The Big Lie: Obama DID NOT Kill Bin Laden!

By Stephen Lendman
May 13, 2015
Global Research

 

Claiming otherwise is one of his many Big Lies. On May 1, 2011, he willfully deceived the US public saying:

“The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda.”

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.”

In last Sunday’s London Review of Books, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shredded Obama’s Big Lie like others before him.

Obama’s official narrative “might have been written by (Alice in Wonderland author) Lewis Carroll,” he said. It was a total fabrication. More on his account below.

Volumes of evidence separate fact from fiction. On July 11, 2002, TheNew York Times said “Osama bin Laden is dead. (He) died in December and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan.”

“Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, echoed the information…(T)he truth is that Osama bin Laden is dead.”

The BBC, Fox News and other media sources reported the same information. David Ray Griffin‘s seminal book on the topic titled “Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?” did it best.

He presented “objective evidence and testimonies.” The former includes the following:

Through December 13, 2001, the CIA monitored messages between bin Laden and his associates. Suddenly they stopped.

On December 26, 2001, a leading Pakistani newspaper reported bin Laden’s death. It cited a prominent Taliban official attending his funeral – witnessing his dead body before it was laid to rest.

His was very ill with kidney disease and other ailments. In July 2001, he was treated at the American Hospital in Dubai.

On September 10, 2001 (one day before 9/11), CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported his admittance to a Rawalpindi, Pakistan hospital.

He had nothing to do with 9/11. An earlier article discussed the Mother of All Big Lies.

In January 2001, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said bin Laden appeared “in the last stages of kidney failure” (according to Griffin) – based on video evidence he saw in late November or early December 2001.

In July 2002, CNN reported the capture of bin Laden’s bodyguards months earlier in February. “Sources believe that if the bodyguards were captured away from bin Laden, it is likely the most-wanted man in the world is dead,” it said.

Washington offered a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture or killing. No one came forward to claim it. More on this below.

Testimonial evidence Griffin cited included influential “people in a position to know” saying bin Laden died in December 2001 including:

• Pakistan President Musharraf;

• FBI counterterrorism head Dale Watson;

• Oliver North saying, “I’m certain that Osama is dead…and so are all the other guys I stay in touch with;”

• Afghanistan President Karzai;

• Israeli intelligence saying supposed bin Laden messages were fake; and

• Pakistan’s ISI “confirm(ing) the death of…Osama bin Laden (and) attribut(ing) the reasons behind Washington’s hiding (the truth) to the desire of (America’s hawks) to use the issue of al Qaeda and international terrorism to invade Iraq.”

In October 2008, former CIA case officer Robert Baer told National Public Radio when asked: “Of course he’s dead.”

In March 2009, former Foreign Service officer Angelo Codevilla published an American Spectator article titled “Osama bin Elvis, saying:

“Seven years after (his) last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence of Elvis’s presence among us than for his.”

Griffin explained today’s advanced technology can create fake messages and videos able to fool most people.

Pre-May 2011 claims about “bin Laden’s continued existence (weren’t) backed up by evidence,” Griffin explained.

Perpetuating the myth about bin Laden remaining alive until May 2011 remains one of the Big Lies of our time.

It bears repeating. Clear evidence proves he died of natural causes in December 2001. Keeping alive a dead man was done to pursue America’s phony “war on terror.”

So-called “Enemy Number One” was used to stoke fear as pretext for post-9/11 imperial wars on one country after another to this day.

Griffin hoped his book would help shorten America’s wars. They rage endlessly. Don’t expect Hersh’s article to change things.

He said bin Laden’s reported killing was “the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election.”

The official White House account of bin Laden’s death was totally “false,” said Hersh. His version of events differs markedly from Griffin’s explained above.

Most important is both explanations and others expose the official Big Lie – hype used as justification for America’s war on terror, naked aggression against one country after another by any standard.

Hersh said the May 2011 bin Laden operation began in August 2010 after a former senior Pakistani (ISI) intelligence official offered information on his location in return for the $25 million reward Washington promised leading to his death or capture.

Claiming he was in Abbottabad under ISI house arrest doesn’t comport with convincing evidence of his December 2001 death.

Saying Obama wanted Osama dead belies his earlier demise. The staged bin Laden killing was hokum – especially with no visuals, corpse, independent proof and shifting official accounts.

Major events are always strategically timed for political reasons. In this case, to boost Obama’s sagging image. It got an immediate bump following the staged event.

It diverted attention from neoliberal harshness, force-fed austerity and protracted homeland Main Street Depression conditions.

