Aletho News

Bodyguard of Lies protects the truth about Osama bin Laden

 Los Angeles Times Says: Time to Stop Doubting the Media and Government

With an Afterword by Michael Hoffman – May 7, 2011

OBSERVATIONS AND PROVOCATIONS
FROM THE OPINION STAFF OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

A note to selected readers: Osama bin Laden really is dead
May 6, 2011 |  http://tinyurl.com/64u54y8

Sunday’s announcement by President Obama that a team of U.S. commandos had killed Osama bin Laden gave rise to a number of, umm, interesting comments on the blog and at the Opinion section’s Facebook page declaring that the whole thing was faked. Like the moon landing, I suppose, or Elvis’ death.

Convinced that the burial at sea was a telltale sign of a cover-up, some argued that bin Laden wasn’t really dead. Others said that he had been dead for years, but Obama staged an assault on a Pakistani compound in order to boost his popularity. Sometimes the same people made both arguments.

So I wonder what the skeptics will make of the Associated Press’ report Friday morning that Al Qaeda had confirmed its leader’s passing at the hands of the Great Satan? According to the AP, the shadowy terrorist group posted an 11-paragraph statement online that said, in part:

“The blood of the holy warrior sheik, Osama bin Laden, God bless him, is too precious to us and to all Muslims to go in vain. We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents, following them outside and inside their countries.”

Of course, there’s no proof that the statement actually came from Al Qaeda. Like the Mafia, the group doesn’t have an official spokesman. The new statement, dated Tuesday, appeared Friday on the same jihad-friendly websites that had posted previous statements purportedly from the terrorist organization’s upper echelon. So that may be too flimsy to convince hard-core skeptics.

Still, I thought I’d throw this out there so the naysayers would come forth again to explain how we’re all being suckered into believing that U.S. troops pulled off a Mission: Impossible in the shadow of an elite Pakistani military installation. Granted, the ever-shifting versions of what actually happened inside the compound haven’t helped the administration’s credibility. But given the apparent confirmation from Bin Laden’s comrades in improvised arms, why persist in the unbelief?
*****
Afterword by Michael Hofman
They really believe the American people are stupid. Or perhaps stupid is too inadequate a word to describe the depth of contempt the media and the government have for our intelligence.

Notice the resort to denunciation by association: moon flights, Elvis.

Hey media dorks, all we are asking for is a little something called e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e. We walk by faith when dealing with the Word of God. The government and the media are not God and do not speak the Word of God. With them, we walk by sight, because more often than not, they speak with a forked tongue.

For stating this truth we are ridiculed. For requiring forensic evidence we are mocked. For asking why the alleged body of Bin Laden was dumped at sea before being brought to the U.S. for forensic examination, we are scorned. For pointing to the imaginary story issued by the White House of a gun battle in the supposed Bin Laden compound, we are derided.

It is declared from the media on high, that we must believe Bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals in Pakistan last week because “Al Qaeda” has said so. Isn’t this the same Al Qaeda that issued a press release attacking George W. Bush, timed to coincide with the eve of the 2004 presidential election?

“President George W. Bush said his 2004 re-election victory over Sen.  John Kerry was… aided by Osama bin Laden, who issued a taped diatribe against him the Friday before Americans went to the polls…’I thought it was going to help,’ Bush said. ‘I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.” (“Bush says bin Laden tape aided re-election,” Reuters, Feb. 28, 2005).

The record shows that, as if on cue, “Al Qaeda” issued proclamations from its leaders at crucial moments when George W. Bush needed a boost in his presidency. In addition to helping get Bush reelected in 2004, “Al Qaeda” conveniently responded to his State of the Union speech on Jan. 23, 2007 announcing an additional 21,000 troops for Iraq, by challenging Bush to “send the entire army.” (“Group Says Al-Qaida No. 2 Mocks Bush,” AP, Jan. 23, 2007).

To what degree is Al Qaeda a creature of U.S. Intelligence agencies or their assets? Why is it naughty for America’s infantilized citizenry to ask these questions? Why are we being herded into Group Think on this subject?

Winston Churchill, the American government’s most esteemed foreign statesman, stated, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Is this truism no longer the case? Have the Pentagon and the CIA suddenly been transformed into units of the Boy Scouts? Have they shuttered their psychological warfare departments? Of what does psy war consist?

