The killing of Osama bin Laden by 25 special force members of the Navy Seals Team Six has produced a speech-for-the-moment from President Obama, followed by a media frenzy of news and commentary.
President Obama offered his views in a televised statement to the country (and world). He suggested that after ten years Osama bin Laden had been located, thanks to “the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals,” and then killed by the heroic “men who carried out the operation.” The implications of bin Laden’s death are profound, in Obama’s view, because they take out the leader and symbol of al-Qaeda. His death “is not the end of our efforts,” the President said. Al Qaeda groups may be in disarray but they “continue to pursue attacks against us.” The President maintains that the costs of the war in Afghanistan and anywhere else al-Qaeda threatens the US or its friends, are justified and necessary for the sake of our country’s security. The war(s) will continue because “the cause of security [for] our country is not complete.” In the end, the President says, America will prevail because “America can do whatever we set out mind to” and because we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The media, at least initially echoed the president’s themes. Joshua Holland sums it up nicely:
“The Obama administration deftly shaped the media coverage of its prized kill by detailing a picture-perfect, morally unambiguous special forces operation, which culminated in the death of Osama bin Laden. Most of the details of that narrative have now unraveled, but the conventional wisdom that the tale established remains. As Glenn Greenwald put it, that's par for the course: ‘the narrative is set forever by first-day government falsehoods uncritically amplified by establishment media outlets, which endure no matter how definitively they are disproven in subsequent days.’”
(http://www.alternet.org/story/150857/7_deceptions_about_bin_laden%27s_killing_pushed_by_the_obama_administration)
In this celebratory account by the President, the killing of Osama is a “victory,” honorable, something only the US can do, and it enhances America’s security. Any terrorist group that threatens America or its allies will eventually be squashed. Former President Bush, Jr., could not have told the story any better. There is no context here, no history, no accounting of how US interference has been significant for over thirty years in bringing al-Qaeda to life and shaping, directly and indirectly, the devastation of an already impoverished Afghanistan society. There is no reference to any US interests in oil pipelines, minerals, and the sheer geo-political desire to maintain some semblance of US dominance in the region.
There are a few other issues that stand out for many of us who opposed the war in Afghanistan from the beginning and who support an expedited withdrawal. The ten-year-old war against and the occupation of Afghanistan have been overwhelmingly against a multi-faceted Taliban, who are variously fighting to advance their own interests, the commands of warlords, the corruption of the national police in their areas and a society ridden by corruption, the US air war, the Special Forces’ mid-night raids, the weakness of reconstruction projects, the illegitimate central government, conflicting interests among ethnic groups, prisons known for torture, refugee camps, high rates of poverty, homelessness, and unemployment. This is a classic story of neo-colonialism, hardly a story of democracy, let alone a march toward true equality. By the way, there are no credible sources that establish that most so-called Taliban are linked to or dominated by the regional and international ambitions of al-Qaeda.
Democracy Now covered well the critical narrative of this killing of Osama. On the May 5th program, co-host Amy Goodman asked Allan Nairn, award-winning journalist and activist, for his thoughts on the event and whether, in his view, this could “mean the end of the US war with Afghanistan?” Before turning to Nairn’s answer to the first part of this question, consider the second part of it. Obama did not explicitly address the question of withdrawal; however, the thrust of his statement is in praise of military valor and an endless commitment to fighting our “enemies.” We’ll see by July whether Obama decides to withdraw many US troops from Afghanistan or not. His decision then will tell us something about his intentions and how much powerful military and corporate interests in the society continue to influence him.
ALLAN NAIRN [in response to Amy Goodman’s question]: “I don’t think it will [change much]. 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….
“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.”
Implications of Nairn’s statements.
The US has not brought peace and justice anywhere in the last 50 years or so through its military interventions or through US supported military dictatorships. Rather, it has supported regimes that have suppressed and stolen from their people, or allowed foreign transnational corporations ravage their environments and take their wealth.
