(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
So Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea. I’m sure there will be those who will not accept any evidence of that, even if they were standing there when it happened. Such are the conspiracy theory skeptics.
What amazes me is that the DNA testing confirming the body was indeed bin Laden was done so quickly, within hours. Yet, death row prisoners are often denied that testing to prove their innocence. One would think that an honest judicial system would ant to be sure they had the right person, the key word being honest. In NYC, the remains of the 9/11 victims still are unidentified after 10 years. Around the country rape kits go untested and the rapists go free because of statute of limitations in many states.
This comment from TalkLeft fairly sums up my thoughts on the events of the last 24 hours:
1. There is one less evil person in the world; that’s not a bad thing, but if I removed one eyedropper of water from a full bathtub, would it look any different?
2. Are we now officially an eye-for-an-eye society now, where when we kill someone who killed others, “justice” has been done? It appears so, which is both offensive and frightening. I am troubled by the expression of this sentiment from the president, who is supposed to be a defender of the Constitution.
3. The real legacy of Osama bin Laden may not lie in the numbers of deaths he was responsible for, but in the erosion of freedoms, the loss of privacy and the perversion of our system of justice, which I do not believe will ever be restored.
4. Dancing in the streets in front of the White House to celebrate the killing of bin Laden is a scene I could have done without; a candlelit vigil in memory of all the lives lost and lives affected would have been a more fitting way to mark the occasion – in my opinion.
5. “Now is not the time to let down our guard” is the watchword of the day, just as I expected it would be; bin Laden’s death is not the end of anything, just another data point on a spectrum that continues to move away from strengthening and protecting our individual rights. Who will the new Face of Evil be, and what will we have to give up in that fight?
6. Lots of questions about Pakistan: how could Osama have been hiding in plain sight of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point? Is their intelligence that bad, have they been paid to look the other way – or worse – and what will the repercussions be, if any?
Finally, I said last night that for me, this is anticlimactic; bin Laden’s death is never going to see the restoration of all that we have lost as Americans.
That being said, I am not so jaded and cynical that I don’t understand that this may have brought some kind of closure to those who lost loved ones in the many bin Laden-engineered attacks both here and around the world, and it isn’t my intention to try to deny that to them; we all have to handle this in our own way – we all feel what we feel for our own reasons.
On a lighter note, this IT guy, trying to find a safe place from the chaos, fled to the hills with his lap top for some peace and quiet in Abbottabad, when he was disturbed from sleep by helicopters hovering near by and began Tweeting. Unbeknown to him, he was Tweeting the biggest news since Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” thus making Sohaib Ather, “the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid”. He is now a much sought after media darling and has over 66,000 followers on Twitter. Nice job, Sohaib.
*Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1am (is a rare event).
*Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter.
*A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty.
*All silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6km away too … the helicopter is gone too.
*Seems like my giant swatter worked!
*The few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani …
*Moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy.
*Since Taleban (probably) don’t have helicopters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, must be a complicated situation #abbottabad
*Osama Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. ISI has confirmed it. Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood.
*Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.
I apologize for reporting the operation ‘unwittingly/unknowingly’ – had I known about it, I would have tweeted about it ‘wittingly’ I swear.
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Jessica Dovey, student, University of Pennsylvania
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No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne
The above quote is important. Hardened by movies and TV shows that spew fascist and chauvinistic propaganda (which has always been very obvious to me) Americans now believe the world is divided into “good guys” v. “bad guys.” It is a giant video-game where we just kill people who are labelled as bad. Americans rarely ask for proof–it is enough for a President, even if they don’t like him or her, to simply assign bad guy-ness to someone and they and their family will be killed in any country without trial, without proof.
There is no proof I’ve seen that Bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11, in fact there’s no proof of anything about anyone since the events themselves were never investigated using forensics or traditional investigation methods. On this the left has almost completely been silent–and whenever anyone brings that up they are called a “conspiracy theorist.” My answer is, to put it simply, that if you don’t believe in conspiracy theories you have to be utterly ignorant of history (and I don’t mean the hagiography that usually still passes for American history). My own experience in government is that there are plots and counter-plots everywhere even about very trivial things and, if you look into it, that’s the case in most of world history in any large Empire. To me it’s insane to assume that if an organization is given virtual carte blanche to do as they see fit that, at some point, they will take advantage of their privilege and become a powerful political force. I’m speaking her of the American covert/special/black ops community which is now truly a multi-national maze of organziations and arrangements spanning organized crime and “terror” organizations. It is a world full of patsy’s, double and triple agents, drug dealing, human trafficking, cnotract killers, money launderers, extortion rackets, gambling, prostitution, blackmail and so on and so on. Believe me that underground exists and many people profit from it. Misha Gleny, some years ago, said that fully 15-20% of the world’s GDP is outside the law. Think of it!
Most middle-class people have no idea about this world. It is referred to obliquely in the Kubrick’s masterful movie (yes, it was disgusting) Eyes Wide Shut. Those of us who have, for whatever reason, lived close to the edge have seen bits of that world and seen the cozy arrangements that go on between so-called law-enforcement agencies and criminal elites who graduate from street hoodlums to political players.
The existence of this “underworld” explains a lot of inexplicable events. BTW, this world has always existed in most civilized countries–it’s just more powerful now since we are in a period that Loretta Napoleoni calls “rogue economics.”
Here’s the timeline:
1. The white house floated the idea that they subpoenaed a sisters DNA, thru ABC TV.
2. Then this is amended to be a dead sister from a Boston hospital.
3. It turns out that sibling DNA is not 100%, but only gives a percentile range as to whether or not the person is a relative.
4. The NY Times then amends the whole thing again– publishes an article saying how it wasn’t a sister, it “must have been a parent or child’s DNA” Which it would have to have been to give accuracy.
Still, the sister story is being repeated by MSM and bloggers world wide.
5. Since the initial float, various on-line edits have occurred on several web sites, to reflect whether or not OBL even has a sister, or only a half sister. Last I checked, wiki still lists no sisters, but that will surely change.
6. If on shipboard, how do you do DNA testing, does the Navy have the facilities? And how do you rapidly compare it to DNA in the USA?
7. What body part was the DNA taken from, and what happened to it?
8. If not a sister, where did it come from?
9. If it is–what percentile figure did the lab return?
the other questions are:
1. Why not bring him to trial? Surely that would have been a ratings bonanza, even better than the OBL is dead story, and it would last longer.
2. Why ‘bury’ him at sea?
Same as George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. The real brains behind all the evil worked these two assholes (OBL and GWB) like sock puppets. Ayman al Zawahiri and Richard Bruce Cheney are the real players in all that went down.
They should both be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
I guess we can all “have faith” that we’re being told the truth, although we weren’t told the truth about Saddam being an imminent threat etc.
of the raid.
The pictures are too gross to show.
http://www.infowars.com/paul-c…