What if the “truth” decided upon by the Cryptocracy is that Barrack Obama needed a boost in his sagging presidency, and that the ghost of Osama bin Laden had to be resurrected in order to achieve that objective? Bin Laden has not been seen in public in any verifiable appearance, since the American carpet-bombing of his redoubt in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in December, 2001, where it is believed by intelligence analysts such as Ghislaine Alleaume, a historian and Arabist at the French national research center, that he was killed.

There’s one final hole in the Obama administration/Establishment media account of the “raid on Bin Laden in Pakistan,” and it’s the size of the Grand Canyon. They now tell us there was no gun battle, just a lone sentry on the ground floor who was quickly neutralized. Everyone else in the compound was without a firearm. Navy Seal Force Six, possibly the most formidable commando unit on earth, then proceeded to kill Bin Laden and his aides rather than capture them alive.

Those of you who have a police detective or prosecuting attorney in your family, or among your acquaintances, without mentioning Bin Laden, please ask them which they would prefer the police do when they have apprehended a murderer and his gang — kill or capture them? Almost invariably, the answer will be “Capture them,” because no computer disk or hard drive is equivalent in intelligence value to what can be elicited by interrogators from the perpetrators themselves.

And yet, the Navy Seals needlessly executed the leader of the western world’s most feared terror network,  thereby forfeiting priceless sources of intelligence on terrorist operations which could have been extracted from him.  Anyone who questions why this would have been done if it really were Bin Laden that had been apprehended, is made the object of scorn and ridiculed as a “conspiracy theorist.”

We’re dealing with a case in which the story changes day to day, the body cannot be produced and the alleged execution of the master criminal violates the most basic procedures of any police department in the United States.

But how dare we doubt the tale? To do so is equivalent to doubting the death of Elvis. To be considered a patriot, we must believe and obey the bodyguard of lies in this, the low bottom twelve of the history of America.

May 8, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 7 Comments

Media Scrambles as Bin Laden Story Crumbles

By Alex Newman | The New American | 06 May 2011

While the establishment media was busy parroting President Obama’s announcement of Osama bin Laden’s supposed assassination, reporting the unsubstantiated claims as if they were unquestionable facts, much of the so-called “alternative” press was far more cautious — and accurate, it turns out. But more importantly, with the new official storyline indicating that bin Laden was in fact unarmed, bigger and much more important questions are beginning to emerge.

In terms of coverage, it turns out that the skeptical approach proved far superior in terms of getting it right. Countless mainstream sources were so confident in Obama’s word that they reported many of the claims as fact without even attributing them to the President.

But the official White House narrative has been changed so many times in recent days that now it’s almost unrecognizable. There wasn‘t even a fire fight; yet this was one of the crucial elements of the original story that justified the assassination of a person the government painted as the most valuable source of information on the planet — the leader of al-Qaeda. And in reporting the statements as fact, the establishment press has officially been left with egg all over its face again.

“[Bin Laden] was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in,” said terror czar John Brennan. Similarly, Obama said that “after a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” The next day, however, the White House spokesman admitted bin Laden “was not armed.” Trying to save face and justify the killing of an unarmed man, the spokesman added, without elaborating, that “resistance does not require a firearm.”

More than a few other important parts of the storyline have been altered, contradicted, or simply exposed as false, too. Everything from which of  bin Laden’s sons was supposedly killed to the claim that his wife was killed after being used as a “human shield” — all of it has changed for some reason or another. The transcript after Brennan’s speech was altered to change the name of the dead son. The new and improved narrative now says that not only was bin Laden’s wife not killed, but that she was not used as a human shield.

Originally the White House also suggested top officials watched the raid live through a video feed. Terror czar Brennan, for example, claimed that they “had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation.” CIA boss Leon Panetta later exposed that claim as false in an interview with PBS, saying: “There was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”

That means the “photo op” of Obama and other officials intently “watching” the operation in the “Situation Room” was almost certainly staged for the press. And almost every media outlet that ran the picture used inaccurate captions parroting the White House claims.

And there’s more. The night of the raid, one administration official told reporters that a helicopter was lost due to mechanical failure. During that same briefing, another administration official said, “We didn’t say it was mechanical.” Now they claim the crash had something to do with the temperature at bin Laden’s supposed compound.

