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London Zoo: [Closed] Bin Laden Killed in Pakistan

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  1.  (9829.181)
    @SilentObjector: Sentenced by iraqi authorities. Authorities appointed by the US military. Or, if I'm wrong, anyway, I was just reading: the interim prime minister of Iraq during that transition phase was Ayad Allawi, a guy who spent half his life in the UK, founded the Iraqi National Accord, whom provided the US with intelligence about Saddam's WoMDs. Wich, by the way, WERE NEVER FOUND!! hAHA!
    OK, no, I'm not mocking you, I'm just saying: politics is the art of lying. War, as Alan Moore said, is the failure of immagination. War is the physical, armed expresion of politics. With BIn Laden dead, you don't end the war on terror. You end it by realizing that your government answers to corporative interests, to corporations not only american (actually, corporations are multinationals, so the don't have nationality; no sense of patriotism!) but also, ironically, middleeastern! I'm probably oversimplifying this, I'm not the smartest person in the world. But one has to learn to recognize a smoke screen. Remember: back and to the left.
    Also, I'm probably becoming very paranoid, as of late.

    Respectfuly.
  2.  (9829.182)
    And I'm beginning to think that politics/bussinesmen keep the world this way so they can create more plots for Hollywood, until the end of centuries. Amen.
    •  
      CommentAuthorMorac
    • CommentTimeMay 3rd 2011
     (9829.183)
    Man, I am really glad I brought my Ten Foot Pole into the forums with me today.
    • CommentAuthorjonah
    • CommentTimeMay 3rd 2011
     (9829.184)
    This whole thing got me thinking about my first exposure to bin laden 11 years ago. I redid this article from the magazine Datacide as part of a graphic design project in high school. I thought the story was over the top and I made an "appropriate" layout with cartoon bombs and mock weekly world news style typography...In my defense my teacher didn't disagree with my assessment.
    •  
      CommentAuthorHEY APATHY!
    • CommentTimeMay 3rd 2011 edited
     (9829.185)
    @ Renthing and Alan (in particular)- I’m way finished playing the radical crazy nonsense internet debate game, I just wanted to say that as part of my business I go to New York fairly regularly and I stood there in that giant empty hole that used to be the Twin Towers around '03-04. I saw the people and felt the most haunting psychically stained horror I have ever experienced in my life, I cried hard. I've been back there several times since and have talked to survivors and to rescue workers and to cops and every time I just broke down into tears. They all did too. I mean I fucking bawled uncontrollably and choked my guts out.

    After all the eel-slinging rants this afternoon I tried to get a little work done but couldn’t stop thinking about my NY experiences & I broke down and fucking cried hard until I passed out, in fact I’m choking up again right now with tears running down my face. Anyways I just wanted you to know that I care deeply for those people and that city, every last nike wearing one of them and @Alan I got something positive from all of this (which is all your fault after all you started the thread HAH!). I can’t explain what but those little hairs stood up on the back of my neck tingling while I was crying and I learned something. So while I’ve no intention of opening/reading this thread ever again I wanted you guys to know that and @BOODOFSTAGE your words are like a koan to me now.
  6.  (9829.186)
    I think it's worth noting that even as crazy as this discussion has gotten, it is still a few heads above basically any other conversation on this topic that I've seen on the net. That's why I keep reading here, even though I don't post particularly often.

    @Jon Wake:

    The shoe analogy is a good one--one that resonates well with me, since it's a recurring motif in Shadow Of No Towers, and I've been so involved with that comic lately. I do think for many people it's become sort of a constant hovering shoe, a sword of Damocles that we know is there, but we live with and eventually become accustomed to.

    So, I think the flip side of the celebration you're describing is, perhaps, bewilderment and disbelief. I mean, I've spent half my life living with this shoe, and not realizing it, and in the same moment I've been made aware that it exists and then told that it's gone.

    That's like being told that the monster in your closet actually was real... but he's been killed by trained monster hunters. It's just kind of a paradigm shift.

    I'm not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense, but I think it's another aspect of this that might be worth considering.
    •  
      CommentAuthorPupato
    • CommentTimeMay 3rd 2011 edited
     (9829.187)
    from Franquin:
    franquin-idees-noires
  8.  (9829.188)
    your words are like a koan to me now.

    Um. Thanks. That was a compliment, right?

    ALso, i'd like to say that despite the volatile subject in this thread, and some precarious posts of passion(My Stan lee, came out.Excelsior.)
    I think we've managed to maintain civility. The fact that the thread hasn't been close is proof of that
    •  
      CommentAuthorVornaskotti
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011 edited
     (9829.189)
    Pupato:

    Brief offtopic - thank you! I read that album when I was a kid, and never been sure whose was it - some really excellent comics there.


