Security forces fired on demonstrators in six Syrian towns and cities in a day of protests that activists declared a “Friday of Defiance.” Twenty-six people died, but a withering crackdown subdued the most restive town and prevented many protesters from gathering in larger demonstrations, activists and human rights groups said.
The worst violence was reported in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, where activists described a chaotic, bloody day, as tanks entered the town. The government said 10 soldiers had been killed there by what it described as “terrorists,” while activists said at least 9 soldiers had defected to their side. Sixteen protesters were killed, they said.
“We answered the call to protest today, but the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us,” said a resident in Homs, reached by telephone.
Another resident there said the security forces fired without provocation.
“They took us by surprise,” he said by phone, over the sound of gunfire.
Both sides in the seven-week struggle claimed victories of sorts on Friday. Thousands of demonstrators gathered again in dozens of towns and cities, despite the government’s deployment of security and military forces from the Mediterranean coast to the steppe in southern Syria. But the crackdown seemed to have slowed the force of the protests, and even some of the government’s opponents acknowledged that crowds may have been smaller than on past Fridays.
While most of America is celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s worth giving credit where credit is due: he didn’t just nurse a quixotic ambition — to attack the US economy — but he also figured out how it could be done and succeeded. Perhaps he was inspired by the AIDS virus and realized that, just like triggering a deadly auto-immune reaction, the only way to attack America was to trick the US government into conducting and expanding the attack itself.
In a clear-eyed analysis of the cost of the massive convulsion called a global war on terrorism, the National Journal makes one mistake — the headline: “The Cost of bin Laden: $3 Trillion Over 15 Years.”
The real cost of al Qaeda’s attacks on US embassies, the USS Cole, New York and Washington DC was a few billion dollars. Beyond that, the additional cost was the cost of America’s overreaction.
If bin Laden and his cohorts had carefully studied the synergy through which American fearfulness, the mass media, commercial interests and political opportunism so easily combine to fuel national hysteria, they would have realized that all they needed to do was engineer a sufficiently potent catalyst (9/11), following which virtually no further effort would be required. Indeed, al Qaeda’s method of “attack” has now evolved to the point where it can attack America simply with ideas about the possibility of an attack.
It has harnessed the counterpart of asymmetric warfare which is asymmetric fear — a state of trauma in which smaller and smaller threats provoke more and more extreme reactions.
If a day ever comes when an America president can boldly declare that al Qaeda has been defeated, have little doubt that the US taxpayer will still be required to incur the massive cost of protecting this country from al Qaeda redux — an organization that has no name and in fact does not exist but lurks in the unmappable territory of the future, just waiting to pounce.
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden’s death, what’s striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we’ve gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden’s terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.
All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America’s costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.
Perhaps the biggest economic silver lining from our bin Laden spending, if there is one, is the accelerated development of unmanned aircraft. That’s our $3 trillion windfall, so far: Predator drones.
Ashley Bright was 15 years old and on her way to school in Cottonwood, Ariz., when she stopped at a friend’s house and saw the news that two planes had hit the World Trade Center.
At the time, Ms. Bright did not even know what the twin towers were. “I had no concept of what it meant,” she said Tuesday, “except that suddenly we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance again every day and having assemblies about patriotism, and everyone was flying their flags again out of nowhere.”
Young Americans, like many others, had a variety of reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden — sadness and anger at the lives he had destroyed, questions about how much safer his death made the United States. But their response, in some notable instances, was punctuated by jubilant, if not jingoistic, celebrations.
In Washington, college students spilled in front of the White House chanting “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” and puffing cigars. In State College, Pa., 5,000 students waved flags, blew vuvuzelas, and sang the national anthem and the chorus to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” Cheering students jumped into Mirror Lake at Ohio State — as they do with big football games — and swelled the Common in Boston.
Some, like Ms. Bright, thought the celebrations excessive. But they were not surprising, she and others said, in the context of how much their young lives had been shaped by Sept. 11. For them, it set off a new emphasis on patriotism, with constant reminders from teachers and parents that it is important to be proud of being an American — a striking contrast to the ambivalence of the Vietnam years that marked their parents’ generation.
The attacks were the first time they had considered that people in the rest of the world might harbor ill will toward Americans. The experience established the world in polarities of black and white, with Bin Laden being the new emblem of evil.
“I probably wouldn’t be as appreciative of living in America if I hadn’t seen 9/11 happen and grown up in this time,” said Ms. Bright, now a graduate student at American University.
“We carry the weight of it more because our entire adult lives have been during a time of war,” she said. “The strong reaction is because it’s the first goal that has been met that we can take ownership of.”
You can’t talk like a five-year old without ending up thinking like a five-year old, yet this is the mentality many Americans bring to bear when they look at the world through the prism of 9/11.
America is at war with “bad guys” and on Monday morning “we got him” — the baddest guy of all.
