To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take time to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness – of himself, of his condition, of his society – for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. (Ellul, Propaganda, pp 46-47)
[Footnote*]
I don’t wish to follow the common notion that propaganda is a series of lies or even a big lie, but for this purpose this day will concentrate on one very big lie. The big propaganda event of 2011 was the “killing” of Osama bin Laden, and it is so thinly constructed, so transparently false, that I wonder why it is so easily sold.
In large part this has to do with the follow-the-leader nature of the American public (the “public” that I am familiar with – I suppose other “publics” are as malleable). If important people say it is true, and especially if there is general agreement among people who purport to oppose one another in public, then the story will be believed, no matter how incredible.
But the other part of it is, as Ellul mentions above, that we are fed a constant stream of “news,” and if we are to stay “informed” we must follow this stream. So there is no time to think about anything, as yesterday’s story is replaced by today’s, and we move forward. The very object of such “news” is to keep us in a state of mental disarray, to keep us distracted and uninformed.
Osama bin Laden most likely died in 2001, and there is disagreement about whether his end was violent or due to his failing kidneys. He was likely as surprised as anyone by the events of 9/11/2001, and in his last known interview before his death, denied having any part in it.
So, vigilant citizens, I propose here not to argue about his 2011 “death” at the hands of Navy Seals who are themselves now dead, but rather to try to understand its purpose. A symbol as potent as that is not killed lightly, and certainly not for the sake of domestic politics. Much larger game was afoot.
My own supposition at the time, and which I keep falling back to, was the public mind needed to shift away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on to new wars. The Arab Spring had raised concern in Washington that an outbreak of democracy was threatening regional stability in the Mideast.
So enlighten me, or set me straight. I obviously do not have my mind right.
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*This was a fascinating footnote in Ellul’s book, and so I present it as a footnote here just as he did:
The only element in publication of a fact which one must scrupulously take into account is its probability or credibility. Much news was suppressed during [WWII] because it wouldn’t have been believed by the public; it would have been branded as propaganda. A 1942 incident is an excellent example lf this. At the moment of Montgomery’s decisive victory in North Africa, Rommel was absent. The Nazis had not expected the attack at that time and had called Rommel back to Germany. But Goebbels gave the order not to reveal this fact because everybody would have considered it a lie to explain the defeat and prove that Rommel had not really been beaten. Truth was not probable enough to be told.
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*[Footnote] Andrew Bacevich here highlights a forest I may be overlooking in my search for trees – the expansion of special ops as our primary means of waging new wars. Navy Seal Team 6 is now part of the mythology of Americanism, alongside Green Berets and and the hoisting of the flag on Iwo Jima. The expansion of these ops, started under Bush and expanded under Obama, is now our primary means of invading new countries. Between these types of operations and drone warfare, the War Department can now attack in secret and kill without causalities on the side of the good guys.
Piece of Mindful 
my personal opinion is there will be an increased push to give Africa the western colonizing treatment. Gaddafi’s Libya was a major impediment to establishing Africom on the actual continent, and with Libya now thrown into disarray, plans can move forward to counter China’s role in trying to establish itself in-country.
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Marchall McLuhan said: “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” If you agree, all means all media, and all values embedded by media. It’s the world as we don’t know it. The real, unreal and surreal are one and the same — Alice and the Wizard of Oz 24/7. Please pass the Prozac.
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What was the evidence that the seals who participated in the alleged mission are allegedly dead?
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SEAL Team 6, unit that killed Osama bin Laden, died in helicopter crash
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The article you cited says none of the members who participated in the raid were on that helicopter.
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you are right, I missed the update at the end of the piece. doh.
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You do realize that Navy seals being on a NG helicopter on their way to a mission is absurd, that an errant rocket getting lucky is unlikely, and that the two combined make for a highly improbable incident, statisically about as likely as Bush writing a science text book.
Then you have the miitary giving us straightforward information regarding a secret mission on the day of its occurrence.
All that in mind, why are the last words of the article anymore likely to be true than the first? The whole of the story is a mishmash of fact seeded with lies.
