Osama bin Laden

Casting my eye around today’s newspaper front pages, all of which announced yesterday’s death of Osama bin Laden, I wasn’t surprised to see some pretty salty headlines.  Though I do admit to being slightly surprised that quite so many were quite so extreme. 

While the New York Times demurely stated, ‘Bin Laden killed by US forces in Pakistan, Obama says, declaring justice has been done’, its city-mate the New York Post opted for the more striking ‘Got him!  Vengeance at last!  US nails the bastard'.  Called me old fashioned, but… two exclamation marks, and a swear-word, before your cornflakes?

The Chicago Sun-Times simply had ‘Dead’, while the Salt Lake Tribune subtly improved on this with ‘Dead.’  -  the finality of the full-stop giving a sense of closure, I feel.  Back in Blighty, wags at The Sun hit upon ‘Bin Bagged’.  Not to be outdone, and probably winning the award for the most unpleasant headline of the day, was the Daily News, with ‘Rot in hell’. 

Finally, I also stumbled upon David Icke’s website, which contains what appears to be an out-of-date reference to a much older story – claiming as it does that, ‘Osama bin Laden has been dead for years’.

But beyond the lurid front pages, the really surprising thing was that no news source I’ve seen has pointed out the fact that the operation was completely illegal from start to finish.

Invasion of Pakistan

The US military has been using unmanned drones to carry out unauthorised airstrikes in Pakistan for a number of years now, which not only demonstrate America’s hypocritical disdain for national sovereignty, but have killed hundreds of innocent civilians.  Until recently, complaints from the Pakistani authorities have been minimal, for two reasons – to maintain good relations with the US, and to avoid looking pathetic at home.  But over the last year, they’ve been increasingly vocal in their criticism of bombing raids on their soil.  

Yet in the aftermath of the Bin Laden operation, the latest of these strikes, the US army has remained unapologetic in confirming that the Pakistani government wasn’t even informed it was going to happen, let alone consulted about its planning.

To add insult to injury, one main strand of commentary to emerge over the last 24 hours – notably espoused by John Simpson on the BBC news – has been that serecy from Pakistan was justified, on the grounds that the situation raises implications of Pakistani incompetence, or even complicity in Bin Laden’s hiding. 

Assassination

Even in Iraq, that other great military adventure conducted in the face of the law, Saddam Hussein was captured and put on trial.  (Whatever citicisms people may have had regarding the legal process and the execution.) 

By contrast, in the bin Laden case, a summary execution was conducted by soldiers - and so brutally, that the photographs of body are too "gruesome" to be released.  No attempt was made to bring him to even the pretence of justice, despite the fact that the US army state he was unarmed when they found him.

Body dumped

The army has stated that his body was ‘buried at sea’, but with no apparent explanation.  According to a cursory look through an atlas, the assassination was about 800 miles from the nearest sea.  This means that it was in no way a convenient place to put him, but a deliberate mafia-style dumping. 

While it makes tactical sense (more on ‘tactics’ later) that no one would want a martyr's grave on their hands, this does seem an extraordinary move.  To kill someone without an arrest or a trial, and then to conceal the body without a coroner’s report is just plain suspicious.

Capitalist Realism

Mark Fisher’s 2009 book, 'Capitalist Realism', argues that in order to maintain a façade of credibility, capitalism requires the abstract character of the ‘referrent Other’ to believe its own lies.  Even if everyone knows that the system is mad and wrong, order can be maintained as long as no powerful figure publicly acknowledges this fact. 

For example, it doesn't matter that everyone knows the Blair government lied to us over Iraq, and that it was a war for oil - as long as no one in government admits that they lied, or that the war was indeed for oil.  As soon as someone admits the truth however, all hell will break loose – even though everyone knew the score already. 

Despite this, it does seem that governments these days are starting to ignore this code of conduct, and are becoming more blasé.  We are increasingly told: “Hello!  We’ve done something outrageous!  And we don’t care whether you like it or not!”  Increasingly it seems to be that powerful nations justify their actions on the basis of their tactical or even financial benefits, as opposed to whether they stand up to legal or moral scrutiny. 

Dario Fo once wrote of the ‘cultural burp’ – the state’s momentary acceptance of liability for some misdemeanour or other, which acts as a release-valve to alleviate a build-up of public anger, permitting a controlled outburst of rage, hence allowing normal service to resume the following week.  But Fo's momentary 'cultural burp' is slowly being replaced with a permanently open valve – a continuous admission, a perpetual ‘I-dare-you’ – which has the effect of a pressure hose on the synapses, numbing individuals to the extent that they can no longer express rage – merely bewilderment. 

After all, it is difficult to offer any other response, to a government which openly declares, "We're going to assassinate whoever we like, wherever we want to, no matter who gets trampled in the process, because it suits us, and because we can - and you can't stop us."

It is this brazen-ness that makes modernity so crazy-making, so exasperating, and so frequently beyond parody.  Satirical website The Onion today ran with the headline ‘Osama Bin Laden:  death of a motherfucker’.  When the spoof headline is milder than, and on the same plane of discourse as, dozens of real newspaper headlines, the world has surely eaten itself.