(See Robert Scheer’s article, “A Monster of Our Own Creation,” for an overview of US involvement in Afghanistan over the last 30 years: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_monster_of_our_own_creation_20110504)
The American people are by and large ignorant of this long and brutal history. Nairn contends that the only way to challenge the US power structure and its militarized foreign policy is for the people to engage in massive protests and civil disobedience. It’s not clear how Americans will go from relative ignorance to involvement in such engagements. If it should happen, such an eruption would likely stem initially from declining economic conditions rather than the squandering of resources on foreign wars against poor countries. But once riled up, Americans may come to see the connection as salient, that is, the money spent on foreign wars and the military-industrial complex is mis-spent and needs to be redirected to building a sustainable and just society here at home.
Other issues connected to the killing of Osama include how much the Pakistan military and government knew about Bin Laden’s whereabouts, whether carrying out assassinations (killings) in other countries is legal and moral, whether it is time to withdraw troops or build on this “victory” and stay the course in Afghanistan. The question of what Pakistan’s authorities knew is still not resolved, though it doesn’t look like it will much alter Pakistan-US relations. It is indeed a violation of another country’s sovereignty, one of the bedrock assumptions of international law, such as it is. And the odds are in favor of keeping US troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014 at least, that is, continuing the policy that has already be espoused by the President and military leaders.
There is another issue as well, that is, the issue of how helpful “torture” of key captives helped US intelligence to identify Bin Laden’s place of residence.
Is the right-wing assertion correct that “torture,” or what government officials have called “enhanced interrogation,” provided the information that enabled US authorities to locate the whereabouts of bin Laden? Many of us thought this was an issue long ago resolved, that is, torture has not borne useful intelligence about bin Laden’s location or on any other important issue related to this war.
Democracy Now provides the following summary of a position that rebuts right-wing assertions on its May 4th program.
“The death of Osama bin Laden has sparked a debate over whether torture of suspects held at places such as the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay helped track down and kill the al-Qaeda leader. Some claim the mission vindicated controversial Bush policies on harsh interrogation techniques. We speak with Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator in Iraq. "The laying of the groundwork, if you will, of these [Bush-era] techniques, I believe wholeheartedly, slowed us down on the road towards Osama bin Laden and numerous other members of al-Qaeda," Alexander says. "I’m convinced we would have found him a lot earlier had we not resorted to torture and abuse." (http://democracynow.org/2011/5/4/former_military_interrogator_matthew_alexander_despite
Here are excerpts from the interview.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER:
“The debate is skewed at this point. And one reason why is because we don’t know all the details, and secondly, because a lot is being left out of the conversation. And let me talk a little bit about that. One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Sheikh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.
“The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, what’s happening now is being used by many to justify torture.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: “That’s correct. And, you know, when you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we—or '02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don't get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that’s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times.
“The other piece of the story that we don’t know yet is we don’t know how the CIA learned the real family name of the courier, who again, his nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And we don’t know how the CIA got his real family name, which really was the key piece of information that led us to be able to monitor phone calls and emails and discover his first name, his full name, which led to us finding him and then him leading us to the compound. So, until we have that information, which we don’t even know if it came from interrogations or if it came from a source, then we really don’t have a complete picture of how we got to bin Laden.
[….]
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: “ I was a senior interrogator in charge of an interrogation team. I conducted quite a few interrogations myself, over 300. I went out with the raid teams on these kill-or-capture missions to try and kill or capture, you know, leaders of al-Qaeda specifically. The time I was on the team, we were hunting a man named Zafar, who was in charge of the suicide bombing operations in northern Iraq.
And what I found is a couple things, Amy. The first is that non-coercive techniques, time and time again, proved extremely effective against al-Qaeda, especially techniques that came from law enforcement that were based on rapport building.
[….]
“And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let’s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture. And numerous other leaders that we have found and captured—another guy named Zafar, that I describe in my book—all these successes have come without the use of torture.” [The title of Alexander’s book is Kill or Capture.]
The Upshot –
It’s great that Osama bin Laden has been killed, though the illegal means used to do this give us pause. In the broad scope of US involvement in Afghanistan, it is like a blink of an eye. It is probably a morale booster for those who favor the war and helps to confirm in their minds that we are still a great military power and can do whatever we set our sights on. For critics of the war, it could –doubtfully - open up an opportunity to withdraw the troops: Mission Accomplished.
Close scrutiny of the US intervention in Afghanistan should leave little doubt that Obama and Congress should take decisive steps to bring it to a responsible end
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment