End the War on Terror

The first thing the president could do to calm an anxious world is dial down his triumphalist rhetoric. He should stop saying that “America can do whatever it sets its mind to” when discussing the war on terror.

And then he should call the war off and deal with terrorism as a law enforcement problem. So long as war remains official policy, America will be tempted to undertake actions—drone attacks, targeted killings, interference in civil wars—as a matter of routine that should be reserved only for emergencies.

The open-ended, ill-defined nature of the war on terrorism puts America at odds with potentially every country, lacing disagreements and conflicts with the threat of aggression. This ultimately does more to compromise the world’s sense of security than bin Laden ever could.

 Shikah Dalmia in Reason. More Here

Who will account and pay for the millions killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan?

Now that Osama is dead and Obama’s re-election is in the bag, could we please move on? I hate to rain on the president’s victory parade and dampen the endless celebrations in America but the departure of one long isolated and ailing figure changes nothing.

In the words of Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online, “all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organization.”

Of course, Bin Laden was no saint and may very well have been guilty of the crimes he has been accused of, including the 9/11 outrage. But even Bin Laden, much reviled and hated as he was, deserved a day in the court to explain himself, didn’t he? How do we know for sure he’s the one who ordered the 9/11 attack. Even the FBI admits there’s no proof linking him to 9/11. Where’s the body of evidence?

Besides, even Nazi mass murderers like Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, responsible for sending millions to their death during the World War II, were penalized only after elaborate, and transparent, trials by a UN war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. Adolf Otto Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Jewish Holocaust, who was captured much later in 1960 by Israel’s Mossad in Argentina, received a fair trial before being hanged in 1962.

I really hate to bat for someone who in his zeal to avenge the Western crimes against the Arabs and Muslims may have ended up targeting hundreds of innocent people, most of them his fellow believers. But there’s something called the due process. Every criminal and accused — even the terrorists — is innocent until proven guilty.

This is the principle that is at the heart of international justice system and no one is an exception, not even the superpower. Following the release of thousands of incriminating US government cables by the WikiLeaks, Bin Laden had declared: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate.”

But law-abiding nations do not go to war over flimsy excuses or send armed commandos to invade a foreign country and blow up the brains of an unarmed man in front of his 12-year-old daughter and dump his body into the ocean.

In doing so, Uncle Sam has once again acted as the prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner all rolled into one. Not very different from the Texan-style justice celebrated in numerous Hollywood westerns. Might is right. The old jungle law still holds good and the powerful can do whatever they want.

Nearly 2,800 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Doubtless a heinous atrocity and crime against humanity for which the perpetrators deserve nothing but severest punishment. What about all those innocents though who were killed — and continue to be killed — as a direct consequence of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? More than a million people have perished in Iraq alone and hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past 10 years. Who will account and pay for them?

Pakistan has been the real victim of America’s decade-long disastrous campaign. Its once healthy economy is bankrupt; its institutions are falling apart and its complex religious and ethnic mosaic of society is unraveling fast. The country has been in a free fall since it was forced to join the US war.

It has lost nearly 40,000 people, including 7,000 military personnel, to this conflict. In fact, as early as 2009, Pakistan’s toll — 12,000 deaths — had exceeded that of Afghanistan. Last year, nearly 10,000 people were killed as a result of US drone strikes and reprisal attacks by militants.

Despite continuing demonstrations and perfunctory protests by politicians, the pilotless drones continue to hit Pakistan almost on a daily basis, feeding the growing groundswell of anger against America. Last year witnessed 111 drone attacks mostly targeting civilians. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says at least 957 victims of drone strikes in 2010 were innocent civilians.

I wonder if the Americans, who burst out on the streets to celebrate the killing of Bin Laden last week, really know what their government has been doing in their name around the world? If yes, do they care? How would they react if some unmanned planes sent by another country were to come raining death and destruction over their cities and towns?

Aijaz Zaka Syed in Arab News. More Here

Killing of Osama: It's a dirty game based on lies, cunningness, hatred and deceit

When I watched the photograph of Obama, Hilary and co, watching the CIA briefing on Operation Geronimo, I was reminded of the movie “Hard Target” (1993).