The military, in my opinion, “killed” the members of NST6 by putting their names on the roster of that copter, then shooting it down. They most likely died the night of the supposed raid, if witnesses are to be believed*. There might also have been members of NST6 threatening to go public or up the ladder with their complaints, who were also killed on that flight.
As Agatha wold say, this is murrrr-derr, cold blooded variety.
*You might question your tendency to automatically disbelieve foreign witnesses here too.
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You are just basically maknig stuff up at this point. Nothing wrong with that I have lots of theories based on nothing more than my own suspicions and conclusions but thats all it is.
I would question the veracity of your eyewitness who claimed he saw dead American bodies at the scene of bin ladens alleged demise (as I did the first time we discussed this). I believe the original pakistani article you cited had some odd exchange where he identified himself as associated with one of the main ‘extremist’ islamic parties in Pakistan.
I question your characterization of the likelihood that the seals were on that particular helicopter as ‘absurd’. It isn’t absurd. The chances of that particular helicopter going down in the way it was alleged are small but also not absurd. There also just simply any support or evidence that the seals allegedly killed in the alleged helicopter crash were the ones who participated in the raid on the compound in Pakistan. That is again your own conclusion you have reached without any basis other than suspicion. Seal Team 6 has over 130 men who are operational soldiers at any one time. Clearly there is room for suspicion but there simply isnt any actual evidence to support what you are claiming. I know you will respond that there is no actual evidence to support the claim that Bin Laden was killed, but as I had pointed out before and i believe pw does again in this thread the admitted presence and existence of Bon Ladens family at the compound is definitely a start.
My own theory, which is pretty much based on my suspicions as your conclusions are based on your own, is that Bin Laden was indeed at that compound and at this point in his life was pretty much a dupe and useful idiot. Trotted out to make videos once in a while and made to feel like he was in charge of something. The question is whose dupe was he.
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Speculation and “making stuff up” are two different things. But reliance on the military for facts is less credible than speculation, in my mind.
Bin Laden’s wives – I have seen nothing from them to the effect that they say they lived with bin Laden, and only grant that to you as evidence, and weak evidence at that. One, the possibility of coercion is strong, two that their words were not spoken by them but merely relayed to us by military sources, three that they were his wives during his life which ended in 2001, four, that the whole story is concocted and they don’t even exist, and and five that they are his wives, that he was there, and the picture of his shot up face was real too.
The key words with the helicopter are “National Guard.” Navy Seals don’t ride on public transportation, which is what NG copters are used for, especially on a secret mission, and certainly not with other soldiers not involved in that mission. Possibly they were on leave and headed for respite, but remember that when that bird was shot down we were told they were on their way to a secret mission.
Statistically, to multiply long odds requires dependent variables – that they would be on a NG helicopter on a mission is a long shot, that this particular helicopter would be the victim of a lucky shot is a long shot (npi), and multiply the two long shots together you get an extremely long shot. The two unlikelys are dependent, so that it is proper IMO to multiply the odds.
Note that I don’t rule out that we were told the truth. I just think it unlikely,and am more inclined to think that many of those Seals were already dead, and others were murdered that day. Remember that the US military is large, that within it are embedded intelligence, and that they kill fifty people before breakfast every they. Killing is their business. Would they kill Americans? Hell to the yes?
And lastly, the credibility of Muhammad Bashir – I saw nothing indicating that he was a member of an “extremist group,” which as you use it means “indigenous resistance” and not part of the US military, as I use that term.
I watched his testimony several times, and noted the incredulity of the interviewer and Bashir’s own emphatic testimony. She repeatedly tried to trip him up but he was consistent throughout. The link to what Americans were told is that the War Department did admit that there was a crash at the scene that night, but wrote it off as a minor incident.
I urge you read the interview. Also note that before it was broadcast, the reporter did her due diligence, satisfied that he was a who he said he was and that he lived where he said he lived. This was not Fox News. This was mainstream Pakistani news.
