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I awoke to learn that Bin Laden had been assassinated in his home in Pakistan near a Military Complex that was less than a Kilometer away.
After hearing the announcement, I saw mobs of cheering jingoists waving flags around the White House and in New York. Pretty soon, this began to become rather disgusting to me as his existence has served as justification for the invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands at an enormous cost.
My question now is does this mean we can have single-payer medical insurance?
Frankly, today was an excellent day to notice how important independent media is and how utterly bogus our corporate media is. I finally tuned to a new program that provided an enlightened perspective on the idiocy, and I present a transcript of the entire thing, including Jeremy Scahill, Alan Nairn, Tarak Ali, and a few others who did not contribute as much to the tenor of the discussion but who where, nevertheless, not disgusting. It also gives a good idea why Alan should remain in print and Jeremy is quite capable on live media as is Tarak Ali. Alan tends to give all of the qualifications of an idea first, as should be done, and then finally the main point. In most fora, he would be interrupted before he got to his main point.
As Tarik Ali points out, it is "astonishing" that they knew about this so long and only killed him now.
I have an idea, but I suppress it here and will share it later.
At any rate, here is Amy & Co.:
AMY GOODMAN: In a televised address to the nation last night, President Barack Obama announced al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. Bin Laden was killed on Sunday in a U.S. operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, about 60 miles north of the capital, Islamabad.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.AMY GOODMAN: Osama bin Laden was shot in the head and buried at sea. The Saudi-born leader of al-Qaeda is believed to be the mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, as well as a number of other attacks around the world.
Osama bin Laden’s death raises questions about the future of the U.S. war on terror and whether U.S. policy in the region will change. Almost 10 years ago, on October 7, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to capture bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda network. The war in Afghanistan has since become the longest in U.S. history and has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. For years, the U.S. has also waged a secret war inside Pakistan.
Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said today the war on terror will continue.
PRIME MINISTER JULIA GILLARD: Can I say, too, about the death of Osama bin Laden, that whilst al-Qaeda has been hurt today, al-Qaeda is not finished. Our war against terrorism must continue. We continue to be engaged in Afghanistan so that that country does not again become a haven for terrorists. That work will need to continue. That work has already cost Australian lives. But that work is vital, and we will continue the mission in Afghanistan.AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the death of Osama bin Laden, we’re joined by a number of guests.
We’ll be speaking with Robert Fisk on the phone in Beirut. Robert Fisk, the longtime Middle East correspondent of The Independent newspaper in London, he was the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden.
We’re also joined in New York by Jeremy Scahill, Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He blogs at thenation.com.
We’re also joined by Allan Nairn, an award-winning investigative journalist and activist.
In London, we’re joined by Tariq Ali, the well-known author, Pakistani-born commentator.
We’re going to start with Jeremy Scahill. Jeremy, tell us what you understand—you have been following JSOC for a long time now—what you understand happened yesterday and in the last months?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, in a way, this operation in Pakistan was the culmination of the life’s work of General Stanley McChrystal, who headed the Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and was the man tasked by the Bush administration with leading a global assassination campaign of people that the administration determined to be high-value targets or terrorist threats or militant threats to the United States. The current commander of JSOC is Admiral William McRaven, who himself is a former Navy Seal. And this really is the most elite force within the U.S. military.
The individuals who we believe actually killed Osama bin Laden are reportedly members of Navy Seal Team Six, also known as the Development Group. And those are probably the most elite forces in the world. General Barry McCaffrey said these are the most dangerous people on planet earth. This operation was carried out by a drone that was overhead, 25 Seals, and then shooters that allegedly stormed this compound. The role of JSOC within the broader U.S. so-called war on terror has been a surgical strike force.
So I think you have the one story playing out, which is how this happened, and it does sound like there was some incredible detective work that took place in tracking this courier, who was Osama bin Laden’s go-to to communicate with the outside world. For five years, they were reportedly tracking the developments at this compound. Interestingly, this compound is a stone’s throw away from a Pakistani military academy. And just days ago, General Kayani, the head of Pakistan’s armed forces, actually was basically a block away from Osama bin Laden, if all of these reports are true.