    Now that I'm reading this thread, I have to say that this is still one of the most sane I've read online anywhere. I can see what Hey Apathy! is doing here, but I just don't think this is the place to do it, and certainly the tone is wrong. Sometimes a little bit of trolling is in the sense that making people question their preconceptions is very important, but well - time and place, dude, time and place. In my experience Whitechapel is one of the really refreshing outposts online where one drop in and be reasonably sure that the people in the discussions know their arguments from their asshole. So, coming here to "shake things up a bit and make people think" mostly makes people go ho-hum, been there, done that in high school, got the T-shirt. We've had the same thing happen in our circle of friends' private channels - someone who very rarely visits them drops in and starts acting like a huge ass, and then exclaims that he just wanted to "shake things up and make people think". Cue facepalms.

    Then to the actual topic. For our local political reasons I've been thinking about nations and nationalism quite a lot in the past months, and getting more and more sure that nationalism is currently one of the most destructive ideas gaining power here and there, globally. I'm a bit ambivalent about the whole OBL death party issue. I mean, it was a huge deal for the people from US - the youngest people who read Whitechapel have spent literally half of their life with that manhunt going on. The need for closure is understandable and can't really harp at people knocking back a few beers and going ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead.

    Then again, stuff like this makes me sick to my stomach:

    No dignity at Ground Zero

    The scene at Ground Zero was like a parody of Team America, the film created by the South Park team to parody Bush's America gone wild on nationalism. Now that we've parodied the parody, can the frat boys go home and can we return to the revolutions of the Middle East and north Africa that symbolically killed Bin Laden months ago?
    • CommentAuthorRenThing
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011
     (9829.190)
    On the subject of nationalism, we have Doug Stanhope's bit about...

    Fuck the French

    Nationalism is idiotic. It's nothing more than tribalism on a grand scale.
    • CommentAuthorErisah
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011
     (9829.191)
    What's the collective noun for a group of patriots?
    • CommentAuthorOddcult
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011 edited
     (9829.192)
    Okay, for Milporn fans - looks like the helicopter that crashed and was blown up wasn't a Black Hawk. No one knows what it was.

    http://defensetech.org/2011/05/03/secret-helo-may-have-been-used-in-bin-laden-raid/

    Looks like the US has a stealthy special forces insertion helicopter they've kept black until now. Stealth bombers and drones are one thing and have been known about for ages, but stealthy helicopters that can get troops well across borders are something that haven't been previously thought operational.

    It explains why Pakistan didn't react against the mission if they weren't informed about it though and makes it a damn gutsy move on Obama's part to make the call to go in without telling them. Just imagine if Pakistani air defences had moved against the mission. It would either have been aborted and Bin Laden would have fucked off, leading to major accusations of Pakistan harbouring him, or the US would have had to use aircraft that were doubtless around to tell Pakistani interceptors to fuck off, which would again have risked Bin Laden escaping and caused an incident too.
    • CommentAuthorErisah
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011 edited
     (9829.193)
    There's enough of an incident as is, what with Pakistan annoyed* at the invasion, the US annoyed at the fact that UBL's compound was within spitting distance of a Pakistani military base while the Pakistanis were "unaware", and everyone with a preference for human rights over cold-blooded assasinations annoyed with the US for lying about shooting an unarmed UBL who apparently didn't use wifey as a human shield. Director of the CIA mentioned something about rules of engagement and UBL being alive if he had surrendered properly or some such. Yeah, I'm sure we all believe that.
    Bin Laden escaping would have been embarrassing for the US and Pakistan, but really, even if that eventuality wasn't kind of moot at this point, along with what Bin Laden may or may not have wanted as far as martyrdom vs standing in front of International Criminal Court, this was always going to be an "incident". The US has once again shown that it could give less of a shit about other countries' sovereignty when it comes to their goals, to the point of blatantly using their black ops units to put a hit on an infamous high priority target. The high-ups had to know that they were doing the diplomatic equivalent of pissing on the neighbour's garden gnomes in broad daylight, but they just don't give a shit, because they're AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!
    It's sickening.

    *for every "annoyed" read "(cautiously) livid".
    •  
      CommentAuthorBrianMowrey
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011 edited
     (9829.194)
    It's not sickening. We're flying bombs into Pakistan all the time and killing people, typically with far more murky distinctions between "militants" and civilians, typically with high rates of correction after the intitial claim was reprinted by the New York Times already that "the bad-guy's definite number three boss was killed this time, seven thousand XP for us!"

    Are people really raising a stink over our methods here? With the president already authorizing the assassination of a US citizen last year, with an entire prison population of untried torture victims we've collected in the last decade, and hundreds and hundreds of pages already documenting that torture and obvious related deaths, just waiting for someone to give a damn, with elderly and mentally handicapped children being tasseled routinely in their own homes across the country, with unsuspectig fathers being shot dead for wielding a golfclub at swat officers who raided his home over personal-use drugs -- for people to fixate on whether Bin Laden was shot unarmed is hilarious and obscene.

    It also doesn't do the other people in that paragraph one bit of good toward getting protection from the government. Give Bin Laden to hate and violence; let's focus on being shrill in defense of everyone else but him.

