Happy Israeli Independence Day!

Tom Tomorrow on Bush Torture & Bin Laden

I don't usually read Daily Kos, but this Tom Tomorrow comic made me smile: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/09/973635/-The-True-Story.

Greg Sheridan on bin Laden's Death & Aftermath

From Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, an interesting analysis, which I hope might reach readers of his Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

A political miscalculation is easier to believe than the most miraculously perfect and clean special operations episode in the history of modern warfare.

Another interpretation has it that the Americans did tell the Pakistanis about the operation just after it began. It was too late then for them to tip off bin Laden, but it meant they could pull back their own soldiers and air force and prevent them reacting. That is also plausible.

There are a lot of other theories swirling around.

Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek, the Jemaah Islamiah commander who was integral to the Bali bombing which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, was arrested in Pakistan a few months ago. He had been in Abbottabad. It is known he was in Pakistan to make contact with al-Qa'ida, which has helped JI in the past. According to some sources, Patek visited bin Laden at the compound in Abbottabad.

If so, it was Patek who led the Americans to bin Laden. But if Patek did visit bin Laden, how then is it that the world's most wanted terrorists didn't change his residence as soon as the Indonesian was arrested in January?

Did the ISI assure bin Laden of his safety and then betray him? Or was bin Laden in effect a prisoner in Abbottabad?

This is all very speculative. It is difficult to have confidence in any of the speculation, but nor is it easier to have faith in the detail of the official explanation, which has changed quite a lot in the various iterations.

If the Pakistanis did play a role in actively giving bin Laden to the Americans, it would make up for a lot of the grief they have caused Washington in recent years. It also makes it much easier for Barack Obama to pull the US out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later. And it occurs against a framework of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates leaving his job and General David Patraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, being switched to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Gates's replacement is Leon Panetta, the CIA director. The US intelligence community, as opposed to the military, has long been pessimistic about Afghanistan and inclined to leave there as soon as decently possible.

A Pakistani gift of bin Laden would assist this development and pay dividends for everybody, including the Pakistanis, who now believe the American involvement in Afghanistan is radicalising their society as well as limiting their strategic options in Afghanistan.

Invitation to an Art Exhibition in Memory of Polly Evans, May 26th, Washington, DC

At the Louise-Lisner-Dickson-Hurt Home. Open to the Public. Invitation here: http://www.lldhhome.org/artshow1.html

Keith Koffler on the Banned bin Laden Photo

From White House Dossier:

I believe the Obama White House thinks the planet beyond Western Europe has our kind of rational, compassionate mindset. But the world has a very different mindset. If we took Bin Laden’s mangled corpse and strung it up on a flagpole at Ground Zero, half the population overseas would think this a perfectly reasonable approach.

But we can’t even release a photo.

In what way is the picture of the Terrorist King with his cerebellum dribbling out the side of his head going to inspire future Jihadists? Sure, there will be some angry ululating, but after that dies down, the message is clear: this is what the United States does to bad guys. Don’t be one.

It’s not spiking the football. How silly. It’s a lesson and a warning. Our enemies and their potential recruits understand that Bin Laden played a risky game, and lost. The photos would not shock them. Why shouldn’t America blow half his head off? That’s what they’d do to us.

Bin Laden is not a particularly sympathetic figure in the Arab world anymore. The photo would give sustenance to those seeking a better Arab world, a graphic message that the past is dead.

And then their are the conspiracies. The Arab street, and many other streets, think the sunrise is a conspiracy. We have left an indelible question mark in the minds of some around the world about whether we really got Bin Laden. The conflicting accounts we offered about the operation only accentuate the sense of a fictional story poorly told.

Gosh, some reasonable Americans took years to believe Elvis was dead. Jim Morrison of the Doors is still held by some to be in some shack in the south of France prying escargots out of their shells and laying down new rock music tracks.

Without the photo, Osama lives on. What better way to recruit the next generation of terrorists, gullible types who can be convinced that harems of willing virgins await their murderous self-immolation?

And what about us Americans. Don’t we have the right to see this? Don’t we have the right to see our worst enemy crushed by our brave protectors? Why, Mr. President, do you and some of the others in the elite ruling class grant yourselves permission to gain closure, while denying it to the rest of us?

Charles Crawford on the Death of Osama bin Laden

From CharlesCrawford.biz:

Most of the moral and legal burbling on whether it was right for the US special forces to shoot Bin Laden ("extrajudicial execution/killing" seems to be one the favourite phrases used) utterly misses the point.

Which is that the whole operation depended on brave beyond belief soldiers walking into a potential death-trap and hoping that Bin Laden was not only evil but also lazy and/or stupid.