They’re evident today in unprecedented levels of borderline/actual/or deep poverty, unemployment or underemployment, homelessness, hunger and overall deprivation in the world’s richest country.

It continued post-9/11 fear-mongering to further Washington’s imperial agenda – featuring one direct or proxy war of aggression after another against nations threatening no others.

So-called DNA evidence claimed to prove bin Laden’s death 12 hours after the staged Abbottabad incident was fake.

Experts explain DNA identification takes days to complete – impossible in hours, especially in a location with no professional lab or skilled personnel to conduct it.

Convincing evidence revealed about the alleged May 2011 bin Laden killing proves the official White House account was fabricated – one of many of Obama’s Big Lies.

A Final Comment

On August 6, 2011, 30 US special forces (including 20 Navy Seals) involved in the Abbottabad incident died in a reported helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

Draw your own conclusions. Dead men tell no tales.

When It Becomes Serious, First They Lie–When That Fails, They Arrest You

By Charles Hugh Smith
March 18, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” Jean-Claude Juncker simply gave voice to what the world’s leaders practice on a daily basis, because now it’s always serious.

And why is it now serious? Persuading tax donkeys and debt serfs that everything is going their way is now impossible without lies. Persuading the populace that the leadership is working on their behalf was jettisoned in the wake of the 2008 bailout of bankers and parasites.

Stripped of the artifice that they care about anything other than preserving the wealth of their cronies, global political leaders now rely on propaganda: narratives designed to manage expectations and perceptions, bolstered by carefully tailored official statistics.

Reliance on lies erodes legitimacy. As the rich get richer and the burdens on tax donkeys and debt serfs increase, the gulf between the official happy-story narrative and reality widens to the breaking point, and faith in the narrative and the leadership espousing it declines.

When 20% of the populace no longer believe the lies and begins questioning the state’s enforcement of the status quo, the government devotes its resources to punishing dissenters and resisters.Whistleblowers are charged with trumped-up crimes; those publicly refuting the status quo’s narrative of lies are harassed and discredited, and those who resist state enforcement of parasitic cronyism are set up, beaten, entrapped, investigated, interrogated and arrested once suitably Kafkaesque charges can be conjured up by the apparatchiks of enforcement.

Why 20%? It’s the Pareto Distribution (the 80/20 rule): the 20% of any populace that accepts a new trend, technology or narrative has an outsized influence over the other 80%.

Governments operate on the premise that propaganda and threats will always be enough to cow their populaces into compliance and bribes will induce complicity.When lies, bribes and threats no long work, the state unleashes its full pathological powers on dissent.

The last mass campaign of political suppression in the U.S. occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when resistance to the war of choice in Vietnam reached mainstream proportions.

The U.S. government was accustomed to manipulating and managing the populace with very simple propaganda: Communism is our deadly enemy, we must fight it everywhere on the planet, etc. But when thousands of American service personnel started coming home in body bags from the latest “we must fight Communism everywhere because it’s dangerous to us” war in East Asia, this simplistic justification made no sense: what existential threat to the U.S. did a Communist Vietnam pose?

The U.S. has faced only two existential threats to its sovereignty since 1860: World War II (1941-45) and the potential for a nation-destroying nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The idea that the U.S. was existentially threatened by falling dominoes in East Asia was always ludicrous, and the U.S. status quo (the political leadership, the Deep State, private industry profiting from war, etc.) soon abandoned the absurd justification.

Vietnam was always more of a domestic-politics issue than a geopolitical one: the Democrats feared being perceived as being “weak on Communism” because that impacted the results of elections. Throwing treasure and American lives away in Vietnam was pure domestic politics from 1961-68 (once mired, Democrats feared being tagged as the party that “lost Vietnam”), and thereafter the treasure and lives were sacrificed on the equally contrived Nixon-Kissinger policy of avoiding losing geopolitical face with a withdrawal that amounted to surrender.

Though it is not well known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was ordered to devote essentially all its resources to suppressing dissent in these years. Teams assigned to organized crime were reassigned to track down draft resisters and other political malcontents. COINTELPRO was a vast program devoted to illegally entrapping, beating up and undermining any and all political resistance to the war and the government’s increasingly heavy-handed oppression of dissent.

For more on COINTELPRO, please read War at Home: Covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it.

Simply put: when lies no longer work, governments freak out and devote their resources not to eliminating wars of choice, cronyism and corruption but to suppressing dissent and resistance to those policies.

