A feast of fools - by Richard... Tuesday, May 03, 2011

A feast of fools - by Richard... Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Nothing could have been further from my mind as I scanned the morning's news yesterday than spending the best part of the day exploring the recent history of Osama Bin Laden's many deaths.

If, as increasingly seems likely, but not yet proven to any satisfactory degree, Bin Laden has finally been despatched, then all the previous commentators – including heads of state and senior government officials – who confidently asserted that the man had already been killed, were wrong. Further, the journalists who wrote the stories publicising these views were portraying falsehoods. They too were wrong.

As it stands, however – and certainly as it stood yesterday – those, including those in the US government, who were asserting that Bin Laden had now been killed were offering no more or better evidence than those who went before them.

Further, the source of the claim was the US government. And like all or any governments, it is prone to error, to deception and even outright lying. No such organisation has any right to expect trust, and anyone who unconditionally trusts any government is a fool.

Thus, as of yesterday and still, until the US government has proven its assertions, we reserve our position. We do not disbelieve the US government, but nor do we believe it. We simply expect a reasonable level of evidence which translates acceptance of its claim from one of unsupported belief to one of reasoned conclusion, thus also enabling us to reject previous claims as wrong.

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and sense would, on reading my piece, readily have divined that this was my position. Two, however, did not – one was Tim Montgomerie who used his fool machine to label me an "OBL denier" and the other Tom Harris MP, who on the basis of Montgomerie's jolly little intervention, decided on the label "nutter". That Harris is an MP and should know better does not surprise me in the least. We expect very little from our elected representatives these days.

Subsequently, however. we see reported that White House is weighing whether to release photographs of Osama bin Laden's corpse "amid calls from some key lawmakers to do so to prove the Al-Qaeda chief is truly dead".

John Brennan Obama's anti-terror adviser responds by saying: "We are going to do everything we can to make sure that nobody has any basis to try to deny that we got Osama bin Laden." And that now includes determining whether to release photograph claimed to have been taken.

"It may be necessary to release the pictures - as gruesome as they undoubtedly will be, because he's been shot in the head - to quell any doubts that this somehow is a ruse that the American government has carried out", says Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman.

Senator Susan Collins, the most senior Republican on Lieberman's committee, declares she has "absolutely no doubt" Bin Laden has been killed, but adds: "... I recognize that there will be those who will try to generate this myth that he's alive, and that we missed him somehow, and in order to put that to rest it may be necessary to release some of the pictures, or video, or the DNA test."

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, says US officials are working through whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse. "We want to make sure that we maintain dignity - if there was any - in Osama bin Laden, so that we don't inflame problems other places in the world and still provide enough evidence that people are confident that it was Osama bin Laden," he adds.

None of them have precisely got the point, but they are closer to it than either Montgomerie or Harris. It is no part of the duty of a responsible and alert citizen to believe unsupported assertions made by governments – and every bit a duty to exercise sensible scepticism. Neither governments nor anyone in authority should ever be given an easy ride. If they make claims, they should be required to support them.

Interestingly, the White House's original plan had been to bomb the house, but Obama ultimately decided against that. "The helicopter raid was riskier. It was more daring", an official said. "But he wanted proof. He didn't want to just leave a pile of rubble". The president wanted proof – which is deemed reasonable. When we ask for the same, Montgomerie and Harris would have us as "deniers" and "nutters".

The very fact that clever sophisticates like Montgomerie and Harris could not see this inconsistency, and resorted to their silly comments, tells us we have a problem. For all their cleverness, they are too gullible, too trusting. They are fools at large – dangerous to themselves and the rest of us. And there are far too many like them.

The meaning of the picture, incidentally, may be obscure, but the title of the website from which it comes makes the point. You may chose who is who.

COMMENT THREAD

6Share

Print ready

How very convenient - by Richard... Monday, May 02, 2011

Obama is in trouble, not least after putting out what is widely thought to be a forged birth certificate. And, hey presto! He suddenly announces that Bin Laden is dead, supposedly killed on Sunday in a compound in Pakistan during a raid by US Navy Seals - the day after the anniversary of Hitler's death.

This is by no means the first time Bin Laden has been pronounced dead. Diverse sources have been claiming this for some time. As early as December 2001, the Pakistani president Gen Pervez Musharraf was mooting that he had been killed by American bombardments in his mountain base of Bora Bora.

Famously, Mark Steyn, writing for The Spectator, insisted that Bin Laden was dead and, in September 2002, during an interview, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior member of al Qaida, mistakenly referred to Bin Laden in the past tense. The reporter Yosri Fouda, London bureau chief for al-Jazeera, concluded that bin Laden is now likely to be dead.

Two months later there was strong speculation from US syndicated columnist, Andy Rooney, that the al Qaeda leader was dead, on the basis of the poor quality of a recent video tape recently released. He was supported by Dale Watson, the FBI's then soon to be retiring counter-terrorism chief. "I personally think he is probably not with us anymore", said Watson.

Come March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld was raising the possibility that bin Laden was dead."The reality is that bin Laden is spending a great deal of his time - if he is alive today - hiding and running and trying to communicate and trying to survive", he said.