In that movie a bunch of psychopaths plays the game of head hunters. They feed some malnourished people and make them physically strong. They then organize an event where those folks are to run for their life and in the process those psychopath hunts them down. The psychos then laugh at their laurels each time, till the hero Van Dam, takes those bulls by the horn and give a run for their money.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden looks to me a script of similar to that of “Hard Target.” That bunch of most powerful people on this earth reminded me of those psychopaths of the movie who took sadist pleasure in taking the blood of those running for life, playing the dirty game “This is who we are.”

I am sure, when it might have been announced that “enemy is killed in action” Obama may have done the NBA hero Karim Abdul Jbbar’s act, leaping up few feet from the ground, raising his hand in exclamation shouting “We got him”!

To me, Osama was like, Van Dam who took up the challenge by the scruff and for ten years defied the most powerful nation on the earth equating with the hero of “Hard Target,” eventually to fall to the superior arrow. This however does not mean that arrow has upstaged the shield and the duel has come to rest. It’s an unending fight with no clear cut winner.

It’s a dirty game based on lies, cunningness, hatred and deceit. The most ironical part is there seems to be a conspiracy of silence among the nations of the world and none has the moral courage to say to stop this madness.

There are few exceptions. Former Cuban President Fidel Castro criticized the way the United States carried out the raid against Osama bin Laden. He said the U.S. raid in Pakistan violated that country's laws and offended its dignity.

In India, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK President M. Karunanidhi said the path taken by Osama bin Laden cannot be termed as ‘Islamic terrorism.’ He argued that just because bin Laden took to terrorism to achieve his goal, it cannot be called Islamic terrorism. Anger against any person cannot be justified in the form of terrorism, he wrote.

However, these are fringe voices and by and large the community of nations has condoned the acts of the US and it acts that it has skirted under the war against terror.

It’s only China that criticized the United States for violating' Pakistan's sovereignty by carrying out a military operation to kill Osama bin Laden saying “China holds that the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of any country should be respected.”

There are no two opinions that terrorism in any form has to be opposed tooth and nail but then this does not mean that those who become the cause of terrorism should be condoned.

Syed Ali Mujtaba in Mujtaba's Musings. More Here

Why Osama failed? Because, he thought he had the licence to kill

Osama Bin Laden was a Visionary.

His Vision was to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. A man who had the means to live like a king preferred to live the difficult life of a fugitive in order to see his Vision fulfilled.

But he failed.

He failed because he thought he had the licence to kill – to kill not only those who did not rule by divine law, but also people who even innocently came in the way. He obviously considered the latter as part of inevitable collateral damages.

He failed because he himself contravened the divine law. The divine law did give him the licence to resist and fight injustices ( refer Qur’aan Chapter 4: Verse 135), but it did not give him the licence to hit soft targets, destroy public property and kill innocent people just to spite the unjust rulers on that account (refer 5:32).

But the Muslims of the world are apt to ask, “What about the Bushes, the Blaires and the Obamas of the Western Powers who exercise their self-given licences to kill or help kill the innocents in their thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and display scant respect for the sovereignty of other nations?”

Well, the situation may best be understood through an example. A house is successfully burgled at night. It does not mean that the burglar shall never be punished for the crime. Allah may just be keeping him aside for now to give him a greater punishment later. Now, in the meantime, He is either testing the victim of the burglary or giving him a warning punishment for some impropriety he (victim) might have earlier committed.

And on a national scale there is the example of Germany’s Hitler. About 70 years ago, he terrorised other nations into abject surrender before him. And for quite some years he had a distinct upper hand over other nations. But what happened to him in the end? He not only lost all his conquered territory, but he lost his own nation to others in an utter defeat. And he died an ignominious death in a bunker!