To the non-American ear there is something at turns amusing then disturbing about the fact that full-grown adults, including literate and less literate presidents, can, without any sense of irony, use this kind of comic-book language. Yet beneath these simplistic expressions is a sense of innocence that Americans cling to, born from the notion that this is a nation that can do no wrong; that at worst America can be misguided but its errors will ultimately never obscure its intrinsic virtue.
What 9/11 and its aftermath did was to widen the gap between the way America sees itself and the way it is seen by the world. If some of us might have hoped that this nation had grown up a bit over the last decade, there has been little evidence of that over the last few days.
On Thursday, President Obama was presented with an opportunity that had slipped through the fingers of his two predecessors: to “take out” Osama bin Laden.
At a moment when hesitation might have been seen as risking political suicide (Obama could have been destroyed by knowledge that he dithered and let America’s nemesis take flight), the president did just that: he put off making a decision.
Why? We’ll probably never know, but the fact was, the timing was awkward. A strike in Pakistan in the early hours of Friday would have happened at the same time that the global media’s attention was focused on London. A royal wedding and two billion viewers’ eyes represented an advertising cash-cow that few news producers would be willing to drag themselves away from.
The wedding played out and payed off just as everyone had hoped and within hours was to be followed by a drama hot enough to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
US special forces swept into Pakistan and during an intense firefight ended the life and career of the most wanted terrorist on the planet. Faced by the overwhelming power of US Navy Seals, bin Laden acted just the way we’d been led to expect an evil low-life would: he used his wife as a human shield and tried to save his own skin. But justice was served — at least justice as a form of storytelling.
Only after bin Laden’s bloody body had been dumped in the Indian ocean did a more accurate and less glorious narrative emerge. This is the story that Hollywood will have a hard time telling.
The firefight was over before soldiers had even entered bin Laden’s house — a house on the edge of town, not a luxury mansion on an imposing hilltop.
Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation, when Bin Laden’s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, opened fire from behind the door of the guesthouse adjacent to the house where Bin Laden was hiding.
After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.
They simply located, shot and killed the remaining men in the house. The surviving women and nine children had their hands bound and were then left in the company of the dead — with the exception of bin Laden and his son whose bodies were removed.
Bin Laden’s 12-year-old daughter Safia is said to have witnessed her father’s death. Will Americans ever hear her story? Are the expressions on her face or those of any of the other children still etched in the memories of the soldiers who killed their parents? If so, will those memories ever be recounted or must they be consigned to a national security vault of silence?
The story of 9/11 that America has been telling itself for ten years is what drove young people to the streets to celebrate bin Laden’s death in the early hours of Monday morning, but it’s not a story that resonates much beyond these shores. It is and never was an axis around which the world was meant to revolve.
In a letter to one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, Moez Mobeen from Islamabad, explains why the 9/11 narrative has such little meaning in a region which for most Americans is defined by the 2001 attacks.
It has long been argued by western thinkers and strategists especially the policymakers that the West is not at war with the Muslim world; that it does not believe in the clash of civilisations and that the Muslim World generally does not have any reservations about the foreign policies pursued by the western nations. This was the point which Obama emphasised in his speech announcing the death of Osama bin Laden. Whatever the American narrative be, it is certain that the Muslim world does not believe in it. It is all but obvious that Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, Mullah Omer’s Taliban, Tahir Yuldashev’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Ahmad Yasin’s Hamas, Abu Sayyaf’s Harkat ul Islamiyah, to name a few, are reactionary movements formed to protest and fight against foreign policies pursued by the West with regard to the Muslim world. Obama may try to present these movements as the common enemies of humanity but the fact remains that for the Muslim world these movements are resistance movements fighting the imperial forces and their allies. If indeed it is the slaughter of Muslims which worries Obama then how does he justify the death of over one million Muslims in Iraq after the US imposed a brutal and destructive war there? How does he account for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan at the hands of the US forces?
The Muslim world does not view its relationship with the West through the prism of the 9/11; it does not think that the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq are legitimate. It sees its relationship with the West with regards to the foreign policies of the western countries. Justice may have been done and closure achieved for the families who suffered losses on 9/11, but the Muslim world stills mourns the death of millions of its sons and daughters with no justice and no closure in sight.
The American story is a story of power and virtue we keep telling ourselves as though it would quickly be forgotten or disbelieved if not reinforced through constant repetition. Yet what might be conceived as a form of self- and national affirmation serves no good if it refuses to accommodate reality. If our self-image is not informed and modified by the perceptions of others, it is no more than a conceit — a picture we can only believe in by refusing to see ourselves through the eyes of others.
Troops loyal to Colonel Gaddafi continued to shell the port of Misrata on Wednesday as a British-funded rescue ship docked to deliver 180 tons of relief supplies.
Passengers quickly boarded the Red Star One, which left Misrata carrying about 800 migrants, journalists and wounded Libyans. At least four people were reportedly killed in the latest attack on the port.