Thus it must have been quite plausible that the whole shabby 'mansion' where Bin Laden lurked had been wired to explode in case of ultimate need, killing its inhabitants and their attackers alike.

Why did this not happen? Maybe Bin Laden was too cowardly to contemplate it, or too cocksure that his 'hiding in plain sight' plan was impenetrable?

Or maybe he wanted to do it but never got round to it, as getting sufficient TNT into the complex might have aroused suspicion?

Or maybe there were booby-traps in place but such was the skill of the SEALs that the AQ people got no chance to trigger them?

One way or the other, imagine the thoughts flashing through the minds of the yound US soldiers as they worked there way up through the dark chaotic building, driving forward to complete the mission from sheer discipline and courage, yet wondering whether when they threw open one final room the whole place would be vapourised - with them going too.

That final door is flung open. My God - there he is. Smirking in the corner with some woman. Maybe he has booby-trapped the room or has had time to put on a suicide belt.

This is no time for polite negotiation or reading Bin Laden his rights.

Bang. Bang.

End it. And hope to get out alive.

As it happens, we have one spectacular historical example of this explosive suicide involving massed Muslims, this time as the attacking troops.

It came 202 years ago to the month, on May 31 1809 on Čegar Hill, not far from Niš in central Serbia. Turkish forces closed in on Serbian 'insurgents' led by Stevan Sindjelic. Rather than surrender Sindjelic blew up his own gunpowder depot, obliterating himself and his own troops plus a goodly number of Turks.

To mark their costly victory and to warn off local Serbs from trying any more insurrections, the Turks built a tower of Serbian skulls in Niš and sent back Serbian scalps stuffed with cotton as tribute to the Sultan. Nice.

Parts of the tower are still there: The Tower of Skulls. I had a jolly dinner in Belgrade recently with one of Sindjelic's proud descendants.

So, Washington. Stop faffing about with these wimpy photographs and furtive so-called burials at sea.

Show your true respect for the finest Islamic warrior traditions. Get out a hack saw and the bricks and mortar - and start building.

President Obama's Remarks in NYC

Well, listen, the main reason I came here is because I heard the food is pretty good.

But to the Commissioner, to Mayor Giuliani -- who obviously performed heroic acts almost 10 years ago -- but most of all, to all of you, I wanted to just come up here to thank you.

This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago.  Obviously we can't bring back your friends that were lost, and I know that each and every one of you not only grieve for them, but have also over the last 10 years dealt with their family, their children, trying to give them comfort, trying to give them support.

What happened on Sunday, because of the courage of our military and the outstanding work of our intelligence, sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say; that our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party; it didn’t matter which administration was in, it didn’t matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act -- that they received justice.

So it’s some comfort, I hope, to all of you to know that when those guys took those extraordinary risks going into Pakistan, that they were doing it in part because of the sacrifices that were made in the States.  They were doing it in the name of your brothers that were lost.

And finally, let me just say that, although 9/11 obviously was a high water mark of courage for the New York Fire Department and a symbol of the sacrifice, you guys are making sacrifices every single day.  It doesn’t get as much notoriety, it doesn’t get as much attention, but every time you run into a burning building, every time that you are saving lives, you're making a difference.  And that's part of what makes this city great and that's part of what makes this country great.

So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the American people for the sacrifices that you make every single day.  And I just want to let you know that you're always going to have a President and an administration who’s got your back the way you’ve got the backs of the people of New York over these last many years.

So God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.

And with that, I'm going to try some of that food.  All right?  Appreciate you.  Thank you.

!Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Steve Clemons on the bin Laden Photo Ban

Many American intelligence officials began to think some years ago that he was dead already. A senior FBI agent once asked me, "you don't really believe he is still alive do you?"

If that is what high level Americans in the terror-tracking business thought, what does President Obama think that those through the Arab world will think.

Not releasing a photo of some sort furthers a bad trend of governments -- that the public doesn't have a right to know, that governments are better stewards of the truth and of basic information than the public. It is undemocratic and stiflingly paternalistic.

Wikileaks was a market reaction to the massive expansion of official secrecy not just in the US but elsewhere in the world.

President Obama's decision to hold back the bin Laden photo/s only aggravates this trend.

MosFilm Classics Go Online

On this MosFilm YouTube channel... (ht Robin Shapiro)

BTW, you can read the article I wrote about my tour of MosFilm, for this blog in 2005, here.