“O you who believe! Seek help with patience and prayer. Certainly, Allah is with those who are patient! And say not unto those who are killed, in Allah's Path, as dead. Nay! They are alive, but you perceive not. And, certainly, We shall test you with something of the fear and the hunger, and with the loss in wealth, life and production. And gladden those who are patient, with the prophecy of good future. Those who, when any adversity confronts them, say, "We do indeed belong to Allah; and indeed are we to return to Him!" Those are the ones upon whom are blessings from their Lord and His grace; and those are the ones that are rightly guided!” (2:153 to 157)

Muslims! Take heart from the Qur’aanic passage above. And remember Allah’s Path lies in following the Qur’aan – and not deviating from it. And have complete trust in Allah. If you do not have that trust, you are not Muslims.

 Mohammed Shafi in RabbunAllah. Here

Why Obama got Osama - the golden goose - Killed?

 

Osama bin laden was very useful for the USA. It could bomb at innocents in the name of Osama. It could wage war over new territories and countries citing the name of Osama. It could tear apart the sovereignty of far away lands at will invoking the name of Osama.

It could allot billions for the war over terror using the bogeyman of Osama. It could promulgate stringent laws, It could humiliate and strip search the leaders of third world countries, It could hoodwink its public - everything in the name of Osama.

That is why the hawky bush and his poodle Mush kept the golden goose alive and kicking. Remember how a video casette released in the name of Osama on the eve of elections swing the prospects of Bush? Then why did Obama got Osama - the golden goose - killed? 

More Here

Noam Chomsky reacts to Osama Bin Laden's death

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.”

obama watching osama being killed

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.

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.

Noam Chomsky in Guernica. More Here

Obama kills Osama: This is not Justice, it was an extra-judicial execution

As the news of Osama bin Laden’s death filtered out onto the streets of the United States it triggered unsightly scenes of undiluted hysteria, chest-thumping and back-slapping which has sadly become a trademark of the vengeful ‘hang’em high’ lobby that emerged from the rubble of 9/11.

And just like George W. Bush did on that horrific day way back in 2001, U.S. President Barack Obama unashamedly wallowed in a flag-waving, nationalistic wave of emotion, crowing about national unity and everyone pulling together as he revealed the manhunt for the world’s most wanted man had finally been concluded.

It mattered not the Al-Qaeda leader was unarmed -- that detail was kept back as hugely distorted stories zoomed around the globe about how the evil Arab used his wife as a human shield while firing off rounds at the heroic soldiers who risked their all for Uncle Sam.

The naked display of uncontrollable gung-ho emotion was bad enough but then a smug-looking Obama began sounding like Glenn Ford in a scene from High Noon as he lectured the world about ""justice being done"".

To quote my favorite journalist Gary Younge: “This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.”

Mercifully, in this sea of madness another sane voice in America also drowned out the hate-filled chorus and it came from an unlikely source - 9/11 survivor Harry Waizer.

If anyone had a right to jump up and down like a lunatic at the show of a full moon it was him, but instead of adding to the hatefest he said: ""I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama Bin Laden.""

I hope now that America’s Number One Bogeyman is no more the USA returns to some semblance of normality that has been absent from its landscape since the now discredited War on Terror began.

Yvonne Ridley in Tehran Times. More Here

Pakistan is playing dumb

If everyone was so clever and the U.S. had been privy to bin Laden's not-so-secret location (Pakistan claims to be, as ever, the last to find out) since August 2010, how does one explain the ferocious drone campaign that took place from September to December of that year?

In the span of 102 days, an unprecedented 52 drone strikes were launched against Pakistan, none targeting Abbottabad or its environs. President Obama ratcheted up the drone war almost immediately upon entering the White House—ordering his first strike against Pakistan 72 hours after assuming the presidency.

Some 2,000 civilians have been killed, none of whom happened to be bin Laden or any of his dastardly lieutenants like Mullah Omar or Ayman al Zawahri, and yet the U.S. defense budget has called for a 75 percent increase in funds to continue and enhance drone operations. This is a frightening development.

Fathima Bhutto in The Daily Beast. More Here.

Americans could not have killed Osama without the help of Pakistanis

Obama and others enjoying the spectacle of the gruesome execution of unarmed Osama

The best accounts of the operation which killed bin Laden are not to be found in the US media, which is behaving as if it is embedded with the CIA like American journalists were with the US forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and swallowed army propaganda for which newspapers like The Washington Post later apologised.