On the other side of this, though, I think there’s another reaction. I found it quite disgusting to see people chanting, like it was some sort of sporting event, outside of the White House. I think it was idiotic. Let’s remember here, hundreds of thousands of people have died. Iraq was invaded, a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. The United States created an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq by invading it, made Iran a far more influential force in Iraq than it ever would have been. We have given a grand motivation to people around the world that want to do harm to Americans in our killing of civilians, our waging of war against countries that have no connection to al-Qaeda, and by staying in these countries long after the mission was accomplished. Al-Qaeda was destroyed in Afghanistan, forced on the run. The Taliban have no chance of retaking power in Afghanistan. And so, I think that this is a somber day where we should be remembering all of the victims, the 3,000 people that died in the United States and then the hundreds of thousands that died afterwards as a result of a U.S. response to this that should have been a law enforcement response and instead was to declare war on the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Jeremy, about what you understand did take place in this—not place in the frontier—
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN:—on the border, the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in a mansion in a city of 500,000 next to a military academy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: This is a very big problem for Pakistan’s government, because had Osama bin Laden been captured in an area that the Pakistani government didn’t have control of, there would have been a very different narrative that would have unfolded. You already see right-wing commentators, Bush—former Bush officials, really ratcheting up their rhetoric about Pakistan. And the fact that he was captured in what was essentially a town equivalent to Vale, Colorado, a vacation town, really shows that he must have had some sort of protection from the Pakistani state in order to live for so long, at least five years, it seems, in this location, rather than being in a cave somewhere.
The way that this operation went down, if in fact it is confirmed that it was the Joint Special Operations Command coming in from Afghanistan, goes back to an agreement that General McChrystal brokered with then-President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan that allowed what was called a "hot pursuit" clause, which authorized U.S. Special Operations forces to go into Pakistan from Afghanistan if they were in pursuit of Osama bin Laden or other al-Qaeda leaders. And the agreement was that the U.S. could do those operations as long as the Pakistani government could then deny it. And so, it seems as though this operation was, at least in part, launched from Afghanistan into Pakistan, President Obama chairing five National Security Council meetings about this specific operation.
So, I think that, you know, there’s going to be a lot of celebrating within the Special Ops community for having taken down the man that was identified as the number one target of this operation. And it shows that President Obama has really continued and doubled down on the Bush administration policy of targeted assassination leading the way in terms of America’s response to al-Qaeda and to people it designates as so-called terrorists.
AMY GOODMAN: And the news of how Osama bin Laden died?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, that’s interesting. Allan and I were talking before the show about this, and I’d be interested in hearing what he has to say. The phrasing that President Obama used was very interesting. I mean, we’ll have to see before, I think, we give any detailed commentary on it. They said there was a firefight there. They said someone used a woman as a human shield at some point during the operation. It sounds like Osama bin Laden was shot in the head. Navy Seals are the most highly trained forces within the U.S. military. It wouldn’t be surprising that they could sniper shoot him from a distance and hit him dead between his eyes. Maybe something else went down. I don’t—we don’t know what happened inside of that compound, but it does sound like he was shot directly in the head.
AMY GOODMAN: And buried at sea.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And then—they say buried at sea. I’m not sure exactly what that means, if they took him down deep into the sea and buried him or if they just dumped his body. I mean, who—we don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and come back, and we’ll be joined by Talat Hamdani. Talat Hamdani lost her son, 9/11. She is the mother of Mohammed Salman Hamdani. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll also be joined by Matthew Hoh, highest-level diplomat to have quit amidst the war in Afghanistan. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Allan Nairn into this conversation. Your response to the news and what you think this could mean? Could this mean the end of the U.S. war with Afghanistan?
ALLAN NAIRN: I don’t think it will. It should. It definitely should be an occasion for rethinking everything on a much bigger scale than Afghanistan.
The first thing that struck me was seeing the Americans out in the streets celebrating outside the White House, outside the old World Trade Center site, people cheering, people exultant. And while some of that may come from bloodlust, I think a lot of it comes from a sense of justice. People like justice. They want to see it. And in this case, I think many people have the feeling, well, he got what he deserved. This was a man who had massacred civilians; he got what he deserved. And there’s a lot of truth to that. But if we recognize that someone who is willing to kill civilians en masse, someone who is willing to send young people out with weapons and bombs to, as President Obama put it, see to it that a family doesn’t have a loved one sitting at the dinner table anymore, see to it that a child and a parent never meet again, if we say that someone like that deserves to die, then we have to follow through on that idea, and we have to recognize, OK, if these things really are so enormous, we have to stop them. Killing bin Laden does not stop them. Bin Laden is dead, but the world is still governed by bin Ladens. People cheer because they thought they saw justice, but this was not justice delivered by—a kind of rough justice delivered by victims. This was one killer killing another, a big killer, the United States government, killing another, someone who’s actually a smaller one, bin Laden. And the bin Laden doctrine that, to take out the CIA office that was at the World Trade Center, it’s OK to blow up the whole World Trade Center, to teach Americans a lesson, it’s OK to slaughter thousands of Americans—that doctrine lives on in the American White House, in the American Pentagon. You know, every day—and in seats of authority all over the world.