Four Questions Following the Death of Osama bin Laden

1. Who shot Osama bin Laden?

2. Why did Americans like Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, and Leon Panetta wear black on television, following his death? (Panetta even wore a black tie on PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer).

3. How could bin Laden have been living in Abbottabad, Pakistan for six years without CIA knowledge or permission?

4. Why is the US government acting afraid, instead of victorious?

Fouad Ajami on the Death of Osama bin Laden

From his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Osama Bin Laden, Weak Horse:

When our remarkable soldiers gave him a choice, Osama bin Laden gave them a fight. Fittingly, he was not in a cave. He had grown up in the urban world of Jeddah, and he was struck down in a perfectly urban setting, a stone's throw from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, in odd proximity to a military academy, in a visible and large compound. He had outlived his time and use, and doubtless Pakistani intelligence was now willing to cast him adrift.

Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden

1. President Obama deserves credit.

Without question, President Obama did the right thing. Two Presidents before Obama flinched when it came to Osama bin Laden. President Bill Clinton let him escape in the 1990s, while President George W. Bush let him escape in the 21st Century. It may have taken two years, but President Obama succeeded where the others failed. One may nitpick, or ask "What took so long?" Others may have found the Presidential announcement off-key.

However, any concerns about the circumstances should not take anything away from the fact that, for whatever reason, for whatever motive, President Obama succeeded where others before him had failed.

2. It is a real blow to Al Qaeda.

Those who maintain that this doesn't matter, or that bin Laden was not that important, don't understand the dynamics of revolutionary political movements. As bin Laden himself said, people bet on the strong horse against the weaker horse. Simply by staying alive for a decade with a price on his head, bin Laden defied the might and power and indeed legitimacy of the United States. Like Che Guevara, he came to symbolize anti-Americanism. He and his allies had blown up the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, downtown London, and sponsored attacks all over the world: Madrid, Bali, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Israel, Russia, China, Turkey--thumbing his nose at everyone. This chutzpah alone gave Al Qaeda a following. With the killing of the Al Qaeda leader, America has finally shown the world that bin Laden didn't get away with it.

3. It is a tonic for the United States.

It makes concrete President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!"

For almost decade, Americans have lived in fear: afraid to name the enemy's ideology; afraid to put terrorists on trial; afraid to fly; afraid to go into government buildings; afraid to close down Guantanamo, afraid even to think. The fear became contagious, creating a morale-sapping decade in which American commerce and industry--once the envy of the world--became a basket case. Likewise, government agencies ceased to function properly as scandals swirled from Hurricane Katrina, to the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud after the largest financial collapse in US history, to cheating scandals on standardized tests, to the failure to try and execute Major Nidal Hasan immediately after the Ft. Hood massacre--an open-and-shut case, if there ever was one.

Yes, the climate of fear resulted from a failure of leadership, institutionalized cowardice among political parties, business, and the citizenry. Now, the killing of bin Laden ought to permit American fear to be replaced by American confidence--and the rebuilding of shattered American institutions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

4. It is not a partisan issue.

This should go without saying. Bin Laden didn't attack Democrats or Republicans, he didn't attack Bush or Clinton--he attacked America. Likewise, all Americans were victims of the 9/11 attacks--not only families of those killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or Flight 93. They suffered most directly, but the target was all of us.

5. It took much too long.

If this had happened in 2002, America could have celebrated. As it didn't, America can only be relieved. While cliches such as "better late than never" or Churchill's line that "Americans always do the right thing, after they have exhausted every alternative option" might seem apropos, they are not good enough.

With bin Laden finally dead, America must not flinch from rigorous self-examination, and an honest accounting for the mistakes of the past decade, in order to answer the question Bernard Lewis posed in another context: What Went Wrong?

To learn from our mistakes, first we must admit them.

Chistopher Hitchens on the Death of Osama bin Laden

Glad that Hitch has lived to see it. From Slate:

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It's the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

Elsewhere in Slate, Daniel Byman analyzes the future of al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden, John Dickerson discusses the president's proactive role in the assassination, and William Saletan uncovers some holes in the raid narrative. Also, David Weigel describes the scene outside the White House following Obama's announcement, Anne Applebaum applauds America's use of human intelligence over expensive technologies, and Brian Palmer examines Bin Laden's burial at sea. For the most up-to-date-coverage, visit The Slatest. Slate's complete coverage is rounded up here.

But, again, we were aware of all this already. At least we won't have to put up with a smirking video when the 10th anniversary of his best-known atrocity comes around. Come to think of it, though, he hadn't issued any major communiqués on any subject lately (making me wonder, some time ago, if he hadn't actually died or been accidentally killed already), and the really hateful work of his group and his ideology was being carried out by a successor generation like his incomparably more ruthless clone in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something.