Revealing details about Sunday’s Abbottabad operation are to be found in the Chinese media, especially China’s official news agency, Xinhua, which has no pretensions to media freedom unlike its American counterparts.

The Chinese have the best sources in Pakistan, given the all-weather friendship between Islamabad and Beijing.

Xinhua says electricity was cut off to Abbottabad as the operation to kill Osama began. That shows complicity with the Americans not only within the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi but down the line to the local administration that controls the electricity switching stations.

Xinhua says security forces cordoned off the entire area near Osama’s safe house before the Americans attacked it and no one was allowed to enter or leave the operational surroundings during the attack. That only means the Pakistanis knew what was going to take place, although it is only logical that reasons for sealing off the area would not have been communicated down the line to the local police or paramilitary units.

Xinhua also says residents of Abbottabad took videos and cellphone pictures from their rooftops as the spectacular helicopter landing and firefight was under way. But Pakistani security forces went round from house to house collecting memory cards from cameras and seizing videos from residents soon enough so that the pictures were not transmitted freelance by what modern TV would call citizen journalists.

All this could not have been organised by the Pakistanis after the event, which means, circumstantially, that the killing of Osama was a well co-ordinated US-Pakistani operation down to local ward-level in Abbottabad. Besides, Abbottabad is the seat of a brigade of the second division of Pakistan’s Northern Army Corps and several other sensitive army establishments, including a key military training academy.

Metaphorically, even a fly cannot circle the skies of that city without escaping the attention of the defence network that guards Abbottabad.

It is for this reason and to keep up the fiction that the US and Pakistan did not co-operate in killing Osama that an official statement was issued in Islamabad today that “US helicopters entered Pakistani airspace making use of blind spots in the radar coverage due to hilly terrain”.

The statement added that “US helicopters’ undetected flight into Pakistan was also facilitated by the... efficacious use of latest technology and ‘nap of the earth’ flying techniques”. At the same time, the Pakistan Army did not want its people to lose faith in Rawalpindi as the guardian of their country’s borders and their defence. Hence, a paragraph in the statement which asserts that “it may not be realistic to draw an analogy between this undefended civilian area and some military (and) security installations which have elaborate local defence arrangements”.

But to think that American helicopters carrying heavily armed personnel who attacked Osama’s hideout could have violated Abbottabad’s air space without help from Pakistan is pure fiction that is meant for the masses who are vulnerable to jihadi sermons in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Inflaming those masses could mean difficulties for the Americans everywhere.

Of the greatest significance, however, is the revelation in the statement that “as far as the target compound is concerned, ISI has been sharing information with CIA and other friendly intelligence agencies since 2009. The intelligence flow indicating some foreigners in the surroundings of Abbottabad, continued till mid-April 2011”.

The Pakistani statement is remarkable for its candour between the lines because it is admitting that in April 2011, the ISI stopped sharing information about Osama with the Americans because of strains between their respective intelligence outfits.

As a result, the Americans had to put off their plans to kill or capture bin Laden in mid-April, plans which began when Pakistan shared that intelligence from 2009, because the operation could not be undertaken without Islamabad’s full support.

K. P. Nayar in The Telegraph. More Here 

Make no mistake. It was a Joint venture

Make no mistake about it: The operation that killed bin Laden was a joint Pakistan-United States Special Forces operation. There is no conceivable way that the Americans could have got anywhere near that part of Pakistan on their own. (Abbottabad is also the sensitive “gateway” to the Karakoram Highway leading to China.) Nor could the Americans have obtained such “real time” intelligence that bin Laden was passing through Abbottabad without the involvement of the Pakistani agencies.

The big question, therefore, is why the Pakistani military leadership finally decided to turn in bin Laden – and the timing of it. Everything hinges on the answer to that question. What needs to be factored in is that bin Laden has always been the “trump card” that Pakistani military was expected to play at an appropriate time. Historically speaking, Pakistani military and intelligence have been extremely adept at modulating their working relationship with the Pentagon and the CIA. Quite obviously, Pakistani military estimated that doing a favourable turn to the US president Barack Obama at this precise juncture would optimise the “returns”.