Every day, the U.S., directly with its own forces, or indirectly through its proxy forces, its clients, is killing, at a minimum, dozens of people. I mean, just since Obama came in, in the one limited area of drone strikes in Pakistan, something like 1,900 have been killed just under Obama. And that started decades before 9/11. We have to stop these people, these powerful people like Obama, like Bush, like those who run the Pentagon, and who think it’s OK to take civilian life. And it doesn’t seem that they can be stopped by normal, routine politics, because under the American system, as in most other systems, people don’t even know this is happening. People know the face of bin Laden. They know the evil deeds that he’s done. They see that he is dead, and they say, "Oh, great, we killed bin Laden." But they don’t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be out in the street cheering about those deaths.
We’ve got to stop this practice. And Americans aren’t doing it. Egyptians, Tunisians are doing their part. They’ve risen up against the repression they face. I think we need an American uprising, if we’re to put a stop to this kind of killing of innocent people. And we need an American Romero, someone like Archbishop Romero of Salvador, who, in the face of massacres, of daily massacres of what in the end was more than 70,000 Salvadorans, stood up and said to the army of his country, "Stop the repression. Defy your orders to kill, because there’s a higher principle." About a little more than a week ago, I was in El Salvador and visited Romero’s old home, which I had never been to before, and saw that on his bookshelf he had Why Not the Best?, a campaign book by Jimmy Carter, which he had apparently been reading. Romero wrote to Jimmy Carter in his capacity as the archbishop in 1980, asking Carter to stop supporting the Salvadoran military that was slaughtering his people. And from what I know of Romero, he probably really believed that Carter would respond. He didn’t. Carter kept sending the aid. And within weeks, Romero himself was assassinated by death squad, that had originated from U.S. backing. Writing letters didn’t work in that case. And it doesn’t work here. You know, we’ve got to put a stop to this. Bin Laden is dead. And bin-Ladenism, if you want to call it that, should die also.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this discussion. Allan Nairn, award-winning journalist. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to be joined by a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going right now to Islamabad to the journalist Mosharraf Zaidi, who was tweeting yesterday early, before all this news came out, asking questions like why was a U.S. helicopter down. We’re hoping that we have him on the line. Mohammed—ah, it looks like we just lost him. We’ll try to get him in a minute.
Tariq Ali is with us in Britain. Tariq, your response to what has taken place?
TARIQ ALI: Amy, what is quite astonishing is that it took them such a long time. The news is that he was in a safe house which is literally next door to the Kakul military academy, one of the most heavily protected areas in the country. And the notion that this was a secret from Pakistan’s military intelligence is risible. It’s just not believable. I think the fact that he was there, the fact that they knew he was there—so the question that is intriguing me is how this information was got. I don’t take at face value—you know, I take at face value what they’re saying, that it was a courier they had been tracking. I don’t believe that. I think that the information came from within Pakistan’s military intelligence. And what was the pressure put to get it from them? I think the Pakistanis were informed that this was going to happen. The Pakistan’s leadership was already, with [inaudible], celebrating the event—the Prime Minister Zardari, Karzai in Kabul. So, I think they had been planning it. The timing is a mystery, why they did it exactly at this moment, given that they’ve known that he was there. So, that’s my first reaction.
The second reaction is, of course, as Jeremy has also said, that it’s far better when these things are done legally, because to show that state terrorism is more powerful than individual terrorism is bizarre. I mean, everyone knows that the United States is more powerful than virtually the rest of the world put together, so we don’t need a demonstration of that. What we needed, which Obama didn’t talk about, was: why wasn’t he captured alive—they could have done that if they knew where he was; the Pakistanis could have been told to do that—and tried in a court of law? That would have been genuinely educative and revelatory. To try him, to prove him guilty, and then to imprison him, or whatever.
AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, we have just—
TARIQ ALI: But they didn’t go down that route.
AMY GOODMAN: Tariq, we’ve just gotten Mosharraf Zaidi on, and I want to make sure—
TARIQ ALI: OK.
AMY GOODMAN:—we get him in from Islamabad. Mosharraf, you were early on tweeting that a U.S. helicopter had gone down yesterday. This is before we knew anything about Osama bin Laden being dead. What is the latest you understand, especially of Pakistani involvement in the killing of Osama bin Laden? And what is the reaction today in Islamabad?
