U.S. wars

Burial at sea?
Osama bin Laden's body should never have been disposed of without extensive evidence of death and identity being made available to the public. How is anyone to believe reports of his death? Cui bono?

Dialysis in the desert

I agree with Paul Craig Roberts in his article, "Osama bin Laden’s Second Death." Reports on Osama bin Laden's death do sound like an April Fool's joke. I don't have the same problem as Roberts does with the idea of bin Laden having renal dialysis in the desert or having problems transferring funds. Portable renal dialysis machines exist and rich people move money around in many forms, including as drugs, all over the world.

Poor taste

I don't pretend to know how Osama bin Laden lived or moved his money nor when he died. I don't find the media reports of 2nd May 2011 very believable and I didn't enjoy watching the President of the United States saying how great it was they had killed someone. I could have written that speech better, maybe starting with, "Regretfully, we announce that we found we had no alternative ..." But, can we believe anything the U.S. government says about international politics these days?

Where's the body?

What really gets me is the lack of a body. Burial at sea? How is anyone to accept that?

Surely with such an important corpus delecti - well, deceased person - the world is entitled to the most careful handling, with forensic examination, identification and finally a formal ceremony agreed to by world leaders, perhaps even with consultation with his family. The outcome of such a ceremony could have agreed to any form of disposal of the body, but the body should never have been disposed of without extensive evidence of death and identity being made available to the public.

It might help if we were to hear the accounts of the witnesses involved. Were there any independent journalists involved at the actual event of disposal of the body? Truly the whole thing strikes me as dreamlike and unbelievable, but it did from the beginning, anyway, when I woke up one day after working a nightshift and saw an incredible Hollywood-like production of aeroplanes sailing into skyscrapers. I waited and waited for King Kong to appear and stop them, but he never did. Instead we got that wil'o'the-wispy mastermind with renal failure, Osama bin Laden.

Cinema

But Osama bin Laden was never physically connected with the acts against the World Trade Center tower himself. Almost immediately after the event, on a cinematographic time-frame, it seemed, the US came up with pictures of the 18 men who were supposed to have executed the attack on the New York CBD under the orchestration of Osama bin Laden. Four of those men have since claimed still to be alive. It never seemed clear who was supposed to be the leader in this raid.

In the absence of a full investigation

One waited for a full investigation.
It never came.

For me, that was the clincher.[1] I initially simply accepted what I was told on the news, but when the inadequacy of the inquiry into 9/11 was put to me, I could not argue it away. Why didn't the USA seriously engage in a full investigation, demonstrating for all to see, why those 18 men were implicated and why we should believe Osama bin Laden's claim to be responsible?

Later many people identified the United States Government itself as a suspect in this tragedy of 9/11. A lot of the arguments for that were somewhat circumstantial, but so were the arguments implicating Osama bin Laden, even if he had claimed responsibility. There were many possible motives on both sides, involving big business in the United States on the one hand, and victims of big business in the Arab world, on the other.

Motives

Some of the accusations against the US Government allege that the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings served big-business interests that wanted to make money out of war, businesses collecting on insurance on the buildings, and CIA secrets that might have been destroyed conveniently in the buildings. Huge corporations like Halliburton and KPMG certainly made billions out of the war on Iraq, which was more or less contracted out to them by the US Government[2] - to the extent that the U.S.government has been unable to regulate corrupt financial practices and conduct of elections during the war, since it was found that it had abrogated its powers to oversee military conduct in one related hearing. [3] Halliburton is also involved in Afghanistan. KPMG has offices in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[4] Corporations do business everywhere, but we should not entrust them with war.

On the other side, the continuous exploitation of the Arab World by European industrial colonial forces, then by corporate colonial forces after the independence of those countries in the 1970s, furnishes an undeniable motive.

The current democratic struggles in the Arab world to get rid of governments (Bahrain, Egypt, ...) backed by the same international hegemonies looks like a reflection of this motive although that doesn't make it linked to 9/11. (Where to put Libya in this group is not easy. To this writer it still looks as if most Libyans consider Gadafi to be better than the internationally backed alternatives, or it would be easy to extract him. One therefore suspects the whole movement against him. I thought this article from Global Research about Libya was good.)