When the bloody siege of this isolated city began, the rebels who rose against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s conventional army had almost no firearms. Many of them relied on hands, knives and stones.
Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.
The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.
The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.
On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.
In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.
Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.
The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.
In his harshest comments to date on the situation in Libya, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a regional power broker, told reporters here on Tuesday that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had chosen “blood, tears, oppression” and that he must “immediately step down.”
Turkey has historic and business ties to Libya, and during more than two months of conflict it has tried to act as an intermediary between Colonel Qaddafi’s government and the rebels seeking his ouster. As a result, each side has accused Turkey of favoring the other, or of hedging its bets.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan appeared to draw a line, saying during a televised news conference that Colonel Qaddafi had violently resisted calls for change and that he must leave power for the good of the country and the Libyan people.
“Muammar Qaddafi, instead of taking our suggestions into account, refraining from shedding blood or seeking for ways to maintain the territorial unity of Libya, chose blood, tears, oppression and attacks on his own people,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Now, at this stage, the thing that needs to be done is Muammar Qaddafi to immediately step down from power that he holds in Libya.”
About 25,000 Turkish workers were engaged in major construction projects in Libya at the beginning of the unrest in February, and Turkey led an extensive evacuation operation for its citizens and others. The two countries began a visa agreement last year, allowing Libyan citizens to stay in Turkey for at least three months without a visa and signaling a turn in diplomatic and business relations.
A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Mr. Erdogan had spoken with Colonel Qaddafi three times in private, “urging him to step down peacefully and allow establishment of an administration to reflect people’s demands,” but that Colonel Qaddafi had refused.
We know Osama bin Laden wasn’t armed when he was shot and killed. We know he wasn’t hiding behind a woman. What we’ve yet to find out are the exact orders that were given to whoever pulled the trigger, but so far mounting evidence suggests that in the early hours of Monday morning, US Navy SEALs conducted an execution under the direction of President Obama.
Update: In a White House press briefing today, Jay Carney provided clarification on the execution order, which is to say that bin Laden would have been taken captive if he had made it clear that he wanted to surrender.
The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender, in which case the team was required to accept his surrender, if the team could do so safely.
Carney did not respond when a reporter asked whether any of the US servicemen in the operation spoke Arabic.
Meanwhile, testifying in Congress Attorney General Eric Holder said that even if bin Laden had attempted to surrender, US Navy SEALs would have been justified in killing him.
A senior Pakistani security official told ABC News, the bin Laden was killed in front of his 13-year old daughter. In photographs published by Reuters showing three of the men killed in the compound, no weapons could be seen.
While many nations suffered from al-Qaida’s terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden’s death, the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation.
The national unity that Barack Obama has sought to harness following the announcement is indeed eerily familiar. Albeit in joy rather than sorrow, it’s the same kind of unity that followed 9/11. It is also the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection. And however comforting it may have been at the time, the consequences of that kind of unity has been disastrous.
The reason Bin Laden’s death was a source of such elation is in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure. Two thirds of the people believe that the Iraq invasion was not worth it, and the country is evenly divided on the issue of whether the invasion Afghanistan is a good idea. The public mostly supports keeping Guantánamo open – but nonetheless concedes that doing so will fuel anti-American sentiment.
So the frustration of the last decade, during which the limits of America’s military superiority were tested and found wanting, had their outlet in the murder of a single man at the hands of a crack team of US Navy Seals.
Having effectively declared war on the world it is hardly a surprise that Bin Laden would come to this kind of end.
This was not so much the exercise of American power as the performance of it. Coming eight years to the day after George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce “Mission accomplished” in Iraq, news of Bin Laden’s death was yet another mediated milestone in this war on an abstract noun. Like the capture of Saddam Hussein, the murder of Bin Laden changes little. Al-Qaida was never a top-down organisation, and was in decline anyhow – and the principal reason for its waning fortunes is the uprisings in the Arab world, revolts that have mostly taken place against America’s client states.
But to suggest that “justice has been done”, as President Obama did on Sunday night, seems perverse. This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.
America resembles the land of the munchkins, as it celebrates the death of the Wicked Witch of the East. The joy is understandable, but in some respects, unattractive. It endorses what looks increasingly like a cold-blooded assassination ordered by a president who, as a former law professor, knows the absurdity of his statement that “justice was done”. Amoral diplomats and triumphant politicians join in applauding Bin Laden’s summary execution because they claim real justice – arrest, trial and sentence would have been too difficult in the case of Bin Laden. But in the long-term interests of a better world, should it not at least have been attempted?
That future depends on a respect for international law. The circumstances of Bin Laden’s killing are as yet unclear and the initial objection that the operation was an illegitimate invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty must be rejected. Necessity required the capture of this indicted and active international criminal and Pakistan’s abject failure (whether through incompetence or connivance) justified Obama’s order for an operation to apprehend him. However, the terms of that order, as yet undisclosed, are all important. Bill Clinton admitted recently to having secretly approved teh assassination of Bin Laden by the CIA after the US embassy bombings in the1990s, while President Bush publicly said after 9/11 that he wanted Bin Laden’s head on a plate. Did President Obama order his capture, or his execution?