    Edit: ha, auto correct. That was meant to be "tasered routinely." I hope no one is tasseling them routinely either
  15.  (9829.195)
    The whole "US needs a boogeyman" theory is flawed in some respects. The CIA didn't create Bin Laden as a boogeyman, he did that himself when he ordered a few people to fly planes into the WTC. The idea that every evil thing that transpires on the face of the Earth is somehow instigated by the US is a paranoid wet dream. Admittedly, having that boogeyman does benefit some institutions like the military industrial complex, but that's another thing than saying that the threat of terrorism and Islamic extremism is non-existent.

    And the fratboy style celebrations over his death, is that really such a huge thing to take issue with? The war on terror is real; it's a war being fought in ideas mostly, and military strikes and other violent altercations every now and then. Even the Arab spring is part of the war on Terror, in a way; an increase in democracy will certainly mean less opportunities for Al Qaeda-like organizations to recruit new angry young bombers. Libyans celebate when they strike a blow against Ghadaffi's interests, Americans celebrate when OBL is dead. That's just human nature. Writing an angry column complaining about a lack of dignity in those celebrations is fucking stupid.
    • CommentAuthorRenThing
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011
     (9829.196)
    @Verus

    The theory of the boogeyman isn't that the US created them, only that the US used them to continue the fear. Bin Laden and Al Queda have been a thorn in the US's side for far longer than 2001; they were, at least somewhat, linked to the original WTC bombing that happened under Clinton back in the '90's.

    I'd argue that a boogeyman, in the context we're using the term, can be a real threat (such as Communism/Communist Russia in the '50's and '60's) or not (Saddam Hussein in the 2000's), but whether it's used to create an atmosphere of fear in order to push policy (OMG, we heard terrorists were going to put explosives in sodas! NO MORE BOTTLED SODAS CAN BE BROUGHT ON PLANES!) or not is what makes it a boogeyman.
    • CommentAuthor256
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011
     (9829.197)
    @Verus
    Even the Arab spring is part of the war on Terror, in a way;

    Really? The target of the revolutions in the Maghreb and Gulf states definitely seems to be their own despotic governments, not the limited number of international terrorist groups identified in the "War on Terror".

    (Notice that several of the governments being protested against or overthrown are ones that have been supported by European nations (including the UK) and the US, with arms sales and oil money.)

    @RenThing
    The theory of the boogeyman isn't that the US created them, only that the US used them to continue the fear.


    Agreed that OBL/AlQ wasn't invented by the US as a boogeyman, but was utilized by them. It seems like "terrorism" was seized upon by a large group of people to promote different agendas - the military industrial complex, paranoid "security" freaks, even cultural extremists.

    But it's worth remembering that the US actually did have something very important to do with the creation of OBL/AlQ - they clandestinely funded the Arab muhajideen in Afghanistan, where OBL first made his name as... An international terrorist.

    Also, in re: your response upthread - I agree that blaming the victim is wrong. In fact, to go on a slight tangent, I think it's a pervasive and incredibly damaging cognitive bias within some groups. I have a theory that it explains some of the rightist/hypercapitalist perspectives that people have, but that's probably a discussion for another time.
  18.  (9829.198)
    @256,
    Well see, that's the beauty of the War On Terror moniker. If anything good happens in the vaguely defined region in which we spread our vaguely defined "no more bad things" banner of military interventions, we get to take at least partial credit for it and continue our campaign of indiscriminate shit-wrecking in the region.
  19.  (9829.199)
    Really? The target of the revolutions in the Maghreb and Gulf states definitely seems to be their own despotic governments, not the limited number of international terrorist groups identified in the "War on Terror".

    (Notice that several of the governments being protested against or overthrown are ones that have been supported by European nations (including the UK) and the US, with arms sales and oil money.)


    Of course, that's all true. The Arab spring may be larger in scope than the war on terror, so I guess it's wrong of me to say that they are part of it; but they are related. The Arab Spring makes it seem like countries in the Middle East are finding their own voice, like an emancipatory movement, a movement towards modernity and maturity. Terrorism grew largely out of the Middle Eastern people's dissatisfaction with their leadership, and the Arab Spring seems like a more measured and effective expression of that dissatisfaction.
    • CommentAuthorRenThing
    • CommentTimeMay 4th 2011
     (9829.200)
    @256

    Sure, it can be argued that the US had a hand in the creation of Osama. There's been an arguable cascade of events that can all be traced back to our meddling with Iran. If we hadn't fucked around with Iran then it, quite possibly wouldn't be in the state it is now. If we hadn't meddled with Iran, we may not have had to side with Saddam in the Iraq/Iran war. Whether or not there would've been an OBL is arguable since I believe he came to being in part because of US attempting to oppose USSR movement into Afghanistan.

    @Verus

    the Arab Spring seems like a more measured and effective expression of that dissatisfaction.

    Which is one of the reasons put forward for why Al Queda has been largely not present in the various uprisings (though some of the fighters in Libya have admitted they have worked for/with Al Queda in the past).

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