Welcome. This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com with your Sunday Update for this 8th day of May, 2011. And now for the real news.
Osama Bin Laden has allegedly been shot dead by Navy SEALs at a private residence in Abottabad, Pakistan, according to one of numerous contradictory reports given by the US government this week.
In the latest development, soundless videos of someone seen from behind watching a TV image of Obama have been released along with years-old tape to convince the public that the person allegedly shot and killed last Sunday was in fact Osama Bin Laden.
It has yet to be explained how the release of this footage in any way supports the idea that Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed last week and immediately buried at sea, nor how silent, undated images of someone who may or may not have been Bin Laden disprove the assertion made by numerous heads of state and counterterrorism officials that he has been dead for years (like Asif Ali Zardari, Hamid Gul and Steve Pieczenik).
The administration has been able to dominate the 24/7 news cycle for one week now by providing a completely unskeptical establishment media with a story that, it now turns out, was completely wrong in every respect and then retracting that story piece by piece.
Originally, it was announced that Bin Laden was killed after the SEALs stormed an opulent compound and engaged in an intense firefight with Al Qaeda operatives, including Bin Laden himself who not only returned fire but used his own wife as a human shield.
Since then, that version of events has been amended to state that the SEALs stormed a relatively spartan, unremarkable house, that only one of the people there actually attempted to use a gun, and that Bin Laden did not return fire or use his wife as a shield.
Now, many analysts are noting that the confusion around the narrative of the killing is a deliberate tactic to keep the public talking about an event for which absolutely no evidence has been provided, and which has been outright contradicted by numerous experts and witnesses.
From the outset, the news that the Navy SEAL team allegedly dumped Osama’s body into the sea has been the one that has left the public most skeptical. Originally justified as being a traditional Islamic way of disposing of a body, that information has now been revealed to have been part of a deliberate deception campaign, with government ip addresses having been responsible for adding information about burial at sea to the wikipedia article on the subject in the hours after the announcement. Many Muslim scholars have now come out to note that burial at sea is not a traditional Islamic practice.
The idea that the public may actually accept this wildly implausible story without being presented with any evidence of any kind for it is now being scrutinized by analysts for possible use in other situations where the government would prefer the public to believe evidence-free assertions merely on their say-so. Other possible uses for this technique have already been suggested by pundits.
The FBI, for instance, could claim to have buried the surveillance tapes from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building at sea, but provide DNA evidence to prove that the tapes did not show a John Doe No. 2 or secondary explosions at the building.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology could claim that they have buried the data for their WTC7 collapse model at sea, but they still have their computer animations to “prove” that the building collapsed into itself at freefall gravitational acceleration due to scattered asymmetrical fires.
The Bush administration could claim that they did in fact find Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, but buried them at sea before they couldproduce evidence for their existence.
Many observers are cautioning, however, that regardless of the particular details of this incident, more worrying is how the incident is now being used to position the Americans and Pakistanis on a more antagonistic footing, potentially opening the door for greater conflict in the Middle East and indeed around the globe (see this and this and this).
The event raises the possibility of a false flag terrorist incident to be blamed on Pakistan and used as a justification for a full-scale military incursion into the area.
Alex Jones, who issued a warning of government-staged terror to be blamed on CIA asset Osama Bin Laden just 2 months before 9/11, has now issued a part two of that warning, asking viewers and listeners to call into the White House to stop such a plan from being implemented.