Al-Qaida strategists, propagandists, operatives and supporters will be relieved that Osama bin Laden, their iconic figurehead, died a martyr and was not captured alive and imprisoned to stand trial. To this extent the strategists determining US counterterrorism policy have shown a disregard for effective counterterrorism and instead fostered continuity with the war on terror which has boosted, rather than diminished, global support for al-Qaida since 9/11.
When Tony Blair and George Bush stood shoulder to shoulder in the aftermath of 9/11 it was clear to both leaders that military responses would replace criminal investigations as the preferred tools of counterterrorism. Sadly, in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the globe, the war on terror resulted in the deaths of far more civilians than suspected terrorists – whether high profile like Bin Laden or lesser and unknown known figures operating in the name of al-Qaida.
As a result, the war on terror lost moral authority and became a gift to al-Qaida propagandists. The fact that the most effective counterterrorism is always closely focused on the prosecution of terrorist conspirators appeared to be of no concern in the Pentagon or Whitehall.
According to al-Qaida propagandist Saif al-Adl, 9/11 was intended to provoke the US to “lash out militarily against the ummah” in the manner if not the scale of “the war on terror”.
“The Americans took the bait,” he continues, “and fell into our trap” – no doubt using hindsight to describe al-Qaida’s ability to predict the massive scale and range of the military responses to 9/11.
Al Qaeda is the most successful terrorist organization in history. By destroying the World Trade Centre in New York on 9/11 it provoked the US into launching wars damaging to itself in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Qaeda aimed to destroy the status quo in the Middle East and it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
Its success has not been all its own doing. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two and chief strategist, wrote at the time of 9/11 that the aim of the group was to lure the US into an over-reaction in which it would “wage battle against the Muslims.” Once the US was committed to a ground war, and no longer exercised its power primarily through local surrogates, the way would be open for Muslims to launch a jihad against America. By over-reacting, President Bush, aided by Tony Blair, responded to 9/11 very much as al-Qaeda would have wished.
In the decade since the attack on the Twin Towers “terrorist experts” and governments have frequently portrayed al-Qaeda as a tightly organized group located in north-west Pakistan. From some secret headquarters its tentacles reach out across the world, feeding recruits, expertise and money to different battlefronts.
Al-Qaeda has never operated like that. The closest it ever came to being a sort of Islamic Comintern was when it had several hundred militants based in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in 1996-2001. Even at that time, when it could operate more or less freely in the Afghan mountains, its numbers were so small that it would hire local tribesmen by the day to be filmed for al-Qaeda propaganda videos, showing its men marching and training.
Premature death offers the surest path to immortality.
No, that isn’t a metaphysical statement; just a rather prosaic observation.
Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John F Kennedy, Malcolm X and now Osama bin Laden — all will forever be remembered through iconic images that capture their vitality, untarnished by age and infirmity.
The war on terrorism made pitifully little sense other than in symbolic terms, yet even in these terms the US has consistently been the loser.
9/11 was an offense to American pride — how could the greatest, most powerful nation on earth be brought to its knees by a small band of young men armed with box cutters?
Apparently, the only way to restore American pride and reinvigorate American power was to go on a rampage across the Middle East, kill hundreds of thousands of people and then, in what most Americans would gladly see as the final act, execute America’s archenemy. If we bankrupted ourselves along the way, it was all in the name of the most noble cause: the war between good and evil.
But evil can only be effectively externalized and symbolically vanquished if we simultaneously indulge in the willful suppression of awareness. The destruction of al Qaeda has only been a plausible objective for as long as we remain dreamily wedded to our own sense of innocence.
Elliot Abrams, a man still guided by his own dream images of the Middle East, writes:
The timing of Osama bin Laden’s death is perfect, coming during the Arab Spring. Al Qaeda’s message that violence, terrorism and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and throughout the Arab lands.
Al Qaeda and its view of the world are being pushed aside in favor of demands for new governments, free elections, freedom of speech and assembly and an end to corruption. Bin Laden’s death weakens Al Qaeda and Salafi movements further by taking away their most powerful symbol.
But on the contrary, what bin Laden’s death has achieved is to terminate the real life of a fugitive and leave behind nothing but the powerful symbol.
While in the eyes of Americans bin Laden came to symbolize violence, in the eyes of those who looked up to him as “Sheikh Osama” he symbolized a beacon of defiance in a region where for too long subservient populations had acquiesced to authoritarian rule by leaders who were themselves subservient to American interests.
As a political awakening now erupts across the region, a narrow violent Islamist movement has not so much been rejected as it has been superseded by a broad, youthful, partially non-violent, popular movement.
