Drones, death, and USA

Large or small, drones raise questions about the growing disconnect between the American public and its wars. Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. Not least, the Federal Aviation Administration has qualms about expanding their test flights at home, as the Pentagon would like. Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington's restricted airspace.

Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of “stand-off weapons systems,” like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United States has used for decades. “There's a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn't have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”

To Mr. Singer of Brookings, the debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. “We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this,” he said.

Elisabeth Bumiller & Thom Shanker in The Hindu. Here and Here

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

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

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.

Americans at it again : Obama arm-twists Manmohan Singh

The Americans know that turning the screws on non-resident Indian accounts in Indian banks is a pressure tactic that the Manmohan Singh government will not be able to stand up to. India now ranks at the top of countries which have impressive foreign exchange reserves, but those reserves will significantly evaporate if American actions to curb alleged tax dodging by their citizens of Indian origin were to force Indian Americans to pull out their deposits from such accounts which constitute the bulk of India’s foreign currency holdings. 

The same applies to NRI stock holdings in Indian companies. In other words, the Obama administration has the wherewithal to turn India’s impressive foreign exchange reserves into hot money that can evaporate and push India back to the 1990s, when it virtually begged for foreign currency.

But it need not come to that. Indeed, it will not, given the nature and composition of the Indian power structure. The Americans have known for some time now that Indian Americans have considerable influence on their system. But the way NRIs in America were mobilized — first by the National Democratic Alliance government to thwart sanctions against the 1998 nuclear tests and then by the United Progressive Alliance government in support of the nuclear deal — has convinced Washington that NRI power is a double-edged sword: that it is a force which can be used to influence New Delhi as well.

Powerful Indian politicians and senior civil servants have their children, siblings and a variety of other friends and relatives in the US who have NRI accounts in Indian banks which are now under the scanner of Obama’s IRS.

Those who hold the levers of power in New Delhi and state capitals are not going to stand by and let the threat of prosecution — as in Dahake’s case — hang over the heads of their family members or cause them to lose sleep. That is how the Americans will secure orders for at least a significant share of the 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft, the biggest military aviation deal in history. That is how the Americans will secure other import orders and significant concessions from New Delhi.

If these orders and concessions are forthcoming, the threat to India’s foreign exchange reserves through withdrawal of hot money through the prosecution of NRIs in US courts will evaporate. In any case, the Americans will have proved that they can decisively influence the making or unmaking of India despite the illusion in New Delhi and Mumbai that India is a rising global power.

K P Nayar in The Telegraph. More Here

President Obama is a liar

The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things - they cost us credibility.  

Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out of our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the Great Satan.

In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan does to Afghanistan today.  As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA.  

I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans.  We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. 

We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.  

Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive - we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions.  It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy.   It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.

In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals.  It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina.  We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war.  I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed.  

This was how they verified their kills for us.  The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.

Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America.  It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing.  I saw the drug operation first hand too.  This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy.  I did not connect all this until the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was testifying about it.  Oliver North was a leader of the Laos operation I was assigned to work with.

Our country has a long history of these type programs going back to World War Two.   We copied this from of warfare from the Nazis in WWII it seems. We justified it as necessary for the Cold War.  One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953to take over their oil fields.

In that coup the CIA and the State Department under the Dulles Brothers first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax  was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today.

Chalmers Johnson also a former CIA employee wrote a series of books too on these blowbacks that happen when the truth is held from the American public.  

If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today..  

I was young and foolish in those days of the Vietnam War, coveting my Top Secret security clearance, a big thing for an uneducated hillbilly from Appalachia.  We saw ourselves much like James Bond characters, but now I am much wiser. These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shut down.

But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true.  

When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks?  How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?  

Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East, are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore.

I say “most” everyone knows, because our own public, the ones suppose to be in control of the military and CIA,  is constantly lied to.  It is so sad to see President Obama repeating the big lie.

Robert Anderson in Counterpunch. More Here

Raymond Davis is David Headley of Pakistan?

The Express Tribune quoting unnamed sources said that call records retrieved from mobile phones found on Davis had allegedly established his links with 33 Pakistanis, including 27 militants from the banned Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

The report claimed Davis was "said to be working on a plan to give credence to the American notion that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not safe."

"For this purpose, he was setting up a group of the Taliban which would do his bidding," it said.
Davis' job was to trace the links of the Taliban and al- Qaeda in different parts of Pakistan but instead investigators found that he had developed "close links" with the Taliban, the report said quoting a source.

Investigators had reportedly recovered 158 items from Davis, including a 9mm Glock pistol, 75 bullets, a GPS device, an infrared torch, a wireless set, two mobile phones, a digital camera, a survival kit, five ATM cards and Pakistani and US currency. The camera allegedly had photographs of Pakistani defence installations.

The CIA team in Lahore with which Davis was associated "was tasked with tracking the movements of various Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, a particularly violent group that Pakistan uses as a proxy force against India but that the United States considers a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan".

It said Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and reconnaissance missions for a CIA task force, working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore.

The Obama administration has demanded the release of Davis contending that he is an "administrative and technical official" attached to its Lahore consulate and that he enjoys diplomatic immunity.

Pakistani leaders, fearful of a public backlash, have turned down the US demand for Davis to be freed on grounds of diplomatic immunity and insisted that his case will be decided by the courts according to the country's laws.

A petition relating to Davis' diplomatic status is pending before a Lahore court. The next hearing is on March 14. JuD terrorist outfit has demanded that Davis be executed and blamed the US for bomb blasts across the country that have resulted in "large-scale killings." Hundreds of supporters of the Jamaat-ud Dawah (JuD) joined a gathering that marched from Chauburji to Qurtaba Chowk yesterday to demand "death" for Davis.

A report in MSN website. More Here.