The Death Of The World’s Most Expensive Terrorist:
US Narrative Revisited
By Protik Bardhan
23 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Osama Bin Laden, the chief of the world’s most hunted terror group died in a firefight with the US elite naval troop in the early hours of May 02, 2011 in the garrison town of Abbotabad, Pakistan. The importance of the news is best understood from the fact US President Barak Obama himself made the declaration from his Oval office. And the rest of the world listened to the narrative in awe!
Another version of US narrative: In 1985, President Ronald Reagan received a group of bearded men. They were ferocious-looking people with turbans; their appearance was different as if they came from another century by a time machine. After receiving them he spoke to the press. He pointed towards them and said, “These are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers”. These were the Afghan Mujahiddin. They were at the time, guns in hand, battling the Evil Empire, USSR. They were the moral equivalent of USA’s founding fathers!
Readers may get a little tangled, yet I would like to draw their attention as to the entire narrative of terror, war on terror, Osama Bin Laden and the post second world war US foreign policy.
In August 1998, another American President ordered missile strikes from the American navy based in the Indian Ocean to kill Osama Bin Laden and his men in the camps in Afghanistan. Mr. Bin Laden, whom fifteen American missiles were fired to hit in Afghanistan, was only a few years ago the moral equivalent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson! What happened in the meantime?
USA simply has no definition of terror, indeed they never went for any definition of it; as it is convenient to twist the meaning of any term in absence of theoretical framework of it. To them terror connotes in multifarious dimension:
Definition number one: “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call terrorism.”
Definition number two is even more brilliant: “Terrorism is a form of political violence.” Aren’t you surprised? It is a form of political violence, says George Shultz, former Secretary of State of the U.S.
Number three: “Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization.”
Number four: “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values.”
Noam Chomsky in one of his famous interviews with David Barsamian termed the US citizen as the most fright-prone people of the world who are highly susceptible to propaganda. Only the US people believe that Saddam Hussain and Osama Bin Laden jointly masterminded the attack on World Trade Centre on 9/11, which symbolizes their national pride. So it is an attack on national security of USA. Former US president George W. Bush used phrases like ‘terror’ ‘national security’ ‘attack’ ‘civilization’ in a very cunning manner in the post 9/11 press conferences. The result is that US people started believing that their national security is at stake, so in that pretext Mr. President designed a ‘war on terror’, which drew popular support. What USA does becomes the norm, moreover law. They can attack any forces which has even the slightest potential of being a threat to its existence. That is, who are yet to be threat.
The fact remains that Osama Bin Laden died or was killed some years back. Even, former Pakistani President General Parvez Mosharraof declared the death news of Laden in 2003. It is learnt from Pakistani intelligence sources that Bin Laden was suffering from chronic kidney diseases, which is evident from his pale look in the video messages in which he appeared in his last days. The situation was so critical that Bin Laden himself bought a dialysis machine. Indeed, the tale is not over yet, on 8/11 the previous day of the hated 9/11; Bin Laden underwent a dialysis in a Pakistani hospital. Whether he died of his kidney failure or in an attack by the US army, this is not clear yet; but Bin Laden was not there in Abbottabad for sure.
President Bush did not disclose the news because he received intelligence news that he would win the 2004 election. Any possibility that the result would have been otherwise, Bush would use the corpse as his trump card in the election. Not to forget that the majority of US people believe that al-Qaeda carried the attack on World Trade Centre! However, rest of the world does not.
Well! This is not the end of the story. The imperial mind is so profound that as Noam Chomsky says, “throughout western society no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying that with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk. The Abbottabad operation was named operation Geronimo, after the name of a valiant aboriginal fighter. So US imperial forces are shrewdly leveling al-Qaeda, bin Laden with national freedom fighters.
This is an irony.
The writer is an activist in Bangladesh. Recently, he translated Noam Chomsky's collection of interviews titled Imperial Ambitions, which is published by Samhati Prakashani. He can be reached at [email protected]
Comments are not moderated. Please be responsible and civil in your postings and stay within the topic discussed in the article too. If you find inappropriate comments, just Flag (Report) them and they will move into moderation que.
