Dead Man Rising

This is from Linh Dinh’s ‘State of the Union’ blog.

Linh is a US resident Vietnamese ex patriot commenting on life in Philadelphia by way, mainly, of street-scene photo-journalism. He manages to capture the essence of a decaying hopelessness interspersed with jingoistic evocations of patriotic America – per the sad and slightly absurd but very real and not untypical image below.

The following is is one of his occasional but always perceptive off-the-cuff reactions to current events:

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Upon hearing that Bin Laden has been officially pronounced dead, I thought:

1. Since this man has been dead for nearly a decade, the US killed a look-alike
2. Maybe previous rumors about Bin Laden’s demise, reported in The New York Times, The Guardian and Fox News, among many other places, were false, after all.

Still, the US has long known where he was, but only decided to kill him now to

• Lift up American spirits as economic despair becomes ever more acute
• Help Obama get reelected, since he is such a great tool of the establishment. Although his policies hardly differ from Bush’s, his charms and skin color have dampened protest from many quarters
• Set up a false flag “retaliation from Al Qaeda,” which would reinvigorate limp support for the War on Terrorism.

In any case, it would be interesting to get all the details of this operation and see the physical evidences. For every assassination or murder, there must be a corpse, but alas, there is no corpse! Less than six hours after news came that Bin Laden had been killed, it was announced that he had already been buried at sea. The official explanation: The US must respect the Islamic tradition that a corpse be buried within 24 hours, and since no country was willing to be his final host, not even Saudi Arabia, his homeland, Bin Laden had to be dumped where he could never be exhumed. How convenient. Case closed!

Such respect for a Muslim corpse from a country that seems to be fighting Muslims everywhere, that kills, imprisons and tortures Muslims, whose soldiers draped panties and smeared shit on Muslim heads, raped Muslim women and collected Muslim ears as trophies. America hasn’t exactly been shy about abusing Muslims, dead or alive, so why this sudden delicacy? Remember also that Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed by American troops on July 22, 2003, then buried on August 2, 11 days later.

Had Bin Laden been captured, and I will insist there was never any intention of catching this man alive, he would have to be tried in court, where his involvement with 9/11 must be proven, counter theories could be introduced and questions about 9/11 raised. In short, a nasty can of worms to be avoided at all cost.

Though long gone, Bin Laden had been extremely useful as a boogeyman for the American military industrial complex, but this ruse was running out of gas. Even with a fake, CIA-produced audio every now and then, the Bin Laden brand no longer captured, so it was time to close out this product line, not with a bang, exactly, since there’s no cadaver, but with plenty of noise nevertheless.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.