Another Death

I was listening to the clock radio alarm yesterday morning, half asleep, when I heard the news. Osama bin Laden was killed by a small team of U.S. commandos in his walled compound, 30 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Please forgive me, but I did not have the urge to jump out of bed and dance around the room. Yes, he deserved it, but his death is ten years late and our response to his crimes has been self-destructive. Thinking pragmatically, there’s no real win here.

We had the chance to kill him back in the winter of 2000-2001. On November 2, 2000 in a hotel room in Germany, representatives of the Taliban government of Afghanistan met with representatives of the Clinton administration and agreed to help us kill Osama bin Laden. The method of choice was to isolate bin Laden and his followers under house arrest in a compound in a village called Daronta and have the Taliban give us coordinates for a cruise missile strike.

(I picked up this story from Counterpunch in 2006 and interviewed the source in 2007.)

Admittedly, there has been considerable debate as to the intentions of the Taliban in these negotiations. Various diplomats and former intelligence operatives have differed as to the seriousness of Taliban offers. Some thought that the Taliban were stalling. Others thought that the U.S. government was missing opportunities due to cultural ignorance; The Taliban kept dropping broad hints that seemed obvious to them, but blew over our heads. Whatever the truth there, it seems to me that with more determination and imagination we could have decapitated al Qaeda before 9-11 at minimal cost.

 Consider the changes the United States has gone through since bin Laden’s biggest plot came to fruition on September 11^th, 2001.

The U.S. government, with our complicity, has discarded major portions of our constitution. The Orwellian USA-PATRIOT Act, passed in a panic-stricken rush, set the stage for our march towards a police state. We have sunk to third-world dictatorship moral status with our government’s embrace of torture, indefinite detention, rendition, military tribunals, and secret prisons. We are subject to warrantless wiretapping and other arbitrary invasions of privacy. Habeas corpus, a settled point of law for four centuries, has become a quaint anachronism. We have, in general, discarded the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th Amendments in the Bill of Rights (covering unwarranted search and seizure, due process, self incrimination, a speedy and public trial, rules of evidence, and cruel and unusual punishment), and key parts of Article 1, Sections 8 and 9 (war powers and habeas corpus). The executive branch has accumulated dangerous and unconstitutional powers.

We invaded Afghanistan when there was still a chance of surgically killing the object of our pursuit, and we remain there a decade later. We committed the ultimate war crime – invading another country without provocation – and Iraq has suffered beyond even its previous sufferings. The blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives is on our hands. We have sunk ourselves in debt by pouring trillions of dollars down the bottomless maw of the military industrial complex. This pipeline of cash has snaked back on itself and further corrupted our electoral system.

The truly perverse part of it all is that bin Laden and his followers just blew up a couple of big buildings. He killed fewer people than die in a month on our highways. They were killed in an especially cruel, horrifying, and dramatic way, and I am not trying to minimize their suffering or the suffering of the victim’s families and friends. But stand back a bit and look at all the painful ways that hundreds of thousands of people die in this country every year.

My point is, bin Laden didn’t depopulate us, he didn’t invade us, he didn’t take over our territory, and he didn’t execute a coup and take the reins of our government. As with the usual automotive carnage, we did the work ourselves. Osama bin Laden didn’t stand at the podium in the House or the Senate, arguing for yet another attack on our fundamental rights. Nor did he vote for the idiots who did. That was the work of U.S. citizens, scared into docility and jingoism, eating up the propaganda and lopping off the best parts of themselves to feed the sharks. The sharks being the opportunist politicians and the corporate sociopaths they serve.

At 54 years old, bin Laden beat the average life expectancy of Afghans by about a decade and came close to that of your average Pakistani. He committed an act of mass murder calculated for its emotional impact and then sat back and watched us as we wrecked the foundations of our own society. We are reduced as a nation, morally, politically, socially, and economically. He probably didn’t have much time to reflect in his last few minutes of life, but if he did, I imagine he died with a certain sense of satisfaction.

Yes, I’m glad he’s dead. No, this doesn’t feel like a victory.