Conspiracy theory, motive and opportunity

How much in control of the US is the US Government? Part of the political and forensic mystery of 9/11 is the apparent bemusement of government leaders who look as if they are reading from incomplete scripts. I am not much of a conspiracy theorist. My preferred methodology is "Cui bono?" In order to explain the continuation of trends that make life unpleasant for many people, you can generally find parties, companies and economic sectors that actually derive focused benefit from the continuation of such trends. Dig deeper and you will find them lobbying on their behalf, using questionable arguments.

In this case, however, because the beneficiaries of 9/11 are also the beneficiaries of an immense crime, for the destruction of the towers was not a legal business operation, you are going to have to admit that a conspiracy must exist somewhere. Either you accept that Osama bin Laden -- or some other outsider or outsiders to the Western World -- benefited from 9/11 and orchestrated it for political reasons, or you suspect an "inside job."

Like good detectives, or world jury-members, we obviously seek to understand "who benefits" from 9/11 and we have two excellent theories: big business and its friends in government vs the victims of big business and its friends in government.

Whichever case seems more likely to you, unless you personally know something that I don't, without a proper investigation, neither case may be proven.

In the absence of suspects being brought to trial, you and I can only advance theories and argue them more or less persuasively. Governments and international bodies can, however, capture suspects, collect evidence, and do forensic tests. They can bring people and corporations to trial.

The fact that the US government has never done this in relation to the events of 9/11 is suspicious. Frankly, it makes me favour the theory of the "inside job" on the basis of cui bono. I have to ask myself, is the US Government protecting some influential 'friends' by not investigating 9/11 properly?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, author of "Osama bin Laden's second death," suggests that a motive for finding Osama bin Laden lies in the likelihood that the US is running out of money to keep the war in Afghanistan going.

Disposing of the evidence

Why, however, did the soldiers who claim to have killed bin Laden dispose of the body?

I'm afraid that it makes me more suspicious. Call me imaginative, if you like, but surely a proper world-policing task-force would have seized the evidence, along with the body, to bring them back for the long awaited investigation and trial, in good faith, to demonstrate to the world, once and for all, what really happened.

Getting rid of the body and blowing up bin Laden's alleged headquarters look to me like getting rid of the evidence. Cui bono?

Well, exactly.

This seems to bring us all back to where we started.

Ready for the next episode.

Enter the minotaur. Or the prophet. Or the son of God.
They are still looking for his body, too.

Will Obama bin Laden come back from the dead?
(Again?) [5]

It's that time of year. (Easter just past.)

How will the two sides of this quasi-mythical Hollywood-Corporate Press production continue to harness the power of the masses, with the help of mainstream press manufacture of consensus, presumably to protect the interests of the world's elites?

Many people in Australia likely to be suspicious too

In Australia there was a strong indication that the masses actually find the storyline a little unbelievable, going by such instances as the massive support for Australian maritime unionist Kevin Bracken's views. But politicians seem infinitely more credulous - going by Prime Minister Gillard's and her peers' response to Bracken's views. The Australian Press predictably denounced all questioning of the official bed-time story and, when if found, to its horror, that people wanted to discuss the matter, it simply stopped reporting. See "Free speech defenders 'persecute' Jon Faine"and Report on Jon Faine/Kevin Bracken interview and subsequent fall-out

Who's paying for the next production

Whose taxes are paying for this production now, if bin Laden's millions are no longer financing it? If they were ever financing it.

Do we have a choice?

One thing is for sure, if you take an extraordinary but material event out of the realms of the material and confirm it as a myth, no-one is going to expect a serious investigation. The way has been prepared for the 9/11 crime to be handed over to priests and the tourist circuits. It is a religion in the making, fit to shore up differences between muslims and christians, capitalists, communists and anarchists, for a long time to come.

If we choose to believe.