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Well to a certain extent we have to rely on the military for the facts to the extent we have any facts at all.
As for the bin laden wives as far as I know they are still in pakistani custody. So to the extent we know anything about them what we know is only what the US and Paki authorities tell us. The US stated they were present at the compound and were left behind. The pakistanis stated they took them into custody. If we are to assume the pakistanis and US are both in on the conspiracy than you could assume they are making it all up and these women were appeared out of thin air or never existed, but that seems a bit of a stretch even for me.
I was trying to find the old thread where we discussed Bashir before, it wasn’t on the link you had above it must have been a different one. I recall he had made statements to the effect or was asking for permission from a higher up in one of the islamist parties to speak to the reporter at the outset of the interview. Seems more likely to be disinformation. The pakistanis make us look like pikers when it comes to the spreading of conspiracy theories, the motivation of a far right (by their standards) religious party in pakistan to spread a conspiracy about the US actions should be self-evident, especially when that party probably had connections with whoever was assisting him in hiding out there.
As for the helicopter and the nature of the mission, everything I read was that it was a Chinook helicopter and the seals were being deployed to help bail out other units that were in above their head in a shoot-out near an outpost the US has recently abandoned. While Im sure the military classifies nearly every operation as secret in one way or the other this seems more like the every day garden variety fight as opposed to something highly classified as would be the Bin Laden mission or something else taking place over the border. Chinooks are frequently used all over the place in Afghanistan because they have the heavy lifting power neccesary to carry a big load high in the mountains. From the list of casualties the helicopter pilots themselves were members of special operations. Im not sure where you are getting this information that the helicopter was national guard in origin. Even if it were I dont see what that matters as the pilots were not. I think you are basing too much on the premise that this helicopter was national guard and therefore the entire story must be bunk. I don’t think it means much.
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Ok, i would not normally search blog archives but I was starting to think maybe I had lost my mind and imagined we had this exchange before so i had to find it. The mention of him talking on the phone to a higher up comes at the beginning of the transcript itself from the website where it was contained. This was my previous response and I still stand by it:
https://pieceofmind.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/arendt-part-3-there-will-be-blood/
From the transcript:
“Sister, I want to tell you something that is a great burden on my heart and conscience” – Listen to what he said:
1. 00:59 Muhammad Bashir: I.. today… would like to comment about todays Abotabad operation events, until now, what I am about to say, no person has said.
01:08: Reporter: But, Muhammad Bashir sahib appeared frightened. While speaking to me, Muhammad Bashir sahib phoned his
relative; leader, M.E.A. of Jamaat-e-islami, Abotabad, Abdul Razaq Abaasi on the phone.”
jackruby:
I dont have any reason not to believe the transcript so Ill take it that its accurate. Is the interview real or is it staged is a good question, as well as: “is the guy lying” for reasons of his own.
After reading the transcript one thing that popped out to me as odd is that this guy is talking on the phone to the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party at the outset. Sort of seems like he is almost asking permission to give this interview. Jamaat-e-Islami is a very conservative religious party, has ties to extremist elements in pakistan (as well as the military and intelligence services) and is kind of like the Republicans of Pakistan. That alone seems really weird. Whether that means he is lying and is trying to plant a fake story for whatever reason I dont know…but that would be the answer I lean towards.
So moving past that..if we assume he is telling the truth and leave aside the inherent probability that eye witness testimony is generally innacturate particularly in a dark chaotic environment like this…I’m not really sure what it means. So he is saying that one of the helicopters crashed and there were dead American bodies everywhere right? I know the govt can pull all kinds of off the books stuff to cover things up, but I would also assume these guys have families and its probably not as easy to sweep mass casualties of US servicemen under the rug as it might seem in the movies.
So Im not saying he is lying…but he has a motivation to lie at the least given who he is talking to on the phone for starters. To convince me that what he is saying is true is going to require more. It seems more likely to me that he is either lying or genuinely confused about what he saw that night. But of course I dont really know what happened.”