Even if the Middle East’s young revolutionaries have no organizational links or ideological sympathies with al Qaeda and its affiliates, the jihadists can nevertheless be viewed as a historical precursor to the Arab Spring in as much as they too rejected the political legitimacy of the region’s American-backed autocratic rulers.
To the extent that commentators portray the uprisings as ideologically non-violent, this seems to say more about the way Americans across the political spectrum have in the post 9/11 era been conditioned to view political violence, than it says about the nature of the Middle East’s ongoing revolutions. If one wants to praise the uprisings it is only politically correct to do so if one also praises their ostensible non-violent character.
Nowhere has this image of non-violence been held up more frequently than in the coverage of the Egyptian revolution, but as Egyptian journalist and blogger, Hossam el-Hamalawy, writes, this image is a fabrication.
One of the biggest myths invented by the media, tied to this whole Gene Sharp business: the Egyptian revolution was “peaceful.” I’m afraid it wasn’t. The revolution (like any other revolution) witnessed violence by the security forces that led to the killing of at least 846 protesters.
But the people did not sit silent and take this violence with smiles and flowers. We fought back. We fought back the police and Mubarak’s thugs with rocks, Molotov cocktails, sticks, swords and knives. The police stations which were stormed almost in every single neighborhood on the Friday of Anger–that was not the work of “criminals” as the regime and some middle class activists are trying to propagate. Protesters, ordinary citizens, did that.
Egyptians understand well what a police station is for. Every family has a member who got abused, tortured or humiliated by the local police force in his/her neighborhood. And I’m not even talking here about the State Security Police torture factories. I’m talking about the “ordinary police.”
Along with dispelling the myth of non-violence, maybe it’s time we stopped calling this an Arab Spring — or at least remember that spring brings tornadoes and storms and not just flowers and birdsong.
“As crowds gathered outside the White House, there was little question that Mr. Obama’s presidency had forever been changed.” That’s the caption the New York Times put under the photo below.
David Axelrod might have preferred this event to have occurred closer to the end of Obama’s reelection campaign, though accusations that the news was being timed to serve partisan political interests would have been even harder to refute than they are now.
“Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan, President Obama announced on Sunday night,” is the lead in the New York Times main report.
US forces on a mission to kill or capture (not capture or kill) bin Laden, killed him “in a firefight” in Pakistan. At least that’s what the Times reports. Only further into the report does it reiterate what Obama actually said: “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
The White House chooses its words carefully. If bin Laden was killed during the firefight then it’s reasonable to assume that this is exactly what Obama would have said. To say that the al Qaeda leader was killed after a firefight seems to suggest he was executed.
The exact manner in which the death occurred may explain why, at least thus far, no photographic evidence has been released. If bin Laden was indeed executed it was most likely for political reasons.
Bin Laden’s capture could surely have provided an intelligence bonanza of inestimable value. His subsequent trial would indeed have been a compelling demonstration of what it should mean to deliver justice. But it would also have opened a can of worms.
If bin Laden had been tried in front of a military tribunal then yet again this government would be undermining the strength of the criminal justice system. If on the other hand he was tried in a civilian court, it would be hard for the administration to justify its continued use of military tribunals for any terrorism-related cases.
During a trial, there would be no predicting what kind of strategically damaging information might have been revealed that could have affected US relations with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or other Gulf nations.
And then there would be the headache of deciding where the trial could take place.
Just over a year ago, it was Attorney General Eric Holder who assured Congress that there was no risk of bin Laden ever being read his Miranda rights.
“The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. … He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that,” Holder said emphatically.
“Dead men don’t talk,” is a truth esteemed by those who value secrets, but the fact that bin Laden’s death leaves so many questions unanswered means that he will remain a potent force for those who want to promote conspiracy theories of every variety. The celebrations in this “victory” will likely be quite short-lived.
The fact that bin Laden was found in a compound in a wealthy retirement community populated in large part by former Pakistani military officers raises dire questions about the relationship of the Pakistani army and its intelligence community to radical Islamic terrorists. For the past decade, as America has poured billions into a country where about one in a hundred citizens pays income taxes, the Pakistani military/intelligence complex has gone into the looking-for-bin-Laden business. Now, they are out of business. If it is true that Pakistani intelligence was helpful in locating bin Laden, and kept that matter secret, then we can begin to sort out our fraught relationship with that troubled country on a more equitable, trusting basis. If that turns out not to be the case, then there will be a dreadful reckoning to come.
Al Qaeda and its followers will be attempting to make a powerful statement in the next several weeks to demonstrate that they are still relevant following this mighty loss. Al Qaeda affiliates may speed up operations that were in the pipeline. The recent bombing in Marrakesh and the arrests in Germany demonstrate that Al Qaeda continues to have enthusiastic, entrepreneurial operatives that are eager to make their own mark on history.
The fact that bin Laden had found refuge close to Islamabad may or may not reveal a role played by individuals in Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment, but perhaps more importantly it should serve as a reminder of what was already known in 2001: that al Qaeda never was an organization tied to a particular place.