The U.S. government has always been free to pursue wars of choice with its professional military, with little risk of widespread political blowback. A variety of “splendid little wars” have been waged, generally for conquest or enforcement of hemispheric hegemony. The government’s success in rallying the nation during World War II instilled a false confidence that merely raising the flag of existential threat would be enough to eliminate dissent and elicit compliance in the masses.

Vietnam was the first time the American public went through the process of buying the usual “threat” justification for war, questioning the threat and eventually rejecting the state’s narrative. The government responded by lashing out at its own citizenry, engaging in a full spectrum of illegal and blatantly immoral actions designed not to right wrongs or fix broken policies, but to suppress dissent and resistance to destructive policies and broken systems.

The U.S. government is not unique in this; on the contrary, all governments, by their very nature as concentrations of coercive power, will pursue the same path. Rather than confess the government is operated by cronies, for cronies, the machinery of the state will increasingly be turned on its citizenry.

Rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s is no longer enough; abiding by the laws of the land are no longer enough. What the state demands is not just compliance with its countless laws and regulations, but absolute obedience to its narratives and policies.

Anyone who withholds obedience is quickly deemed a traitor–not to the nation or its Constitution, but to the state itself, which is ultimately a collection of cronies and self-serving vested interests protecting their fiefdoms at the expense of the citizenry.

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance.This process is well under way in nation-states around the world.

If I had to pick the two key operative dynamics of the next 20 years, I would choose:

1. The over-expansion and implosion of credit/debt bubbles.

2. The over-reach of the central state as it seeks to win the hearts and minds of its people by ruthlessly suppressing dissent.

The two dynamics are of course causally connected. Central states depend entirely on credit bubbles for their financial survival, and on enforcing increasingly untenable official narratives for their legitimacy.

Both are unraveling, and will continue to unravel, no matter how many state resources are thrown at the symptoms of political illegitimacy, rather than at the root causes of that illegitimacy.

The American Government’s Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine

By Eric Zuesse
March 16, 2015
Washington’s Blog

 

The American Government’s biggest lie in 2002-2003 was about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. We’ve already seen what that lie produced. It cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion, produced ISIS, and caused death and destruction in Iraq that make Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship look benign by comparison. Are Americans still fooling themselves about that? (Some are; but most are not.)

The American Government’s biggest lie in 2014-2015 is instead about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine — and it’s even worse, and far more dangerous, because this one can very possibly lead to a nuclear war, one with Russia that’s totally unnecessary for America’s national-security, and that actually places all of our nation’s security at risk, for the shameful reasons of aristocrats (“oligarchs”) in both the U.S. and Ukraine — not for any real reasons of the American people, at all. 

But, that’s where we are heading, nonetheless, because America’s aristocrats overwhelmingly want it (as will be shown here).

Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL, is a U.S. government broadcaster which, like NATO, was necessary when communism threatened the United States from the Soviet Union, and which, also like NATO, should have been disbanded when the U.S.S.R. and its communist ideology effectively ended. It, like NATO, is now really just a vile vestige of our war against communism, a war that’s gone but which America’s aristocrats want to continue fighting, because America’s aristocracy want to conquer the entire world and want U.S. taxpayers to fund the effort. The ideological excuse is gone, and they want us not to notice that.

A good example of RFE/RL’s current vileness was a story they ran on March 12th, “A Bipartisan Cause In Washington: Arming Ukraine Against Russia,” and it reported that, “Consensus appears to be snowballing among Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the U.S. capital on at least one issue: arming Ukraine. One exception, however, is the figure who matters most: President Barack Obama.” 

The implicit thrust of this news article is that, as their propaganda-writer put it, “Obama has resisted providing such assistance despite the pressure from lawmakers and public statements by top military brass, including U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, supporting lethal aid to Kyiv. ‘The president has all the authority he needs to do it. He just needs to have the will to do it,’ [Eliot] Engel [a House Democrat] told RFE/RL.” In other words: the article presents Obama as being obstructionist against something that supposedly needs to be done, and should be done.

Earlier, RFE/RL had brazenly reveled in the international success of its campaign to vilify Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.

And, unfortunately, that entire propaganda campaign is based on blatant lies, just like the propaganda to invade Iraq in 2003 was. But this one is far more dangerous.

