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Bin Laden was, after all, not just the leader of one faction, but the US government’s chosen figurehead for all terrorism everywhere. 10 years of the hunt meant trillion of dollars in war spending, thousands of soldiers and upwards of a million civilian deaths, but last night the message was ‘all’s well that ends well.’
This morning, however, it isn’t even that, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassuring the world that America’s assorted wars would continue in the wake of bin Laden’s death. Indeed, the killing is being presented less as a game-changer than as a vindication for the overall policy of endless war worldwide.
“You cannot defeat us,” Clinton insisted, while adding that the death of bin Laden some ten years after 9/11 proved that the US would “never abandon its pursuit of justice.” Incredibly, it seems bin Laden’s death has emboldened the hawkish Clinton, who also said the US would “boost” its counterterrorism efforts after the news.
At the same time, the State Department issued a global travel advisory for Americans, warning of a possible backlash over bin Laden’s death in the near term. Even if this backlash is not realized, the continuation of the wars is likely to ensure that anti-US sentiment will linger.

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by crescentandcross

Deputy Head of the Majlis Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Esmail Kowsari A senior Iranian lawmaker says Osama bin Laden’s death clearly shows that the al-Qaeda leader had an expiry date and the US was obliged to kill him.“Bin Laden, whom all Muslim nations despised, was simply a stooge in the hands of the Zionist regime [of Israel] to show a violent image of Islam following the 9/11 attacks,” Deputy Head of Iran’s Majlis Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Esmail Kowsari told Mehr News Agency on Monday.
“The death of Osama Bin Laden reflected the removal of a one-time US pawn, and marked the end of an era and the start of another in US’ subversive policies in the region,” he added.
Earlier in the day, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the news of bin Laden’s death had left the US and its allies with no excuse to stay in Afghanistan.
“This development (Bin Laden’s death) plainly demonstrates that there is no need for a major military deployment to counter one individual,” Mehmanparast stated.
In a televised speech on Sunday, US President Barack Obama announced that bin Laden had been killed in a US operation in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, a US official says bin Laden’s body has been buried at sea, alleging that his hasty burial was in accordance with Islamic law, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.
The official added that finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted man was difficult, so the US decided to bury him at sea.
This is while Grand Sheik of al-Azhar in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, Ahmad al-Tayeb, has condemned the US measure to deposit the body of bin Laden into the sea as a violation of Islamic laws.
The burial at sea “runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values and humanitarian customs,” al-Tayeb said in a statement.
He said that the dead should be given full respect regardless of their nations or beliefs, adding that a corpse would be respected once it is buried.

NOVANEWS

by crescentandcross

NOVANEWS

by crescentandcross

By Paul Craig Roberts

If today were April 1 and not May 2, we could dismiss as an April fool’s joke this morning’s headline that Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan and quickly buried at sea. As it is, we must take it as more evidence that the US government has unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans.

Think about it. What are the chances that a person allegedly suffering from kidney disease and requiring dialysis and, in addition, afflicted with diabetes and low blood pressure, survived in mountain hideaways for a decade? If bin Laden was able to acquire dialysis equipment and medical care that his condition required, would not the shipment of dialysis equipment point to his location? Why did it take ten years to find him?

Consider also the claims, repeated by a triumphalist US media celebrating bin Laden’s death, that “bin Laden used his millions to bankroll terrorist training camps in Sudan, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, sending ‘holy warriors’ to foment revolution and fight with fundamentalist Muslim forces across North Africa, in Chechnya, Tajikistan and Bosnia.” That’s a lot of activity for mere millions to bankroll (perhaps the US should have put him in charge of the Pentagon), but the main question is: how was bin Laden able to move his money about? What banking system was helping him? The US government succeeds in seizing the assets of people and of entire countries, Libya being the most recent. Why not bin Laden’s? Was he carrying around with him $100 million dollars in gold coins and sending emissaries to distribute payments to his far-flung operations?