[F]or the Muslim world, bin Laden has already been made irrelevant by the Arab Spring that underlined the meaning of peoples power through peaceful means.
It is also worth recalling that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and its affiliates have killed far more Arabs and Muslims than they did Westerners.
And it was only after they failed to garner real support in the Arab world that they ran back to Afghanistan and began to target the West.
After long hijacking Arab and Muslim causes through its bloody attacks on Western targets, al-Qaeda has been discredited since 9/11 and its organisational capacity diminished by Western counter terror measures.
Al-Qaeda’s bin Laden has provided the Bush administration with the excuse to launch its disastrous and costly wars in the greater Middle East.
As expected, Washington’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to provide al-Qaeda with fresh recruits and support in the Muslim world and perpetuate a cycle of violence that ripped through the region for the last decade.
However, it has been the more implicit and less costly US and Western intelligence services that succeeded to a large degree in curtailing al-Qaeda activities, limiting the movement of its leaders that eventually led to his killing.
So what will this mean for the US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Certainly Washington has less reason or justification to wage a war in Afghanistan now that bin Laden is no more.
It might also find more readiness among certain Taliban leaders in the absence of the thorniest issue of al-Qaeda, to make a deal that insures a power sharing arrangement in favour of the Taliban in return for curbing the use of Afghanistan by al-Qaeda to export “terrorism”.
Bin Laden will continue to be a distraction for the short term, and especially if some of al-Qaeda groups muster revenge attacks.
But in the long term, it is the historical transformations in the Arab and Muslim world that will eventually close the book on al-Qaeda.
A Taliban commander in Afghanistan has promised that his fighters would mount attacks to avenge the killing by US forces of Osama bin Laden.
The commander, who gave his name as Qudos and operates in the northern province of Baghlan, said: “The killing of Osama bin Laden will bring no change to jihad. Osama is the leader of al-Qaida and he is a powerful man in jihad. Losing him will be very painful for the mujahideen, but the shahadat [martyrdom] of Osama, will never stop the jihad. We will continue our fight until we liberate our lands from the Kafirs.”
He said his fighters planned to launch an operation called Bader “to avenge the killing of Osama” and claimed many other similar operations would be launched.
A Taliban fighter — who had what seemed like a British accent but said he was Afghan — told the Guardian there was still a lot of suspicion among the Taliban about whether the news of Bin Laden’s death was true. But he added: “Even if he is dead, I don’t think it will make any difference to our fight. He is just one of thousands of fighters, and from a different organisation.”
A Yemeni jihadi who goes by the name of Omar claimed the death of Bin Laden would not stop al-Qaida insurgents mounting attacks. “I am not fighting for Bin Laden to stop fighting if he is killed, we are not people who worship figures, he – may God have mercy on him – is a brave man who created and led the jihad but it will not stop here and now look what is happening with all the dictators, they are falling because we have been fighting them for so long and that’s thanks to the ways of the Sheikh the shahid [the Sheikh the martyr]. Many brothers will I am sure be planning revenge attacks at the moment.”
The dilemma of what to do with Osama bin Laden’s body appears to have been quickly resolved if reports that he has been buried at sea prove correct.
Burying him on land could have led to his grave becoming a centre of contention as well as raising questions about where he should be buried.
“Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult,” a US official said, adding: “So the US decided to bury him at sea.”
Fears about Bin Laden’s burial place turning into a shrine for Islamists were probably unfounded, since the Wahhabi/Salafi tradition rejects such things. Even Saudi kings are buried in unmarked graves.
Senior US officials initially told news agencies that his body would be disposed of in accordance with Islamic tradition, which involves ritual washing, shrouding and burial within 24 hours.
Although the swift burial complies with Islamic custom and should therefore avoid causing any offence in Muslim countries, the apparent haste could lead to claims that the person killed was not really Bin Laden – though the US authorities have taken DNA samples and appear to have no doubts.
The 24-hour rule has not always been applied by the US in the past. For example, the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein – sons of the Iraqi dictator – were held for 11 days before being released for burial.
Burial at sea is rare in Islam, though several Muslim websites say it is permitted in certain circumstances.
One is on a long voyage where the body may decay before the ship reaches land. The other is if there is a risk of enemies digging up a land grave and exhuming or mutilating the body – a rule that could plausibly be applied in Bin Laden’s case.
For sea burial, according to alislam.org, the body should be lowered into the water “in a vessel of clay or with a weight tied to its feet”. The website adds: “As far as possible it should not be lowered at a point where it is eaten up immediately by the sea predators.”
The Libyan regime’s claims that Nato is attempting to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi have intensified following the apparent death of one of the leader’s sons and three of his grandchildren in an air strike on Tripoli.
Gaddafi was at the one-storey house in a residential area of Tripoli when the missile struck late on Saturday, according to the government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.
