Osama bin Laden

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“We Have To Understand That ISIS Is A Country Now”

June 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

ISIS is Hollywood, but it’s also Silicon Valley, a digital caliphate marrying Middle Ages barbarism to social media, Medieval yet mobile. The next-level Al-Qaeda has upped the ante on terror despite the absence thus far of a 9/11 on American soil. It’s thrived on small acts of well-publicized brutality and by doing something that Osama bin-Laden never come close to accomplishing: establishing a nation of sorts, if a tentative one of shifting borders.

While my default assumption is that things are constantly collapsing within any terrorist organization, Malise Ruthven’s NYRB piece about Abdel Bari Atwan’s new book depicts the Islamic State as a disciplined machine. An excerpt:

Bin Laden is dead, thanks to the action of US Navy SEALs in May 2011, but as Abdel Bari Atwan explains in Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s official successor as leader of “al-Qa‘ida central,” looks increasingly irrelevant. Bin Laden’s true successor is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy caliph of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. As “Commander of the Faithful” in that nascent state he poses a far more formidable threat to the West and to Middle Eastern regimes—including the Saudi kingdom—that are sustained by Western arms than bin Laden did from his Afghan cave or hideout in Pakistan.

One of the primary forces driving this transformation, according to Atwan, is the digital expertise demonstrated by the ISIS operatives, who have a commanding presence in social media. A second is that ISIS controls a swath of territory almost as large as Britain, lying between eastern Syria and western Iraq. As Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent ten days in ISIS-controlled areas in both Iraq and Syria, stated categorically in January: “We have to understand that ISIS is a country now.” …

The jihadists of ISIS may be terrorists—to use an imprecise, catch-all term—but as Atwan explains, they are both well paid and disciplined, and the atrocities they commit and upload on the Internet are part of a coherent strategy:

Crucifixions, beheadings, the hearts of rape victims cut out and placed upon their chests, mass executions, homosexuals being pushed from high buildings, severed heads impaled on railings or brandished by grinning “jihadist” children—who have latterly taken to shooting prisoners in the head themselves—these gruesome images of brutal violence are carefully packaged and distributed via Islamic State’s media department. As each new atrocity outdoes the last, front-page headlines across the world’s media are guaranteed.•

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“He Was In No Way Suggesting That Osama Bin Laden Was Not Killed In Pakistan”

October 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

One update to the Seymour Hersh comments which suggested that the bin Laden raid story wasn’t legit, which made it sound like the journalist believed the terrorist’s murder was a moon landing on a sound stage. Hersh has made it clear that he was not referring to the actual killing: The Guardian correction:

“Hersh has pointed out that he was in no way suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan, as reported, upon the president’s authority: he was saying that it was in the aftermath that the lying began.”

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“Nothing’s Been Done About That Story, It’s One Big Lie, Not One Word Of It Is True”

September 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Seymour Hersh doesn’t buy the official line about the raid that erased Osama bin Laden–or much else the media says these days. He tears into his industry in discussion with Lisa O’Carroll of the Guardian. The opening:

“Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider. 

It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.’

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth. 

Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends ‘so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would’ – or the death of Osama bin Laden. ‘Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,’ he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011. 

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an ‘independent’ Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. ‘The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report,’ he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

 ‘It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],’ he declares in an interview with the Guardian.”

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Some Thoughts About The Furor Surrounding President Obama’s Campaign Ad About Bin Laden

May 1, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Swims with the fishes.

•In regards Obama questioning whether Mitt Romney would have made the call to enter Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden, it’s based on factual statements that Romney made which were not taken out of context.

•We need to stop acting like the murder of bin Laden was a sacred event. It was a political and military decision to eliminate a mass murderer. Save the sacred feelings for the victims of 9/11.

•If the decision had gone badly, it would have been politicized to the hilt by the GOP, including Romney. The Democrats would have been branded weak on defense as they have been for more than 40 years.

•It’s not like the GOP didn’t do its own–and very undeserved–victory lap over bin Laden’s killing. Members of the Bush Administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) came out of the woodwork to try to claim credit.

•You could argue that Obama is hanging his “Mission Accomplished” banner with the ad, except that the mission actually was accomplished. Maybe it seems boastful, but it is accurate.

•It’s hilarious that draft-dodging members of a party that Swiftboated an Army veteran like John Kerry are now crying foul over being called out on being less forceful on military matters.

•If Arianna Huffington wants to better understand the definition of “despicable,” she should recall how she allowed Jenny McCarthy to use the Huffington Post as a platform to repeatedly frighten parents about immunizing their children. And even after it was proven that those charges were linked to junk science, there was still no retraction or apology. Now that’s despicable.•

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“The Republicans Won’t Try To Beat [Obama] From The Center And Will Thus Nominate A More Extreme Candidate”

May 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Damn, those Kenyans are good. (Image by Pete Souza.)

Economist Tyler Cowen’s instant reaction to the political ramifications of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, posted at 11:30pm on May 1:

“My quick take is that that Obama will be re-elected (getting Osama is way more important than Iraq, or Saddam in the American mind, attacks on American soil, etc.), at this point the Republicans won’t try to beat him from the center and will thus nominate a more extreme candidate and lose badly, and the most important effects will be on Pakistan, not this country.”

 

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