This morning’s headline has the odor of a staged event. The smell reeks from the triumphalist news reports loaded with exaggerations, from celebrants waving flags and chanting “USA USA.” Could something else be going on?

No doubt President Obama is in desperate need of a victory. He committed the fool’s error or restarting the war in Afghanistan, and now after a decade of fighting the US faces stalemate, if not defeat. The wars of the Bush/Obama regimes have bankrupted the US, leaving huge deficits and a declining dollar in their wake. And re-election time is approaching.

The various lies and deceptions, such as “weapons of mass destruction,” of the last several administrations had terrible consequences for the US and the world. But not all deceptions are the same. Remember, the entire reason for invading Afghanistan in the first place was to get bin Laden. Now that President Obama has declared bin Laden to have been shot in the head by US special forces operating in an independent country and buried at sea, there is no reason for continuing the war.

Perhaps the precipitous decline in the US dollar in foreign exchange markets has forced some real budget reductions, which can only come from stopping the open-ended wars. Until the decline of the dollar reached the breaking point, Osama bin Laden, who many experts believe to have been dead for years, was a useful bogyman to use to feed the profits of the US military/security complex.

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The United States will aim to destroy al-Qaida’s central organization now that its leader Osama bin Laden has been killed and its capabilities degraded by U.S. operations, a top White House adviser said on Tuesday.

Since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, al-Qaida has spawned affiliated groups in the Middle East and North Africa and inspired attacks by so-called home-grown militants in Europe and the United States.

But White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said bin Laden’s death was the latest in a series of U.S. operations that have delivered “severe body blows” to al-Qaida’s central network in Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past year.

“We’re going to try to take advantage of this opportunity we have now with the death of al-Qaida’s leader, bin Laden, to ensure that we’re able to destroy that organization,” Brennan told NBC’s Today show. “We’re determined to do so and we believe we can.”

“We believe that we have damaged the organization, degraded its capability and made it much more difficult for it to operate inside of Pakistan as well as beyond.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry said in an MSNBC interview on Monday that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas had killed as many as 17 senior al-Qaida leaders before bin Laden’s death.

Brennan spoke a day after world leaders and security experts urged increased vigilance against possible retaliatory strikes by al-Qaida.

CIA director Leon Panetta warned on Monday that bin Laden’s death would “almost certainly” prompt his Islamist supporters to attempt some sort of retaliation.

But Brennan said U.S. officials were aware of no specific threat, nearly 48 hours after bin Laden’s death.

“But what we’re doing is, we’re taking all those prudent measures that we need to whenever there’s an incident of significance like this,” Brennan said in a separate interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“Right now, I think we feel pretty confident that we are at the right posture.”

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British Prime Minister David Cameron urged people to be “particularly vigilant” in the weeks ahead and the US State Department issued a worldwide travel advisory for all Americans today, as Interpol warned that the killing of Osama bin Laden might spark reprisal attacks.
Political leaders the world over praised the Sunday night announcement of the killing of the al-Qaeda leader, but experts were quick to downplay the operational significance of his death, saying the wars would continue and little would change.
This inevitably raises the question of why officials are so keen to present the death as a positive development for security, when all indications are that they are expecting things to get worse as a result.
Indeed, the concern is that a number of would-be affiliates keen on establishing themselves will use the death as a chance to make a name for themselves. Bin Laden’s position as a figurehead may have, ironically, been keeping a lid on a number of these groups.

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Though the Obama Administration insisted that the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s body was entirely in keeping with Islamic practices, there was considerable question from two fronts over the move.
A hot topic of debate in the United States was whether or not it was appropriate to give bin Laden an honorable burial at all, with a number of people suggesting that the military ought to have desecrated his body.
On the other hand, despite White House assurances, some Muslim clerics have insisted that putting someone’s corpse in a weighted bag and hurling them into the sea isn’t strictly in keeping with Islamic tradition.
Some expressed concern that if he had been buried on land it would have provided a site for a shrine for his followers, while still others suggested there was a danger the body would be desecrated if it was buried on land. It seems less likely that anything will happen to it at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.