PETER HITCHENS – THE EXECUTION OF OSAMA BIN LADEN: A FEW THOUGHTS (2 MAY 2011)

  

Adolf Hitler (left) and Osama Bin Laden (right)

INTERNET SOURCE: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/05/the-execution-of-osama-bin-laden-a-few-thoughts.html

02 May 2011 3:43 PM

The execution of Osama bin Laden: A few thoughts

President Obama says 'Justice has been done' on Osama bin Laden, and I'm inclined to agree with him. While I'm still unsure that bin Laden played as large a part in 11th September 2001 as he boasted, he did boast, and was without doubt in general responsible for many cruel murders. Obviously I should prefer him to have been tried properly, but capturing him alive would have been hugely difficult and dangerous, if not actually impossible, and his own many public admissions, nay gloating avowals, of guilt make a trial superfluous.

But the many more-or-less liberal politicians and commentators who now exult at this death have a problem that I don't have. I believe in the death penalty, as deterrent and retribution. They don't. Had he fallen into the hands of some EU tribunal, bin Laden would have faced life imprisonment in some Dutch celebrity jail, doing his basket-making alongside various Serbs, and a few Croats for good measure, while the kitchens toiled to provide him with halal meals. This refusal to execute murderers is supposed to be a principle, so wouldn't be affected by the huge numbers of murders involved in this case. Shouldn't they then be condemning this execution too? On what morality or legality is it based, if we do not accept the death penalty?

And if they are not condemning it, why not?

I can cope with soppy liberals. I can cope with macho boasters. I know where I stand with either. But soppy liberal macho boasters are too much for me. If the death penalty is wrong, it's wrong, and they should say so. This mission could have had no other end.

Something similar is going on in the apparent attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi, which the Libyans say has led to the deaths of his youngest son and three grandchildren. Official sources deny that this is the purpose of missiles repeatedly aimed at compounds in which Gadaffi may live. In that case, what are they doing? And what moral basis do they have for their outrage against the Libyan regime, with which they had excellent and productive relations six months ago?

There are other questions about this bin Laden business. You may believe in 'al Qaeda' if you wish. I have yet to see any evidence that there is such an organisation, or if the phrase has anything other than a vaguely general application to a vast variety of Islamic armed militants loosely if at all connected to each other. I think this novelistic bogey is an invention of journalists and spooks (and politicians) all of whom have reasons to promote its importance.

If this organisation has now been decapitated, can we now declare the 'war on terror' over? I doubt it. Airports are going to be even more oppressive for quite a while. Our soldiers remain in Afghanistan. And so on.

Was there ever really such a war? Or was something else going on, during which the 'West' actually appeased the very terrorists against whom it was raging? I set out in my book 'The Broken Compass' (reissued in paperback as 'The Cameron Delusion') an alternative explanation for the events of 2001. I pointed out the following facts:

People sometimes wonder about the timing of the outrages. Here's a possible explanation. The terrorist assaults on the USA were immediately preceded by the UN conference on 'anti-racism' in Durban, during which the verbal attacks made upon Israel and the United States by Arab and Islamic delegates were so virulent that the delegations from the USA and Israel walked out (on 3rd September).

The murders in Manhattan and Washington DC were met with a wave of joy across the Middle East, from Beirut to Gaza. This wave only diminished (and even then, not totally, especially in Gaza) when local Arab leaders realised that the vengeful fury of the USA would be terrible if their rejoicing became widely known among Americans. On 16th September 2001 the Washington Post (and several other major US newspapers) reported that the Palestinian Authority had been trying to suppress film taken of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the outrage. 'Palestinian officials have told local representatives of foreign news agencies and television stations on several occasions that their employees' safety could be jeopardized if videotapes showing Palestinians celebrating tha attacks were aired. Broadcast news organisations operating in the Palestinian-ruled portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have complied'.

In other words, stop showing this in the West, or your people won't be safe in areas under our control. Censorship? I should say so. If you remember seeing any of this stuff (and I do, particularly of smiling women distributing sweet pastries) this explains why it has since completely dropped out of the archive narrative.

On 17th September 2001 several provincial big city US newspapers (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) carried a story presumably from wire services or syndicated from other newspapers with foreign bureaux, which described how the Palestinian Authority had confiscated and then censored an Associated Press videotape showing marchers in Gaza carrying a portrait of bin Laden. My book speculates on why this story did not appear in more major US papers.

Next, I would draw to your attention the pre-suicide video of one of the actual 11th September hijackers, shown on Al Jazeera in September 2002 (and very briefly on some Western stations) a year after the event. Abdul-Aziz al-Omari (believed by the FBI to have been responsible for the hijacking of the American Airines plane that was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) was shown wearing a chequered 'keffiyeh' headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause.

What was his aim? In his own words, his planned murders were to be 'a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.

There is much more about this in the chapter entitled 'A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus', in my book.

But here's the really important bit. While the 'West' was bombarding sand and rocks in Afghanistan, largely irrelevant to the issue, the USA was behaving very differently in the Middle East. In a series of urgent and hastily-arranged missions, it sent first General Anthony Zinni (December 2001 and March 2002), then Colin Powell himself (April 2002), to meet the Palestinian chieftain Yasser Arafat. US troops were withdrawn from the Arabian peninsula in 2003, as it happens an action demanded by the mass-murdering terrorist al-Omari. Most striking of all, on 10th October 2001, was George W. Bush's declaration of his personal and Presidential support for a Palestinian State. For the USA as a country, and for a supposedly conservative Republican President, this was an enormous change of view. In May 1998 Hillary Clinton had made a similar statement - and it had been swiftly disavowed by her (Left-wing Democrat) husband and by the entire administration.

What, if not the attack of 11th September 2001, brought about these momentous changes in US foreign policy? Have we all been looking in the wrong direction?

I'd add a couple of other thoughts. I was amused by Mr Obama's use of the phrase 'Deep in Pakistan' to describe Abbottabad (named after a British army officer, by the way and still somehow retaining that name nearly 70 years after the Empire ended). It's amusing that Pakistan is the sort of country into which one can go 'deeply'. Would one say 'Deep in France' or Deep in England'?. And if one did, would one use the phrase to describe a substantial town a couple of hours' drive from the capital?

I must admit I had always thought that bin Laden was in Quetta, a rather remoter (or deeper) spot. I treasured President Hamid Karzai's wry remark some years ago that Bin laden was 'either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and he definitely isn't in Afghanistan'.

But this discovery does raise the question 'What didn't they know about bin Laden's hiding place, and when didn't they know it?