In a rare acknowledgement that security around Gaddafi may not be watertight, Ibrahim told reporters that intelligence about Gaddafi’s whereabouts or plans must have been leaked to Nato. (The Guardian)
The claim that Muammar Qaddafi’s three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike conducted by NATO late Saturday is not true, an Al Arabiya source has revealed. A source close to the Qaddafi family has confirmed the death of Colonel Qaddafi’s youngest son, Saif al-Arab, in the airstrike but has denied the story that Mr. Qaddafi’s three grandsons were killed. (Al Arabiya)
Shashank Joshi writes: The death of Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, if confirmed, is likely to have come as a consequence of Nato’s increasingly aggressive tactics, undertaken by the alliance to shake up a stalemate in the conflict.
But his killing in an air strike is a grievous strategic error – militarily insignificant but diplomatically disastrous.
Towards the end of April, Nato states made a number of operational innovations. Three member states – Britain, France, and Italy – injected military advisers into rebel-held eastern Libya. Another, the US, began continuous patrols of armed drones.
Third, and most important, air strikes began to target command, control, communications and intelligence networks (known, in military parlance, as C3I). The Bab al-Aziziya compound includes all three such networks, and it was presumed that their disruption would disorient regime soldiers on the front line, cut off field commanders from Tripoli, and sow confusion in the ranks.
But was the strike also an assassination attempt?
Assassination of a head of state is illegal under international law, and forbidden by various US presidential orders. On the other hand, the targeted killing of those woven into the enemy chain of command is shrouded in legal ambiguity. (BBC News)
Britain has ordered the expulsion of the Libyan ambassador to London, Omar Jelban, in retaliation for an attack on the British embassy by a pro-Gaddafi crowd in Tripoli.
Jelban has been given 24 hours to leave the country.
“I condemn the attacks on the British embassy premises in Tripoli as well as the diplomatic missions of other countries,” said the foreign secretary, William Hague. “The Vienna convention requires the Gaddafi regime to protect diplomatic missions in Tripoli. By failing to do so that regime has once again breached its international responsibilities and obligations. I take the failure to protect such premises very seriously indeed.” (The Guardian)
They sniff with contempt at a passing car filled with Moammar Kadafi’s supporters. They turn up the volume on Al Jazeera just when a report chronicling the government’s attacks on civilians in rebel-held Misurata comes on.
Or they make a cryptic remark, like the driver working with the government minders assigned to monitor foreign reporters.
“God willing, spring will come soon,” he said.
But spring began weeks ago.
“God willing, in two weeks,” he said with a smile.
“Two weeks” is the time in which Libyans have been assuring themselves that their nightmare will come to an end. (Los Angeles Times)
Pro-Gaddaffi forces have been seen roaming the streets of Misurata wearing gas masks, contacts in Libya’s besieged city have reported to timesofmalta.com .
Sources at the hospital confirmed that pro regime troops were wearing gas masks. An independent source said there were reports that thousands of gas masks had been distributed to troops yesterday. (Times of Malta)
Shattered glass litters the carpet at the Libyan Down’s Syndrome Society, and dust covers pictures of grinning children that adorn the hallway, thrown into darkness by a NATO strike early on Saturday.
It was unclear what the target of the strike was, though Libyan officials said it was Muammar Gaddafi himself, who was giving a live television address at the time.
“They maybe wanted to hit the television. This is a non-military, non-governmental building,” said Mohammed al-Mehdi, head of the civil societies council, which licenses and oversees civil groups in Libya. (Reuters)
David Kenner writes: Bashar al-Assad never saw it coming. In a Jan. 31 interview with the Wall Street Journal, the Syrian autocrat boasted that his regime was immune from the revolutionary wave spreading across the Middle East because it “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”
Over the past month and a half, Syrians have made a liar out of their president. Small protests broke out in Damascus on March 15 and have slowly spread to towns and cities throughout the country. And as the movement has gained strength, Assad’s crackdown has increased in brutality. The Syrian regime has killed at least 450 people since the uprising began, according to human rights groups, and this week sent tanks into the mutinous southern town of Daraa to quell the protests.
So far, the regime’s attempts to quash the demonstrations have only caused them to increase in size. Tens of thousands of Syrians came out to the protests this Friday, with crowds demonstrating in more than 50 towns throughout the country. The protests’ growing strength has produced a reaction in Washington: Following days of escalating statements, President Barack Obama issued new sanctions today against three of the regime’s most notorious officials, including Bashar’s brother, Maher al-Assad. The U.N. Human Rights Council also denounced Assad’s use of violence against peaceful protesters on Friday, calling for a team to visit Syria in order to “ensur[e] full accountability” for those who perpetrated the attacks.
So who’s leading the charge against Assad? The president has accumulated no shortage of enemies over his decade-long rule, many of whom have little in common besides their enmity toward the Syrian president. If he continues his ruthless crackdown, however, it just may be enough to unite them. (Foreign Policy)
When protests erupted in March in the forlorn Syrian border town of Dara’a, demonstrators burned the president’s portraits, then set ablaze an unlikely target: the local office of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Syriatel, whose owner sits at the nexus of anger and power in a restive country.