NOTES

[1] There was an almost immediate announcement of who the guilty parties were, after unbelievably speedy identification of suspects, but actual public investigation was avoided for nearly 2 and a half years, despite obvious demand. For comparison, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and President Kennedy's assassination were both investigated almost immediately. Ditto for the investigation of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinski, which was provided with a great deal more money than the 9/11
investigation, when it eventually occurred. Against all principles of a democratic public justice system, the public were denied careful and detailed establishment of evidence and reasons for allocation of guilt. The motive, of a fanatical racist religious ideologue with unlimited funds in the desert of Afghanistan, financing alienated muslims to carry out spectacular acts against United States infrastructure and bystanders for his own purposes, did need careful evidencing, to say the least.

The investigation seemed pro forma to observers, with numerous matters left uncovered. A notable hole in the report which came from the investigation was that it said nothing about the collapse of the World trade center tower number 7. This occurred a few hours after Towers one and two (the "Twin towers"), but the main difference was that no plane flew into it and it was located about half a kilometer away from the towers hit by the planes. It was as if the sudden death with head injuries of a man standing in the next street hours after two men who were shot by guns held to their heads in another street was ascribed to the impact of bullets on the first two men. So far no theory of why Tower 7 collapsed has sustained scientific criticism. That does not say that no relationship will ever be found, but it makes it unlikely. The principle of Occams razor would suggest that a separate cause of the collapse of the 7th building is likely. Another notable hole was the lack of questions about the failure of the US Defence system to halt any of these attacks in part or in full.

There may have been an explanation, but the world has never heard it. At best it might show up the US military system as asleep on the job. At worst it might show that it was in on the job.

[2] A representative of the FBI has reportedly said there is "no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."

On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden's Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Source

Even today, after the FBI has updated its wanted poster for bin Laden as "Deceased" the crimes of 9/11 are not among those listed: Murder of U.S. Nationals outside the United States; Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death."

[3] Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, (p.355) quotes, 'Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine', saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.” See also pp. 362-378 for shocking stuff on conduct in Iraq.

[4] "WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney's (search) former company already has garnered more than $600 million in military work related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and potentially could earn billions more without having to compete with other companies.

As the Army's sole provider of troop support services, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has received work orders totaling $529.4 million related to the two wars under a 10-year contract that has no spending ceiling.

Rather than put the Iraq work up for bidding, the government has used the 2001 Halliburton contract to place the various work orders in Iraq, prompting criticism from some Democrats that Cheney's former company is receiving favored treatment.

"The amount Halliburton could receive in the future is virtually limitless," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who disclosed the troop support work orders Thursday. "It is simply remarkable that a single company could earn so much money from the war in Iraq."" Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88122,00.html

[5] Klein, Shock Doctrine, pp. 357-358. The Custer Battles corruption case: "Two former employees of the security firm launched a whistle-blower lawsuit against the company, accusing it of cheating on reconstruction-related contracts with the CPA and defrauding the U.S. government of millions of dollars ,mostly for work done at the Baghdad International Airport. The case was based on documents produced by the company that clearly showed it was keeping two sets of numbers - one for itself, one for invoicing the CPA. retired Brigadier General Hugh Tant testified that the company's performance was 'probably the worst I've evern seen in my 30 yhears in teh army." (Among custer Battles' many alleged violations, it is said to have appropriated Iraqui-owned forklifts from the airport, repainted them and billed the CPA for the cost of leasing the machines.)

In March 2006 a federal jury in Virginia ruled against the company, finding it guilty of fraud, and forced it to pay $10 million in damages. The company then asked the judge to overturn the verdict, with a revealing defense. It claimed that the CPA was not part of teh U.S.S government, and therefeore not subject to its laaws, including the False Claims act. The implications of this defense were enormous: the Bush administration had indemnified U.S. corporations working in Iraq from any liability under Iraqui laws; if the CPA wasn't subject to U.S. law either, it meant that the contractors weren't subject ot any law at all - U.S. or Iraqui. [...] In other words, the U.S. governmetn presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had beena mirage - there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state counterrevolution - a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there."

[6] See film of Pakistan politician Benazir Buto interviewed by David Frost in 2007 about her survival of an assassination attempt just prior to her actual assassination, where, in passing, she says that Osama bin Laden was murdered.