A poorly photo-shopped image of a dead bin Laden embarrassed a large swath of the world press and several Senators, too. Shortly after newspapers and television stations around the globe ran the image, it was exposed as a shoddy forgery that had been circulating for years. Now Obama said he “decided” not to release any pictures — or any other evidence that any element of the story is true, for that matter.

And then there’s the burial issue. The Obama administration originally claimed no country would accept the body; so, it was dumped at sea — Mafia style — in accordance with what Obama alleged were Islamic traditions and customs. When prominent Muslim theological leaders repudiated that lie and noted that it was actually a violation of Islamic tenets to bury Osama bin Laden in the ocean, the new line was that the decision was to avoid the creation of a “shrine.” That lie fell apart, too, when it was widely reported that bin Laden’s brand of Islam calls for unmarked graves — building any sort of shrine would have been blasphemous. So far, no new excuses have been concocted for allegedly feeding the body to the fish.

After the numerous discrepancies and falsehoods in the storyline became painfully obvious, the Associated Press, USA Today, Fox News and other outlets slowly and begrudgingly started to report it. “From the first moments, a good number of the details about bin Laden’s killing, on points large and small, have been wrong,” admitted a Fox reporter in one of the more candid acknowledgements to appear in the mainstream press.

But of course, most of the media were also dutifully offering and parroting all manner of excuses. “Fog of war” was to blame for the confusion, claimed the White House spokesman after that excuse was suggested to him by a member of the “press” corps asking a question. Virtually every major news outlet reporting the changes in the official story promptly blamed “fog of war,” too.

An apologist reporter at USA Today wrote that “the administration did its best to get the story quickly,” adding “it’s common situation with military action.” The paper quoted a Pentagon spokesperson under the Bush administration to bolster its case.

The AP offered a similar excuse along with the “fog of combat” line offered by the White House. “The contradictions and misstatements reflect the fact that even in the case of a highly successful and popular mission, the confusion inherent in a fast-paced, unpredictable military raid conducted under intense pressure in a foreign country does not lend itself immediately to a tidy story line,” the reporter claimed, citing “some experts.”

Several excuses for the ever-changing story were offered by other publications, too. The possibility that they were deliberate lies or worse was virtually never addressed. But the U.K. Independent noted: “The impression persists that the administration sought to cast the operation in the most heroic light possible, at the expense of the facts.”

Now, the President and his spokespeople and subordinates are refusing to offer more details or explanations. The government has also announced that it will not be releasing pictures or any other evidence to support its claims even as suspicions continue to mount.

But as analysts pointed out, the newly revealed fact that there was no fire fight begs the question about where the “fog” may have come from. And even more importantly: Why, in the absence of a fire fight, would U.S. forces put a bullet through the brain supposedly containing the most valuable intelligence on the planet? What if bin Laden knew where that alleged nuclear bomb in Europe was located that was set to detonate after his capture or death? None of those questions have been addressed so far.

But prominent critics are sounding the alarm. “When such a foundational story as the demise of bin Laden cannot last 48 hours without acknowledged ‘discrepancies’ that require fundamental alternations to the story, there are grounds for suspicion in addition to the suspicions arising from the absence of a dead body, from the absence of any evidence that bin Laden was killed in the raid or that a raid even took place,” noted Paul Craig Roberts, a senior official in the former Reagan administration in a piece entitled “The Agendas Behind the bin Laden News Event.”

Roberts raised several important questions, too, as well as some comparisons. “The entire episode could just be another event like the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin event that never happened but succeeded in launching open warfare against North Vietnam at a huge cost to Americans and Vietnamese and enormous profits to the military/security complex,” he suggested, citing a series of government deceptions that have led to war based on lies and other atrocities.

Roberts suspects there are more lies about the bin Laden narrative than those exposed so far. And he’s certainly not alone. It emerged recently that the man who owned the house next to bin Laden’s supposed compound doesn’t even believe the story either. “To be honest, it’s not true,” he told Al Jazeera.

As the official story continues to be re-written by the administration and those in the media who simply re-package government press releases, critics and skeptics would seem to be justified in wondering what other lies and “fog of war” changes may emerge in the coming weeks and months. And perhaps even more importantly, we might also wonder if there are lies that may never be exposed in their entirety?

May 7, 2011 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 5 Comments