Syriatel is owned by Rami Makhlouf, first cousin and childhood friend of President Bashar al-Assad and the country’s most powerful businessman. In the past decade, he has emerged as a strength and a liability of a government that finds its bastions of support shrinking and a figure to watch as Mr. Assad’s inner circle tries to deal with protests shaking his family’s four decades of rule.
Leery of the limelight, he is alternatively described as the Assad family’s banker or Mr. Five Percent (or 10, or whatever share gets the deal done). His supporters praise him for his investment in Syria, but they are far outnumbered by detractors, who have derided him in protests as a thief or worse. Sometimes more than Mr. Assad himself, he has become the lightning rod of dissent.
“We’ll say it clearly,” went a chant in Dara’a. “Rami Makhlouf is robbing us.”
Egypt had Ahmed Ezz, the steel magnate who favored tight Italian suits (and now faces trial in white prison garb). In Tunisia, it was Leila Traboulsi, the hairdresser who became the president’s wife, then a symbol of the extravagance of the ruling family. Mr. Makhlouf, 41, is Syria’s version, a man at the intersection of family privilege, clan loyalty, growing avarice and, perhaps most dangerously, the yawning disconnect between ruler and ruled that already reshaped authoritarian Syria even before the protests. (New York Times)
Zvi Bar’el writes: Israel’s Pavlovian response to Palestinian reconciliation, which included the usual threats of boycott, is the result of the ingrained anxiety of people who no longer control the process. For five years, Israel has done everything to change the outcome of Hamas’ watershed victory in the elections in the territories. It did not recognize the Hamas government or the unity government, and of course, it did not recognize the Hamas government that arose after that organization’s brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza became a synonym for Hamas; that is, for terror, and the West Bank stood for the land of unlimited possibilities. Israel made an enormous contribution toward building up Hamas into an institution, not only an organization. The cruel closure of Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, turning Gaza into a battle zone and the saga of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, with Israel continuing to negotiate with Hamas while striking out against it – all this has transformed Gaza into a symbol of the occupation and a focus of international empathy.
Israel, in its diplomatic blindness, saw the product it helped manufacture as a huge diplomatic achievement. Its working assumption was that the split between Gaza and the West Bank would allow Israel to pursue the appearance of negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while fighting another part of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel interpreted the political conflict between Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and Khaled Meshal in Damascus as an unsolvable ideological conflict and a reality in which, in Israel’s thinking, Palestine is divided not only into two regions, but into two mutually hostile peoples. Israel tortures one side while celebrating with the other at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of a shopping center. (Haaretz)
Israel has suspended tax transfers to the Palestinians, its finance minister said on Sunday, fearing the money will be used to fund Hamas after President Mahmoud Abbas struck a unity deal with the Islamists.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), led by U.S.-backed Abbas, asked foreign powers to stop Israel from blocking the transfers, which make up 70 percent of its revenues. A senior Palestinian official said Israel, by its action, had “started a war.”
Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said he had suspended a routine handover of 300 million shekels ($88 million) in customs and other levies that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians under interim peace deals. (Reuters)
Serious differences have emerged within Iran’s top leadership, media reports suggest, pitting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, against Aytollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
Ahmadinejad has boycotted cabinet meetings since Heider Moslehi, the intelligence minister, was reinstated after he was forced out of the government.
Moslehi was restored to the powerful post by Khamenei after Ahmadinejad had forced him to resign on April 17.
Ahmadinejad’s opponents, meanwhile, have seized the opportunity.
According to the Shargh newspaper, a group of 216 lawmakers, more than two-third of the 290 members in the Iranian parliament, have issued a letter to Ahmadinejad, urging him to call off his cabinet boycott for the good of the country.
“You are expected to follow the supreme leader,” the lawmakers wrote.
On Friday, a hardline cleric used his nationally broadcast sermon to indirectly warn Ahmadinejad that he would be moving into dangerous territory by escalating his challenges to Khamenei.
“Obedience to the supreme leader is a religious obligation as well as a legal obligation, without any doubt,” Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said. He did not mention Ahmadinejad by name, but it was clear he was referring to the president. (Al Jazeera)
John Norris writes: In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly say they believe that foreign aid makes up a larger portion of the federal budget than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or spending on roads and other infrastructure. In a November World Public Opinion poll, the average American believed that a whopping 25 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent also thought that the appropriate level of foreign aid would be about 10 percent of the budget — 10 times the current level.
Compared with our military and entitlement budgets, this is loose change. Since the 1970s, aid spending has hovered around 1 percent of the federal budget. International assistance programs were close to 5 percent of the budget under Lyndon B. Johnson during the war in Vietnam, but have dropped since. (Washington Post)
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