A nonsensical story by the White House and U.S. media four years ago in May of 2011 claimed that a group of U.S. navy seals “heroically” assassinated the ever evasive Osama bin Laden in a blaze of gunfire during a night raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In a 10,000-word investigative report published two weeks ago in the London Review of Books, American journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the U.S. official narrative as a hoax devised to bolster American popular support for Obama’s campaign for re-election and to justify the use of brutal U.S. counterinsurgency warfare tactics including torture and drone strikes.
Hersh’s piece has incurred a firestorm of slander and fury from the white ruling class and its lapdog media outlets, including suggestions that Hersh must be going senile for him to dare question Obama’s absurd cover-up.
The official story, like the story on the 9/11 attacks, reeked of fiction from the beginning, and raised a lot of questions.
Re-examining Obama’s lies about bin Laden’s assassination
According to Obama’s flimsily constructed narrative, the CIA had located Osama bin Laden with the help of one of bin Laden’s alleged couriers who coughed up Osama’s location after a few hours of “enhanced interrogation,” a euphemism for the heinous, horrific methods of torture used by the U.S. government against colonized people.
Bin Laden, it turns out, was not in Afghanistan; he was in Pakistan, and according to the imperialists, he continued to give tactical and organizational leadership to Al Qaeda operations from his “lavish compound” in Abbottabad, somehow “hiding in plain sight” from the Pakistani government, a longtime U.S. ally.
In the patriotic action movie sequence lionized in the CIA Hollywood propaganda blockbuster, Zero Dark Thirty, the group of Navy Seals shot their way through a tense firefight with the famed Saudi-born leader, then dragged his corpse onto an aircraft carrier and released his body into the ocean for a “traditional Islamic burial at sea.”
How was bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan for so long without the Pakistani government or military noticing? Why would bin Laden choose to hide in Abbottabad, just two miles away from Pakistan’s military headquarters and surrounded by Pakistani intelligence operatives?
Why would the Navy Seals shoot bin Laden rather than attempt to apprehend him? Why would they dump his body in the ocean without even verifying his identity? Why would we believe that they would bother to give him a proper Islamic burial after they just supposedly riddled his body with bullets?
The answer to all of these questions is the same—they lied. When U.S. imperialism tells you something, always assume that the opposite is true. .
What really happened in May of 2011
According to Hersh, the Pakistani secret service knew bin Laden’s whereabouts all along. They had captured him in 2006 from the Hindu Kush Mountains and held him hostage in the Abbottabad compound near their base of military operation so they could keep a close eye on him.
In 2011, a retired Pakistani official walked into the white house, said he knew where bin Laden was and demanded a chunk of the $25 million reward. The man took a polygraph test and passed, and the ball was rolling.
The CIA went to the Pakistani military and told them they knew about bin Laden’s presence there, and blackmailed them if they didn’t cooperate.
Relations between Pakistan and the U.S. grew even more tense when the U.S. began to reduce its military aid to Pakistan to intimidate Pakistan into full cooperation.
Obama’s original plan was to use a drone strike to kill bin Laden. This would “justify” the use of drone strikes, widely hated by Pakistan and elsewhere for their use as weapons of mass murder against Pakistani weddings, funerals and communities.
Pakistan is a pliant U.S. puppet, but their relations with the U.S. have historically been fraught with tension. U.S. imperialism’s smug arrogance and brutish military assaults on “terrorists” in Pakistan have elicited the fury of the Pakistani people and government alike.
However, Pakistan heavily depends on U.S. financial and military aid.
Regardless, Pakistan concealed their capture of bin Laden from the U.S. for two reasons: firstly, they wanted to have him on hand as a potential strategic trump card should they need something from the U.S.
Secondly, Pasha, one of the former head generals of the Pakistani military, claims they kept bin Laden because they needed a hostage to “keep tabs on Al Qaida and the Taliban.”
They could prevent the Taliban and Al Qaida from conducting operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI by threatening to turn bin Laden over to the U.S.
For these reasons Pakistan insisted that the U.S. maintain a cover story that kept secret the cooperation between the ISI and the CIA to get bin Laden.
When the night of May 2, 2011 rolled around, navy seals, along with a CIA and ISI agent, went into Pakistan with plans to shoot bin Laden dead on sight.
They busted into the compound, went to the exact room where he was located (he was very ill, basically bed-ridden) and shot him repeatedly.
There were no weapons in the house. Obama made sure to fabricate a story about a gun battle when he announced the news later that week.
America’s desperation exposed for the world to see
Hersh’s report has exploded in Obama’s face like a rusty bombshell—not simply because it tore off the curtains on what really happened with the killing of bin Laden, but because it further exposed what Omali Yeshitela, the Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, refers to as the “stench and rot” of a dying, desperate and decaying U.S. imperialism.
U.S. imperialism is on its last leg. Threats, bribery, and blackmail, even against their supposed allies, have become necessary.
The U.S. cannot even rely on one of its allies, Pakistan, to share information about their capture of one of “America’s most wanted.”
Everywhere you look America and Americanism are scorned.
This is evident in the bloc of anti-imperial progressive movements and governments sweeping Latin America.
We see it in the unceasing resistance of the Palestinian people, in the uprisings throughout Africa, and in the re-emergent Black Liberation Movement sending tremors throughout the fabric of white American society from St. Louis, Missouri to Baltimore, Maryland.
Deception, political intrigue, assassination and cover-ups are the logical conclusion of a social system born from slavery, genocide and colonialism.
The United States of America defines anyone who challenges U.S. domination as a “terrorist.”
The oppressed and colonized peoples, including the thousands of Pakistani children whose limbs have been blown off their small bodies by U.S.-launched drone strike operations know that the world’s leading terrorist organization is not al Qaida; it is the United States of America.
The victorious struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere for their self-determination and national liberation will push U.S. imperialism off the face of the planet Earth, once and forever!
Uhuru!