Then, in one of the more famous episodes, in April 2005, the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al Awsat announced that Bin Laden was dead. In April 2009 the Pakistan president, now Asif Ali Zardari, said Pakistani intelligence believed Bin Laden dead, and in September of the same year, the Daily Mail was asking: "Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the US and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?"

Now, so often has Osama Bin Laden been pronounced dead, that when Obama yesterday made his announcement, he was according to this source, at least the ninth major head of state or high-ranking government official to have done so – and that is discounting all the small-fry.

There was no hard evidence for any of these and many more earlier assertions, but a lot of serious people have strongly believed Bin Laden was dead. Now it seems, they were all wrong ... every one of them. Except that, looking at the multiple reports of Obama's current claim, there seems to be a similar lack of confirmation. He has offered no better (or more) evidence to support his claim than any of his antecedents.

Because of the profusion of rumour, claim and counter-claim, the US military has long been used to being treated with scepticism when it comes to its own claims of taking out key terrorists. When announcing successes, therefore, it has developed a routine of offering three types of evidence – photographs of the body, independent witness reports, and DNA identification evidence. A classic example was the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Even the revered Spectator dimly understands that the US treatment of the media is now different. It cites the example of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, when they were killed. Gruesome though they were, the US authorities were quick to release photographs of the pair, to still scepticism amongst Iraqis. But when it comes to Bin Laden's latest death, although Obama claimsthat the Seals "took custody of his body", we have not so far seen any official photographs.

Earlier on, The Daily Mail was claiming a "confirmed kill", showing a screen grab from Pakistan's Express TV, purporting to show bin Laden's "maimed face" (above). A better photograph was dismissed as a photoshop fake, with an illustration of how it was done here. The Guardianconfirmed that the picture was a fake that had been circulating on the internet for years.

That means that, as yet, we have absolutely no independent evidence to support Obama's claim. There cannot yet be any details from a post mortem examination as it is too early. Some might argue, though, that we also need reliable evidence that excludes any possibility of the body having been preserved. We have, after all, been there before, and there have been those persistent reports of his earlier demise.

However, the Mail promises us that "experts used facial recognition techniques to identify the slain terrorist and performed DNA tests, the results of which will be available in the coming days". WCTV Channel 5 TV is claiming that a DNA match has already been made, giving a 99.9 percent certainty of a positive identification. It was that, we are told, which gave Obama the confidence to make his claim. Interestingly though, just the laboratory procedure takes between 24-72 hours, so it hardly seems as if Obama had enough time.

Such results, if they can be trusted, might provide some evidence that Bin Laden is dead. Photographs on their own may prove of limited value as the use of doubles is not unknown. But there are also the questions of when and where Bin Laden died. These need corroboration.

As for independent tests, we are told that the body has already been buried at sea, "to avoid his grave site becoming a focus as Saddam Hussain's grave has become in Iraq". This means there can be no independent corroboration, which is asking for trouble. It is almost as if the US authorities are going out of their way to invite suspicion.

And to add to the confusion, the Taliban in Pakistan are claiming that their leader is still alive and that reports of his death are baseless. This is according to Karachi-based GEO Television, citing a statement from the group. Are they going to be setting out on a fishing expedition?

Cutting to the chase, all we have - many hours after the news has broken - is an unsupported claim by a tarnished president. The claim may be absolutely true, but at the moment we have no evidence to support it, one way or another. But this should not trouble the media and the clever sophisticates. They are so grand, and wise and knowing that they do not need troublesome things like actual evidence to support their belief systems.

Unlike us simple folk, they, and only they, are clever enough to know that US presidents never lie, have never been mistaken about anything, especially something important ... and have never been involved in botched operations. They would have it that we can safely believe everything we are told. The proof will come later - the sophisticates do not need to wait. They are so clever that they can divine the truth before it even arrives.

Of course, it adds immeasurably to the corps of evidence that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has made a statement regarding the death of Osama bin Laden. When one is a real sophisticate, what more can one possibly need? Well, a Boys' Own narrative from The Guardianhelps:

The Americans scoured the house for intelligence, took photos of the body, using facial recognition technology to compare it with pictures. It was him ... Bin Laden's body was taken to the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the Arabian Gulf. Hours later, it was wrapped in white cloth, and – after, it is said, the administration of Islamic burial rites – it was weighted and dropped from a plank into the sea. The location was not revealed.

Three journalists put their name to this, claiming ownership of it. None of them witnessed the events, or have any means of knowing that they, and the other things they wrote about, were true.

In a more cautious age, such material might have been referenced to source, with the writers standing back. But not any more. Tens of thousands of journalists, politicians and commentators blindly recycle exactly the same material, fed to them by the Obama publicity machine. Never mind the quality, feel the width. We the readers can be assured that there is no way the media would be publishing it if it was not 100 percent true.

Now that so many clever, sophisticated people have an investment in their beliefs being true, we cannot possibly permit any doubt. To doubt is to become that most venal of all creatures, a "denier". To avoid that label, you must not ask questions my child. Just shut up and believe. You know it makes sense.

And all too often, ladies and gentlemen, that is how history is made.