The American public opinion has lately turned against the Afghan war and is plainly dissatisfied with Obama’s handling of the war. Obama is badly in need of a “success” story from the Hindu Kush. And bin Laden is a highly emotive issue for the American people. Obama will now be riding a wave of patriotic fervour all across America and that can have interesting fallouts for his re-election bid in 2012.

A regards the Pakistani military leadership, what counts most at this juncture is that the endgame of the Afghan war is beginning. Pakistan has never been so close to realising its objective of gaining strategic depth in Afghanistan, devolving upon the return of the Taliban to the power structure in Kabul. But in order for this to happen, American acquiescence is a vital pre-requisite. And, lately, tensions had arisen in the equations between the US and Pakistani military and intelligence. The killing of bin Laden comes as the ultimate litmus test of the trustworthiness of the Pakistani military as an ally. In sum, Pakistani military leadership will expect a quid pro quo from Obama.

M K Bhadrakumar in Strategic Culture. More Here

Obama executes Osama: It's a pity that...

Obama and others enjoying the spectacle of the gruesome execution

The fact that Osama bin Laden, a man who fought his enemies with violence that frequently killed the innocent, is now dead is from many perspectives a positive development. That the world now has one less influential leader who is willing to kill and destroy as a means of engendering political change is hopefully a small step towards a more peaceful world…

But it's a pity that the U.S. chose to pursue a massive ‘war on terrorism' as a response to bin Laden's violent campaign, a war in which far more innocent people have been killed and injured than bin Laden's initial attacks. Their deaths are also part of this story and must be counted and acknowledged in our reflections on the real costs of this so-called act of ‘justice'…

And it's a pity that the Bush administration and the coalition of the willing wrongly linked Iraq to al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and then invaded with the result of more than 600,000 dead and millions displaced. The immeasurable suffering of that nation is one of the most shameful episodes of the hunt for bin Laden, but I have seen no mention of Iraq in all the discussion. To the victims of the invasion, the rejoicing in the death of bin Laden will most likely leave a bitter taste…

And it's a pity that so many people, including many innocents, were kidnapped, rendered and tortured for information on bin Laden's whereabouts, and in the end, normal methods of intelligence-gathering found him anyway. Those innocent individuals who can no longer sleep properly because they endured sleep deprivation torture, who suffer nightmares and post-traumatic stress from being waterboarded, also have to be counted as part of the enduring costs of the hunt for bin Laden…

And it's a pity that the U.S. did not respond to the Taliban's offer to hand over bin Laden to trial in Pakistan in 2001, and that they did not take the opportunity to strengthen international law and the ICC, so that bin Laden (and any other wanted terrorist or war criminal) could be captured, tried and imprisoned at the Hague. A strong international legal system guaranteed by the U.S., rather than the rule of force, would have been far better outcome than the disastrous decade of war on terrorism that we have had instead…

And it's a pity that so many are celebrating using violent means to fight a violent group, and that it will most likely lead to a continuing, maybe even intensifying, cycle of violence. It's sad that so few today recognise or understand that the use of violence rarely leads to any long-term solutions, but instead, most often creates ever more violence and suffering in the long run. This event and the response to it are an opportune moment to reflect on our addiction to political violence and our belief that conflict can best be solved by killing…

And it's a pity that some think we should just celebrate his death without thinking about the context in which it occurred, the history of suffering he and his enemies engendered, the inherent moral and strategic problems with the way it was done, and the likely future consequences for so many. This small death should be a moment to reflect on how many lives were lost in the campaign to finally get bin Laden and whether killing terrorists without dealing with the reasons why they fight is a useful long-term strategy. These deeper questions have been lost in all the rejoicing…

And it's a pity that the U.S. and other Western states view ‘justice' as killing a man extra-judicially and then disappearing his body in the ocean. Apart from the denial of full justice to the victims of 9/11 who will never know now what really happened, this seems like a surrender of our own values, norms and beliefs in the rule of law. Making exceptions to human rights and legal standards of justice only succeeds in creating a world in which law and justice is ever weaker. By responding to bin Laden in a lawless manner, and treating him as he treated his victims, we simply go down and join him in the pit of immorality. We become the monster we hunt…