In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?

Osama Bin Laden is Dead.

It's a relief.

It's nice news.

Yet, it comes a little late.

From Pakistan's DAWN newspaper's account:

Residents said they were astounded to learn bin Laden had been in their midst. One neighbour said an old man had been living in the compound for the past 10 years.

“He never mixed much, he kept a low profile,” said the neighbour, Zahoor Ahmed.

“It’s hard to believe bin Laden was there. We never saw any extraordinary movements,” said another neighbour, Adress Ahmed.

Abbottabad has long been a cool, leafy retreat from the heat of the Pakistan plains.

It was founded by a British army officer, James Abbott, in the mid-nineteenth century as the British were pushing the bounds of their Indian empire into the northwestern hills inhabited by Pashtun tribes.

Today, the town is home to a Pakistani military academy and its surrounding hills are dotted with summer homes.

Sohaib Athar, whose online profile says he is an IT consultant taking a break from the rat race, sent out a stream of live updates on Twitter about the movement of helicopters and blasts without realising it was a raid on bin Laden.

When he learnt who had been killed, he tweeted: “Uh oh, there goes the neighbourhood.”
But it might take more to convince many people that bin Laden is dead.

One soldier on patrol near the compound said there had been talk before of bin Laden’s death, only for it to be proven untrue.

“It’s not clear if he was killed or not,” the soldier said.

Link to Google Maps view of site (ht Tom Gross).
Amateur video of Osama Bin Laden's hideout from YouTube (ht Sohaib Athar) :

Score: Donald Trump 1, President Barack Obama 0.

Long-form Birth Certificate PDF on White House website.

Chinese Credit Ratng Agency Downgrades USA

Read report here.

Document of the Week: Wikileaks Guantanamo Files

Read them here. From the introduction:

Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063), a Saudi regarded as the planned 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantánamo, approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This consisted of 20-hour interrogations every day, over a period of several months, and various other "enhanced interrogation techniques," which severely endangered his health. Variations of these techniques then migrated to other prisoners in Guantánamo (and to Abu Ghraib), and in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, a retired judge and a close friend of Dick Cheney and David Addington, who was appointed to oversee the military commissions at Guantánamo as the convening authority, told Bob Woodward that she had refused to press charges against al-Qahtani, because, as she said, "We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture." As a result, his numerous statements about other prisoners must be regarded as worthless.

Abd al-Hakim Bukhari (ISN 493), a Saudi imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, who was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent, inexplicably, to Guantánamo (along with four other men liberated from the jail) is regarded in the files as a member of al-Qaeda, and a trustworthy witness.

Abd al-Rahim Janko (ISN 489), a Syrian Kurd, tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy and then imprisoned by the Taliban along with Abd al-Hakim Bukhari, above, is also used as a witness, even though he was mentally unstable. As his assessment in June 2008 stated, "Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective ... He has several chronic medical problems. He has a psychiatric history of substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, and prior suicide attempt for which he is followed by behavioral health for treatment."

These are just some of the most obvious cases, but alert readers will notice that they are cited repeatedly in what purports to be the government's evidence, and it should, as a result, be difficult not to conclude that the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantánamo Files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism.

The rest, these documents reveal on close inspection, were either innocent men and boys, seized by mistake, or Taliban foot soldiers, unconnected to terrorism. Moreover, many of these prisoners were actually sold to US forces, who were offering bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies -- a policy that led ex-President Musharraf to state, in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, the Pakistani government “earned bounty payments totalling millions of dollars.”

Uncomfortable facts like these are not revealed in the deliberations of the Joint Task Force, but they are crucial to understanding why what can appear to be a collection of documents confirming the government's scaremongering rhetoric about Guantánamo -- the same rhetoric that has paralyzed President Obama, and revived the politics of fear in Congress -- is actually the opposite: the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.

Happy Easter!

"Let Bradley Manning Go!" Singers Disrupt Obama Event

They sang this song:

Dear Mr. President we honor you today sir

Each of us brought you $5,000

It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign

I paid my dues, where's our change?

We'll vote for you in 2012, yes that's true

Look at the Republicans -- what else can we do?

Even though we don't know if we'll retain our liberties

In what you seem content to call a free society

Yes it's true that Terry Jones is legally free

To burn a people's holy book in shameful effigy

But at another location in this country

Alone in a 6x12 cell sits Bradley

23 hours a day (and) night

The 5th and 8th Amendments say this kind of thing ain't right

We paid our dues, where's our change?