News sources have recently reported on an interesting assortment of materials at Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. Not only was bin Laden living far from any cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, his house apparently had a large supply of Pepsi and Coke (inexplicably, Pakola wasn’t good enough), a significant stash of pornography, and marijuana plants on the property.
Scratch the surface of any story and you’ll find rumors, hoaxes, and conspiracies. The conspiracy theory is the most intriguing of them all, for it combines total skepticism with total credulity. The same person will challenge every assertion made by the government or the mass media about Roswell or the Kennedy assassination, and then proceed to embrace the most cockamamie theory without even doing a minimum of legwork to test it.
Back in 2004, three years into the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 Commission report made its debut to the gushing admiration of the Washington press corps. The report was everything that the mainstream media adores: bipartisan, devoid of divisive finger-pointing, full of conventional wisdom.
At best, when taught in schools, extremist religious views dilute the quality of education; at worst, they breed violence.
Sami Al-Hajj was classified as an “enemy combatant” whose “access to senior terrorist leaders demonstrates his probable connections to the al-Qaida network and other militant jihadist organizations.” He was presented as “a member of al-Qaida who is an expert in logistics with direct ties to al-Qaida leadership.” However, new evidence has come to light that now shows the U.S. government hoped to use al-Hajj as an intelligence source, perhaps even an informant, to spy on Al Jazeera’s operations, or to track down Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.
Such is the depth of Pakistan’s moral corruption, that Syed Saleem Shahzad’s death leaves al Qaeda and the Taliban on a higher moral ground than Pakistan’s infamous intelligence agency, the ISI.
Some feel that if the United States continues to provide financial aid to Islamabad, it will be recognized as acceptance of flourishing Islamist extremism in Pakistan.
The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”
The excessive violence with which Ugandan security forces have over the last month cracked down on initially peaceful opposition protests at soaring food and fuel prices, and which last weekovershadowed the inauguration of re-elected President Yoweri Museveni, is almost as puzzling as it is disturbing.
Hardliners, whether Israeli or Palestinian, do not desire a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ends in a negotiated peace, but an all-or-nothing end that justifies their ideological certainties.