no' to the new world order." right... hahaha

[xibalba]

hahahhah

I always thought they were somwhere connected to that international gang "Spectre" in old James Bond movies. Suspicious disapperances. Elvis was nr 3, JFK nr 2.

kelamuni said:

This just in: Osama not dead!! Spotted eating mechoui and sipping tea with Elvis and JFK in a souk in Casablanca.

 

 

 

xibalba said:

 

Kela, look at that  pic

the gathering  at the White House.

They are follwing the killing of Bin Laden in real time.

They look like a bunch of geeks playing video games style "counter-strike".

 

Robert Gates to the right seems annoyed, he rather prefers another version "battlefield".

Hiallry has missed, she must reload with new weapons.

The fastest at typing on the Keybooard seems to be Obama.

The general is a mess.

the pizza boy is soon coming to deliver the quatro staggioni, calzone, frutti di mare, kansas pizza, tea party pizzas, etc...

That´s very ambiance  "the society of the spectacle" of Guy Debord or "simulacras" of Jean Baudrillard.

hahhahahahha

kelamuni said:

but i thought obama was osama? i'm confused...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w53TMpk6QNc&feature=fvsr "just say 'no' to the new world order." right... hahaha

[kelamuni]

In the words of Obi Wan, "should you strike me down i will become more than you can imagine."

Balder said:

 

[kelamuni]

great rant btw. thanks.

kelamuni said:

In the words of Obi Wan, "should you strike me down i will become more than you can imagine."

Balder said:

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Olbermann, as usual, is right on point. We are not now more but less safe after the killing. And that bin Laden was a symbol purposely kept alive by conservatives to serve as a boogey man in their catastrophe capitalism. And the myth that weak-kneed liberals cannot do the killing is destroyed. Aside from the questionable nature of intentional assassination, the poor conservative talking points on so many issues are now being air-dryed in the light of day that no wonder they're in a panic on how best to proceed politically. Especially when their own chicken-hawk leaders didn't have the balls to do what this socialist did. So very funny. And so very tragic.

[kelamuni]

It was only a matter of time.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Actually my first suspicion upon hearing the news, especially since they reportedly got rid of the body immediately afterward, was that it was a fabricated story. And I would not put it past the US government, including Obama, to do this. As to ascertaining the veracity of such a theory it is impossible short of an insider confessing under waterboard, in which case he will be deemed as mad as Dick on VALIS.

[Edward theurj Berge]

No surprise here:

"Al-Qaida vows revenge for Osama bin Laden's death."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Chomsky finally speaks up, copied in toto from this source:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky

[xibalba]

Chomsky is the only dude to tell such thing about Bush and the US.

No surprise why he is so hated, that commie creep as they call him. 

The Israeli call him a self-hating jew, ect....

KW would say this is classical modernistic speech, the orange meme structure in action.

But I can recall some dialogues between Chomsky and Foucault sounding old Frankfurt school of critical theory.

Interesting said by the father of the duality deep and surface structures in transformational grammar.

That logic is always present in political context, very much like unveiling power structures with the help of  hermeneutics of suspicion, including KW´s utterances ín the so called memetic matter.  

hahhahah

[Edward theurj Berge]

Seems Chomsky is not part of the usual 9/11 conspiracy crowd, not in the least. Yet above he claims there was no evidence bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11. A quick search of news sources from the past, long before he was assassinated, seem to bear this out. See this for example:

"Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, 'The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.' Tomb continued, 'Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.'"

Dick Cheney himself admits there was no evidence for this either. Chomsky discussed this here.

 

[xibalba]

yes strange stuff, and coming from Chomsky´s side, it is always a plus in rational and balanced thinking.

 

Now the question is: why so much noise around such a symbolic killing ritual?

anthropokogical reasons?

unconsiously re-enacting the sacrifice of the scapegoat?

an ancient pagan offering rite to appease the forgotten wrathful deities?

for a participation mystique"" like in the mass for the dead?

and to experience the grofian perinatal phase BPM IV of liberating release (ground zero celebration)  after the existential anguish and despair of the sub-phase BPM II (world center attacks),  sub-phase BPM III (the two wars in Afghanistan and Irak the assault of the compound and the killing action) at the collective level  of the north-american civilisation?

 

well just ideas.

cheers