Furthermore, this propaganda campaign (including that article) ignores that the top leaders in Ukraine who are pressing for the U.S. and other Western nations to supply arms to the Ukrainian Government are Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist outright nazis, especially the leaders of Ukraine’s two nazi parties, both of which were created as local copies of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and one of which even called itself the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, in order to signal to Ukrainians that it’s in the tradition of Adolf Hitler but just the local, Ukrainian nationalist, version of it. That party’s leader (Andrei Parubiy) was the chief organizer of the Maidan demonstrations that were used by the Obama Administration as cover for the coup that the Obama Administration planned and carried out, which installed the current, rabidly Russia-hating, racist-fascist, Government in Ukraine.

It also ignores that the leader (Dmitriy Yarosh) of the other Ukrainian nazi party (also calling for America to send weapons), which party is called Right Sector, was the organizer of the gunmen whose shooting into the crowd of anti-corruption demonstrators actually brought down the democratically elected President of Ukraine, and thus enabled the Obama Administration to choose the new leader of Ukraine (which Obama’s operative, Victoria Nuland, chose on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the coup).

It also ignores that the leader of Ukraine’s most effective fighting force, the Azov Battalion (Andrei Beletsky), authored the official statement of “Ukrainian Social Nationalism,” including: “The historic mission of our Nation, a watershed in this century, is thus to lead the White peoples of the world in the final crusade for their survival. It is to lead the war against Semites and the sub-humans they use.” 

It also ignores that Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who on 4 February 2014 was selected for his post by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department, was quoted by Ukrainian media on Thursday March 12th of 2015 as saying that, “Ukraine is in a state of war with a nuclear state, which is the Russian Federation.” He blamed all of Ukraine’s current problems on Russia, and urged “our Western partners” to send weapons.

Clearly, these people are eager to serve as the proxy-state for Washington’s war against Russia.

It also ignores that, as German Economic News headlined on March 15th, “Ukraine: Right-wing extremists boycott peace plans with Russia,” reporting that several of the leading nazis in the Ukrainian Government (which America’s coup installed and which still is enthusiastically supported by both President Obama and the U.S. Congress) employed such phrases as: “Russia is the ‘eternal enemy’ of ‘civilization’.” This is what America’s Government wants to send yet more American weapons (we’ve already sent lots, some of which have already turned up destroyed on the battlefield when the Ukrainian forces have surrendered). 

While it’s true that there is virtual unity (more than 98% among members of Congress) in Washington to supply arms to Ukraine, the U.S. public, when polled about this matter, are more than 2 to 1 opposed to doing so.

In this regard, the U.S. public are far more in line with the leaders of the EU than they are with the leaders of the United States.

The RFE/RL propaganda-article ignored, of course, the overwhelming opposition of Europeans, and even of their leaders, to supplying weapons to Ukraine. It also ignored the overwhelming opposition of the American public to doing so.

Whereas the central focus of Obama’s foreign policy is to weaken if not destroy Russia, some in Washington are not satisfied with the intensity of that campaign, and want it to be even more, but Obama is trying to avoid pushing European leaders so hard on this that he loses them altogether. The difference between Obama and the Republicans on this is merely tactical. Both want to destroy Russia; the debate is over how to get the job done.

Insane and globally suicidal isn’t bad enough for some of the rotten people whom we in America elect into public office. But we, the public, are not to blame for it — the aristocrats who fund politics determine what the field of candidates will be from which we get to select our leaders. And, for example, only too late are the American public starting to recognize that the choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 was really a choice between, as Ralph Nader lied in 2000 but which was true in 2008 and 2012, “Tweedledum versus Tweedledee.” Obama turns out to be a dark-skinned Romney with prettier rhetoric.

The aristocrats determine the political choices that we have; and, now (in this century) in America, they’re all bad. 

As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found in their massive study published by the American Political Science Association during the Fall of 2014, today’s United States is an aristocracy (or as they call their findings, an “oligarchy”), and the will of the public no longer counts for anything in determining the federal government’s policies and laws: the aristocrats control the media so that they control the political personnel and outcomes that matter the most to politicians’ sponsors.

And, now, they’re even pushing the envelope of revolution, because nuclear war would harm everybody. Aristocrats’ chief motive is dominance; the public aren’t like that: mere survival is more important to the bottom 99% of the population. Nuclear war is too much of a risk to take for our aristocracy’s global dominance, and we’re heading now straight into that risk. They want us to do like Ukraine’s nazis are doing, and play along with it. But we’re not like Ukraine’s nazis — nor like any. Nazis have the dominance-culture, just as aristocrats do; but we don’t. So: the lies are coming, thick and fast, to make us go along, purely on the basis of deception.

If the public is deceived, then democracy is impossible. All choices become bad. And that’s where we now are. Things like this just can’t be explained any other way.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.