And it's a pity that targeted killing is now a core tactic of counter-terrorism, especially when the Israeli experience clearly demonstrates that it does not work to reduce terrorism, kills many innocent bystanders, and leads to more recruits for terrorist groups…

And it's a pity that bin Laden came to be seen as the personalisation of evil, the mastermind who could be blamed for causing most of the world's terrorism, and who therefore needed to be eradicated at all costs. Solely focussing on one man meant that the history and context of real political grievances which lead to bin Laden's rise was silenced and erased; terrorism was about one evil guy, not decades of U.S. foreign policy, entrenched grievances, structures of oppression and daily physical, structural and cultural violence. Now he's gone, one wonders who will take his place as the next personification of evil…

And it's a pity that it happened so late that it will have no positive effect at all on terrorism or counter-terrorism, or on bin Laden's mythical status as the man who stood up to the Western world for more than a decade…

And it's a pity that all the resources and efforts put into killing bin Laden over 10 years was not instead put into strengthening international law, dealing with political grievances, supporting peace constituencies, resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, genuinely promoting political participation and democracy, and reforming the oppressive and unjust foreign policies which provoke violent resistance…

And it's a pity that so many Americans are on the streets celebrating and so many political leaders are crowing about it as a major victory. It will be a further humiliation for some in the Middle East, and they may rightly feel that the celebrations contain no acknowledgement of the suffering they have experienced from U.S. invasion, counter-terrorism operations, drone attacks, rendition, etc. I wonder how we would react to celebrations in Iraq if George W. Bush was to die…

And it's a pity that no one is talking about the other three people killed in the operation, one of whom was bin Laden's son and another an unknown woman. They may turn out to be far less guilty than bin Laden, more ‘collateral damage' in our war on terror. It illustrates something about our real values that their lives, and the lives of all the others lost in the hunt for bin Laden, are so unimportant that they won't be discussed or mourned in all the euphoria over killing bin Laden, the evil mastermind. And it's a pity that Obama said ‘no Americans were harmed' in the operation, as if American lives are more valuable than others. This way of ordering the world into worthy and unworthy victims, people to be mourned and people to be erased, is what keeps the cycle of violence ever turning…

And it's a pity that it will not lead to the end of the war on terror, the culture of fear, and all the intrusions into daily life of militarised forms of counter-terrorism. It's a pity that in response to bin Laden's initial attacks, we irrevocably changed our way of life and undermined our own values, and that political leaders are still saying that his death changes none of these things but that we will have to (endlessly) continue the fight against terrorism…

It's a pity that this event will do nothing to end the sheer stupidity and shameful waste of ten years of war and violence.

Richard Jackson in his blog. Here

Osama is dead! Long live Print

The last word on the Osama bin Laden killing has not been spoken or written yet.  Questions are flying all over the world; there is a deliberate opaqueness in the selective information released by the United States that is fueling speculation and scepticism.

In such a situation what is the role of the media? Should it try and glean as much information as it can and put it out in the public realm before it launches into airing opinions?

Indian news channels, given their past record, routinely fail to provide essential information on a development before they start bombarding viewers with opinion. The hours after President Obama announced the success of his country’s operation to kill Osama bin Laden were not very different. It is true that little information was available barring what the President had announced. It is true that Indian channels do not have reporters in Pakistan and had to depend on feeds from Pakistani channels to get the first images and information.

But surely, in this day of the Internet, it would have been possible for news desks in this country to put out cogent information about the site of the attack, Abbotabad, and piece together background that would help viewers make better sense of the story. But if you watched only television, you were left with dozens of questions unanswered. So when May 3 dawned, it was a relief to turn to the print media to fill in the gaps in information.

Of course, in the middle of all the grim business, we got a bit of entertainment. For some channels, it was not Osama who had been killed but Obama! NDTV India was the first off the mark killing off the American President and through the evening, talking heads on other channels kept slipping up on the two names, making them virtually interchangeable. The prize for doing this repeatedly should probably go to the irrepressible Arnab Goswami of Times Now who repeated his trademark command performance by inviting Pakistanis to the channel and not allowing them to speak.

