Osama "Has Been" Laden finally dead

The worldwide press has one headline today and that is the death of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was killed during a US special forces assault on a compound in the town of Abbotabad. Bin Laden, 54, has since been buried at sea.

So there is the end of Osama bin Laden, a man whose star has been very much in the descendant since  that appalling day in September 2011. In hiding for nearly ten years his influence has decreased and his organisation Al Qaeda has drifted far from the vanguard of islamic militancy.  Retribution was a long time coming for whatever reason (and these will be discussed at great length in the press, the blogosphere, at water coolers and so on) but it has finally come and America rejoices. 


For my own part I am extremely glad that is is now  dead and feeding the fishes. Regardless of the views of the likes of that scumbag Ward Churchill et al, the 9/11 atrocities were not some form of justice against an evil imperialist monster; they were acts of craven cowardice.


Ideally I would have liked to have seen Bin Laden face trial but that was never likely to happen. 

What more to say about this but to hope Has Been Laden rots in hell.

A fatal blunder in 2001?

Scott Shane in the hNew York Times reports on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report which concludes that there was a lost opportunity in December 2001 to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. This of course is reported widely in the press around the world.

The Foreign Committee concluded that removing bin Laden would not have eliminated the global threat from terrorism out would have removed “a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

The report, based asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt. The lapse laid “the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

The showdown at Tora Bora, a mountainous area dotted with caves in eastern Afghanistan, pitted a modest force of American Special Operations and CIA officers, along with allied Afghan fighters, against a force of about 1,000 Qaeda fighters led by Mr. bin Laden.

A larger troop commitment to Afghanistan might have resulted in the demise not only of Mr. bin Laden and his deputy but also of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Mullah Omar, who also fled to Pakistan in 2001, has overseen the resurgence of the Taliban.

Like several previous accounts, the committee’s report blames Gen. Tommy Franks and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld for not putting a large number of American troops there lest they fuel resentment among Afghans. General Franks, who declined to comment for the committee’s report, has at times questioned whether Mr. bin Laden was even at Tora Bora in late 2001.

If this is the case then the US made an appalling and costly blunder in Afghanistan in 2001. It is true that there was no guarantee that bin Laden and Mullah Omar would have been captured but additional troops would have made it more likely. Without the rallying figure of bin Laden it is very possible that some of the atrocities carried out by Muslim extremists would not have taken place... would we have seen the Bali, Madrid or London bombings? We will never know but there might have been less of a chance of them happening.

Would Mullah Omar’s capture have helped blunt the Taliban’s resurgence? Again we will never know but perhaps fewer soldiers would have been killed in Afghanistan over recent years. More importantly Afghanistan may have been more stable and the country may have been able to make further desperately needed progress.

So Bin Laden’s - a piece of sewage and a poet to boot

It is well known that the war criminal Radovan Karadzic found time to pen poetry when not presiding over the slaughter of Bosniaks. Well poetry is a generous description for the crap he produced. Here is an example:

Sarajevo

I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree
Marches up the hill, within itself.
The aggressor air storms our souls
and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:
What does the black metal in the garage have for us?
Look how fear turned into a spider
Looking for the answer at his computer.

BBC translator said his poems were as "bad in the original as they sound in the English translation"

If that was not bad enough the Times poetry reports that Osama Bin Laden is to be published next week by an Oxford-educated academic, who discovered that he had once been in great demand as an after-dinner speaker.

Bin Laden’s recitals at wedding banquets and other feasts during the 1990s were recorded on tapes recovered from his compound in Afghanistan in 2001. They have been studied by Professor Flagg Miller, who teaches Arabic poetry at the University of California, Davis. He said: “Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and meters, which was one reason why many people taped him and passed recordings around, like pop songs.”

“They reveal Osama Bin Laden as the performer, the entertainer with an agenda,” Miller said. “He told gory tales of dead mujaheddin from the villages where he was speaking, which was often the first time their families had learned of their fates. He mixed this news up with radical theology and his own verse based on the traditions of hamasa - a warlike poetic tradition from Oman calculated to capture the interest of young men.” Miller said Bin Laden was calculating. “He crafts his words to excite the urban dissatisfied youth, offering them escape from their elders and villages. Instead, many just die in terrible ways.”

Other Arabic specialists are unhappy that the tapes have come to light. “They seem adolescent and brutal, like a video nasty, composed with minimal skill to win over the susceptible mind of the young and bloodthirsty male,” said one academic, who did not want to be named.“Whatever else Bin Laden is, he is now exposed as a disgrace to two millennia of Arabic culture.”

Here is an example of his work.

Tomorrow, William, you will discover which young man [will] confront your brethren, who have been deceived by [their own] leaders.

A youth, who plunged into the smoke of war, smiling

He hunches forth, staining the blades of lances red

May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent

Humans, should they fall, Djinn, should they ride

[And] lions of the jungle, whose only fangs

[Are their] lances and short Indian swords

As the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back

[My] stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame

On the day of the stallions’ expulsion, how the war-cries attest to me

As do stabbing, striking, pens, and books.

In my view it is ugly and brutal fare. I would not offer up a line of verse by Farrokhzad for the complete works of this evil man. That said I’m sure there will be a few who will appreciate this crap. I can just picture a certain ersatz Mexican getting an orgasm over it though.