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Sunday, September 24, 2006

...and in other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
Posted by Jill | 11:09 AM
If you're not old enough to get that reference, it comes from Chevy Chase's Weekend Update segments on early Saturday Night Live, after the long, drawn-out death watch of the Spanish dictator.

But the "is he or isn't he dead" saga of Osama Bin Laden, and the non-response response of the Bush Administration, combined with the spin coming from the gasbags on the right, reminds me that sometimes you don't need satire because real life is ironic enough.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the spin among the denizens of Blognuttia, and reminds us of how Bin Laden always seems to die whenever the Bush Administration needs him to:

Osama bin Laden has died more times than any human being in history. In fact, he died right around this same time in 2002, a few weeks before the 2002 midterm elections. From The World Tribune - 10/16/02:

TEL AVIV -- Osama Bin Laden appears to be dead but his colleagues have decided that Al Qaida and its insurgency campaign against the United States will continue, Israeli intelligence sources said. . . .

The Israeli sources said Israel and the United States assess that Bin Laden probably died in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan in December. They said the emergence of new messages by Bin Laden are probably fabrications, Middle East Newsline reported.

How many times has the Administration or its close allies planted stories in the media indicating or strongly implying that bin Laden is dead, only for the stories to be proven entirely false? Let us count:

Michael Ledeen, National Review, January 9, 2006

And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Christian Science Monitor, 12/21/2005

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday that he doubts Osama bin Laden is in any position to command the worldwide operations of Al Qaeda. The BBC reports that Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters on a flight to Pakistan that bin Laden could still be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, but it was hard to know since the terrorist leader had not been heard from in more than a year.

Pakistani Ausuf - October 24, 2005

The Pakistani newspaper 'Ausaf' which is based in the city of Multan in the Punjab Province is reporting that Osama bin Laden died last June in a village near Kandahar in Afghanistan. According to the newspaper report, Bin Laden was campaigning at Bamiyan, fell very ill, returned to Kandahar where he died and was buried in the Shada graveyard in the shadow of a mountain.

National Review -April 30, 2005

Was chatting with Jim Robbins. He keeps hearing this morning that the president might have some OBL news tonight? A new Islamist website is reporting that bin Laden is dead...and Musharraf has for the first time said that OBL is in his country.

CBS News - 7/17/2002

FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson said Wednesday he believes Osama bin Laden is dead — the first time a senior U.S. law enforcement official has publicly given an opinion on the al Qaeda leader's status.

CNN - January 19, 2002

Pakistan's president says he thinks Osama bin Laden is most likely dead because the suspected terrorist has been unable to get treatment for his kidney disease. "I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a ... kidney patient," Gen. Pervez Musharraf said on Friday in an interview with CNN.

Most of our "counter-terrorism" efforts have been like this -- like a Three Stooges routine. The reality is that we have no idea whether bin Laden is dead (the latest report, for instance, suggests the whole thing is a sham and he's alive) because we know so little about him, his whereabouts and his activities, because virtually all of our military and intelligence resources are devoted to a war in a country which never had anything to do with terrorism directed at the U.S., and in preparing for a war with another country which doesn't either. Bush followers are doing what our government has been doing for the last five years when it comes to bin Laden -- stumbling around in the dark, dealing only with baseless, fact-free insinuations, and ignoring him (by necessity) except to grasp desperately for him when some domestic political gain can be squeezed out of him.

In the hands of Bush followers, terrorism and al Qeada are big toys, things to be tossed around aimlessly for fun and diversion when one wants to escape the stresses of the real world. Their discussions of these issues -- including from our Government -- are on the level of comic book hysteria or a National Enquirer gossip article over celebrity couple break-ups ("the report comes from an actual secret document"!) and are about as unserious and frivolous and uninformed as can be imagined. Terrorism plots and Osama bin Laden's latest death are playthings that get dragged out for fun and political profit.



And why wouldn't the Bush Administration continue to do this, when it's worked so well for them? Why SHOULD they kill Osama Bin Laden, when dragging him out when they need him for election success has worked so well? At least when we had a president who WASN'T friends with him, there was at least a real attempt to kill him, as the Big Dawg pointed out in his T.K.O. of that snivelling little rat-faced git Chris Wallace this morning.

Here's my take: I think the story is probably accurate, and that Bin Laden has died. This is why all the recent videotapes seem to be of indeterminate age. He has probably died of kidney failure, or of any of a variety of other ailments. I think the Bush Administration wanted to hold this information long enough to get a few bulletholes into the corpse that they could then release to the media, as they did with the Al-Zarqawi photos. Perhaps they even planned to fly Georgie in his flightsuit with the stuffed crotch in there to identify the body. And then they planned to release the story around Halloween.

And that's why they're spinning so madly now to try to defuse the story -- because if there's any possiblity that the public thinks he died of natural causes, it'll make the Heroic Leader bit that much less credible. So now they're stuck. They have their own guy signing off on a report which says the Iraq war has made the terrorism problem worse, and now they can't fake a Bin Laden death as being the product of good old American know-how.

But take no joy in the plan being thwarted, my friends, because we still have a Democratic Party that's shown itself to be congenitally unable and unwilling to fight this bunch, even when facts and public opinion are on their side; but also because an animal cornered is always at its most dangerous.
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