Kalpana Sharma in The Hoot. Here

Obama kills Osama, and the world goes mad : Robert Fisk

Obama and others watching the execution of Osama

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday. And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American President turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British Empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body's secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron thought it "a massive step forward". India described it as a "victorious milestone". "A resounding triumph," Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find Bin Laden, pray let us have no more "resounding triumphs". 

Robert Fisk in The Independent. More Here

The Victorian art of murder and the behaviour of Americans

The Victorians' thirst for murder - their fascination with the details, their poring over and feasting on it - mirrors western culture.

Obama, Hillary and others watching with glee the murder of Osama

Late one afternoon in the winter of 1836, a man boarded a London omnibus, carrying a soft, round object, approximately the size of a football, “wrapped up” under one arm. There was nothing about his appearance to excite suspicion. Indeed, he struck all those who saw him as placid and unremarkable. Taking his seat, he settled his luggage on his lap where it remained, held in place by its owner with perfect equanimity, for the rest of the journey. At Stepney, the passenger disembarked and walked the short distance to the canal where he disposed of his burden, hurling it, as discreetly as he was able, into the water. It floated for a second or two, as though struggling to remain in view of the world, before it sank at last beneath the surface, vanishing from sight.

The name of the traveller was James Greenacre and earlier that day he had committed murder. What he carried under his arm was the severed head of his victim – a washerwoman named Hannah Brown, who was his fiancée. Greenacre must have hoped that the canal would swallow the proof of his crime but the waters failed to keep their secret. On January 6, 1837, the head of Miss Brown was found by a lock-keeper when it came to obstruct the mechanism of which he was in charge. Brown’s torso was soon discovered, “in a horridly mutilated state”, dumped in a sack “tucked under a flagstone” on the Edgware Road, and in February “a pair of legs was dredged out of a bed of reeds near Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton”. Following the identification of the body by the victim’s brother, Greenacre was hunted down and arrested. Soon afterwards, he confessed and the crowd at his execution was apparently “large, vocal and perfectly good-humoured”. They purchased “Greenacre tarts” from a pie-seller while they waited to watch the killer swing.

In Judith Flanders’s new book, The Invention of Murder, a survey of homicide in the nineteenth century, the slaying of Hannah Brown is one of dozens of such atrocities. Here are to be found a horrifying array of “more than fifty” violent and bloody expirations – including well-known cases which have been popularized by other writers (Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, described by Oscar Wilde in “Pen, Pencil and Poison” in 1889 as a “young dandy” with “rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands”, who is revealed here as “short, fat, bald and with a speech defect”; the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 which inspired P. D. James and T. A. Critchley’s The Maul and the Pear Tree, 1971; the murder of Francis Savile Kent, dramatized by Kate Summerscale in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, 2008) and other less well-known cases. Here are crimes born of lust, pecuniary gain, revenge. Here are murders of servants by their masters and of masters by their servants, murders by strangers and murders by loved ones: poisonings, bludgeonings, suffocations.

Jonathan Barnes reviews the book THE INVENTION OF MURDER How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime by Judith Flanders in The Sunday Times. Here

US has no business to be in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq NOW

Obama & Osama

SO America has finally managed to kill the monster it had created. And in one of those ironies that fate throws up, Bin Laden met his end at the hands of someone whose name has often been confused with his own. In his death, Bin Laden hasn’t just saved the struggling US president; he may have gifted his nemesis a second term in office.

But can you really kill men like OBL? He was not just another human being, a man of flesh and blood like you and me. Rather, he represented an idea. And you can’t kill ideas — even if you happen to be the most powerful nation on the planet and have the deadliest of arms man has invented at your disposal.
The long crippled man who spurned a life of obscene luxury to live on the run forever like a hunted animal, had to go the way he did. There’s hardly a surprise there. The real story and feat lies in the fact that the Al-Qaeda chief managed to evade the long and powerful arms of the empire for so long — for 11 long years.

While the “coalition of the willing” hunted the most wanted man on the planet all across the wild frontier stretching from Pakistan’s Northwest to the Afghan border with Russia, he ostensibly lived right in the heart of the Abbottabad cantonment, a stone’s throw away from Pakistan’s elite Kakul Military Academy.
What an extraordinary, extraordinary story! And what chutzpah, what masterstroke of the evil genius that Bin Laden was!