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI: Thanks, Amy. I’m actually driving from Abbottabad to Islamabad right now, after having spent the better part of a day there. The helicopter fell—apparently fell on a—during the operation, on the compound. There’s a little plot of land on which bin Laden was living, that was—
There’s been a kind of a—we got an implicit denial by the Pakistani government in its official statement about, you know, Pakistan being intricately involved in this. But the notion of there not having been any involvement by Pakistan in this, it doesn’t—it rings nonsensical and a little bit far-fetched. The city, Abbottabad, is—it’s a garrison town that was founded by a British major in 1853. It’s kind of a hill station. A lot of people enjoy the weather there during the summers, and so people have sort of a dual residence. Abbottabad itself is the largest urban area between the Punjab province, which is the largest province in Pakistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which is a province—it’s the Pashtun province. It’s the province in which so much of the insecurity that’s been happening in Pakistan is sourced. The specific neighborhood is a reasonably sort of middle-class, upper-middle-class neighborhood. The house is said to have been electronically sensed and well guarded.
The idea that bin Laden got from Tora Bora to that house over the last seven or eight years without a single element of the Pakistani state knowing about it just doesn’t ring true. What rings even more hollow is the notion that somehow U.S. military choppers and gunships could fly into Pakistan undetected, [inaudible] and hover above the house, have one of the choppers crash, have perhaps another chopper end up there, kill bin Laden, take a few people there, capture them, and fly them away—and all of this could happen without any coordination, any kind of approval or any kind of data or information sharing with the Pakistani security establishment or the Pakistani state. It just sounds like [inaudible] a flight of somebody’s fancy.
AMY GOODMAN: And the plane that went down yesterday, the helicopter, the U.S. helicopter, though they said no one died in that crash?
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI: That’s right. We heard that there were no casualties. Nobody—as far as I know, nobody has actually seen the wreckage so far. People did hear a massive blast. And there are reports locally and internationally there that a helicopter had fallen there. Originally, we were told that that helicopter was a Pakistani helicopter. Today, it’s—the line has been that they were both U.S. helicopters. Sources in Pakistan that are reasonably trustworthy confirmed that they’re U.S. helicopters. Some people say two, others say four. But the compound itself, the location where this happened, and the fact that a helicopter went down, again—allegedly a helicopter went down—suggests that, you know, this was a Pentagon operation that wouldn’t have been possible without the support of parts of the Pakistani state.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Also, on the issue of the helicopter, I mean, we understand that it was what’s called a Little Bird helicopter, which is a very lightweight helicopter that Blackwater types and JSOC types have often used in Iraq and, to an extent, in Afghanistan. The reports are that it was then destroyed by the U.S. forces after it went down. And the official line is that it was a mechanical failure. There are other reports that say that it was brought down by some kind of arms fire from within the compound, and we probably won’t know that. I would concur with what Mosharraf is saying. I mean, the idea that U.S. Special Ops forces are operating in Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani government is, in fact, ludicrous. And that’s why, when this deal was originally brokered by Musharraf and McChrystal, the public posture had to be that the Pakistanis would deny it.
Let’s remember, too, that this killing of Osama bin Laden takes place just months after Raymond Davis, who was a man who straddled the world of both the CIA and Special Operations forces, killed two men in Lahore, Pakistan, and then, after weeks of controversy, was eventually taken out of the country after payments were made to the families of his victims. One of the things that Raymond Davis is suspected of having done inside of Pakistan was having communications with people in the tribal areas, but also potentially targeting Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is a terrorist organization behind the Mumbai bombings that has been designated by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism and that the U.S. accuses of having very close ties to the ISI. So, the timing of this operation coming as soon as it did after this epic scandal with Raymond Davis, perhaps the most serious crisis between Pakistan and U.S. governments in a decade, or maybe even since the ransacking of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 1979, is curious, to say the least.
But I think there’s two questions here. Were the Pakistanis giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden in this town that Mosharraf has just described, a heavily populated town with big military presence? And what was the full role of the Pakistani government in ultimately killing Osama bin Laden? Because it was Special Ops forces and not the CIA, it would indicate that there had to have been very high-level discussions between the U.S. and Pakistan about this, but the Obama administration says no intelligence was shared with any government, including the Pakistani. So this mystery, I think, is going to continue to deepen.
AMY GOODMAN: Mosharraf, has—on the ground, the response in Pakistan?
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI: Amy, the response here is, at least to the people that I spoke to—and I had the chance to speak to a couple of sort of, you know, bloggers, IT professionals, a few students who are studying to be software engineers, and then a few ordinary folk that were just walking around the neighborhood where this happened, who were either from the neighborhood or work in that neighborhood. I think the one word that I would use to describe the sentiment was "bewilderment." I mean, there was less sort of substantive, you know, content than reaction. It was more that—you know, the sense of bewilderment that—how could this happen? How could bin Laden have been living in our neighborhood, so close to us for all this time? And then, how could this—you know, this sort of quite grand operation, and ostensibly successful operation, had taken place? People feel as though they’re starstruck by the fact that they eyes and ears of the world are now very intently focused on the city of Abbottabad.