And what embarrassment for Pakistan’s leaders! They haven’t been just caught unawares; they’ve been found with their pants down. The country has become the laughing stock of the whole world. It’s damned if it admits that this was a one-sided US operation and it had no clue whatsoever until US choppers with their elite commandos barged right into the heart of the cantonment and took out their man. It’s damned if it suggests otherwise.

How’s it possible for the world’s most hunted man with a $50 million bounty on his head to live next to a military base close to Islamabad and go unnoticed by Pakistan’s fabled sleuths? These are disturbing questions that no one seems to have any answers for.

Whoever is responsible for this mess, they’ve put Pakistan in a rather nice spot, perhaps like never before in its history. The ever voracious and vicious television networks across the border haven’t stopped partying since. It’s the great Pakistan barbecue season all over again.

All his life Bin Laden had been an enigma and a perpetual source of concern to his distinguished clan and the land of his birth. Now he has visited a calamity on the folks who hosted and worked with him during the glorious decade of the Afghan jihad.

Lest we forget the commander of the faithful in that “holy war” against the so-called “Evil Empire” was none other than the leader of the free world. Uncle Sam headed the Western coalition as he does now. Pakistan was only their second lieutenant, a facilitator if you will. Only when the music stopped, Pakistan was left holding the baby. Everyone went home and it had to live with the mess that was left behind. Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Taleban and the whole rag-tag army of various other groups are a blast from the past that the West doesn’t want to have anything to do with today.

When the tide turned after 9/11 and Pakistan went with the flow, the chickens came home to roost. Bin Laden came home to where he thought he belonged. His final suicide mission was to blow up his former friends and the land that sheltered him.

However, the ultimate victim of the misguided missile that the billionaire Bin Laden fired had been the faith that he claimed to champion. He brought nothing but disgrace and disaster to Muslim lands and fellow believers. More Muslims than the Westerners or Christians and Jews have died as a direct consequence of Al-Qaeda attacks, or by those that were inspired by his murderous ideology. A noble religion of 1.6 billion believers has come to be condemned as a death cult, with all Arabs and Muslims being tarred as terrorists. For which Bin Laden will not perhaps be ever forgiven by Muslims.

Yet you can’t help a twinge of sadness at the tragic end Bin Laden has met — far from the land of his birth that he so loved. He was driven by the belief — hopelessly distorted as it was — that he was fighting to free Muslim lands and for justice for the Palestinians, Afghans and for the oppressed everywhere.

Muslims never identified with OBL or condoned his appalling crimes. They, however, understood what forced a quiet young man to kick his billion-dollar fortune and take up arms. He struck a chord in not just Arabs and Muslims but in the dispossessed everywhere by taking on the big bullies who have killed more innocents and wreaked more destruction on our world than a million Bin Ladens could have managed in their life time.

Obama watching the gruesome murder of OBL

Besides, the way this whole charade has been played out with President Obama and his aides “coolly” watching the action live in real time as if it was a baseball game, and his body being dumped into the Arabian Sea has only added to their disgust and outrage. Using all that overwhelming force to kill an unarmed, ailing man without a trial. So much for America’s fabled justice system and due process!

Shouldn’t Bin Laden have been put on the trial for the crimes he has been accused of? What was the hurry to buy him at sea? What was it that America was trying to cover? And how’s Obama’s justice different from the “dead-or-alive” cowboy retribution of his predecessor?

But dead or alive, we haven’t heard the last of this yet. Bin Laden may be dead and gone; his cause is not. Others will take his place and may already have. If the world is to prevent the rise of more Bin Ladens, it must take its scalpel to the festering cancer of injustice and oppression in the Holy Land. Now that the so-called architect of 9/11 is gone, the US has no pretext or business to be in Afghanistan-Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Bin Laden has taken with him to his watery grave the West’s raison d’être for its imperial project in the Muslim world.

Aijaz Zaka Syed (szaijaz@hotmail.com) in his best in Arab News. Here.