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Excuse me while I have a laugh, not at you as you are a serious man. It’s a hall of mirrors and we’ll never know what is true. But when men die, as they did that night, they later have to be officially killed. They do, after all, have friends and family.
Ergo a crash. Families are then given the knock on the door. That is how Navy Seals wind up on National guard helicopters. They were already dead.
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I forgot to address your skepticism re Bashir. Address that inquiring mind at American news, please.
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Mark, you disappeared last time I asked this, so I’ll ask it on your website –
What actually happened, then? Why did Raymond Davis kill two ISI agents if the ISI wasn’t defending a high value target in their country? That to me suggests that indeed US intelligence was going after someone they weren’t supposed to. Furthermore, if a high value target wasn’t killed or captured that night, why did Pakistan proceed to arrest bin Laden’s wife and children, and threaten to deport them? Why did Pakistan also arrest a doctor and try him with treason for allegedly helping the US find bin Laden? If bin Laden died in late 2001 or early 2002, as you have theorized, how does he have children under the age of ten? Clearly, they could not actually be his children, but that’s objectively be testable, so it’s a dangerous thing for a hypothetical conspirator to claim.
For this conspiracy to have worked out, in other words, we would have either had to have fooled the Pakistani government and the ISI, or they would have to be involved. The former seems rather unlikely – that would mean that the doctor, the wife, the kids, are all in on the cover up, and we expect them to stick to their stories while in the hands of Pakistani intelligence? That’s rather bold. The other possibility is that the Pakistani government, or at least portions of it, are in on the conspiracy. That’s again trouble – we invade their country (briefly, but still an invasion), destroy our relations with them, and then expect them to keep a secret with us? It’s unlikely – they may have agreed to it as a way to stop the drone attacks in Pakistan, but that hasn’t been the case. And why leave a country you’re unfriendly with with a secret that could undermine your credibility so thoroughly?
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I’ll answer you both at once here, but first a comment or two: One, your deep skepticism at a challenge to official truth is noted. This attitude, sometimes referred to as “eternal vigilance,” would better serve you be skeptical of, rather than to defend, those who present to you stories that are of such an incredible nature that they ought to be held in high standards of evidence. Trust in an official is not evidence.
Two, you both exhibit the tendency that Ellul talked about – caught up in the news, unable to get beyond the surface of an event.
Jack, members of Navy Team Six were killed on August 6, 2011 in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. They were supposedly on a secret mission, and were using a National Guard helicopter to go there, and were not alone, but were with soldiers from other units. Officials have denied that the OBL unit were among those killed. It is all suspicious, the nature of the transportation, the lucky shot that downed it, and the people aboard.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/07/us-afghanistan-violence-idUSTRE7750UW20110807
There’s more, but I’ll leave it there. You’re on your own, and I advise you to rely on your self, your wits, your natural skepticism, your cognitive abilities, to connect dots.
PW, the ins and outs of this and that are a tangled web, but every shred of evidence you present is in one way or another “official”, and not necessarily credible. Do we know his wives were arrested? Do we know these were his wives? Do we know these are his children? Do we know why the doctor was arrested? No. We know only what we are told. The difference between us: I don’t believe any of this so-called evidence. It’s not physical evidence when you strip away the details. It’s only the words of officials.
One thing that you lack in all of this OBL-killing circus is concrete evidence. We’ve not been shown footage, the picture of the dead OBL turned out to be a doctored fake, the body buried at sea, DNA evidence under complete control of those who claim its authenticity – no chain of evidence or independent testimony.
We do have the neighbor who lived next to the compound appearing on Pakistani TV that night, saying that there were three helicopters, only one landed, men went in the neighborhood and told people that anyone who left their houses would be killed. One helicopter landed, men went into the compound, came out later, the helicopter exploded on takeoff, everyone aboard killed. I have seen the interview, but it is gone now from YouTube. I do have a transcript. https://pieceofmind.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-death-of-team-6/
In other words, you’ve got nothing. Why so much intrigue, why a doctor arrested, why why why … who knows. It’s a big story. If it’s false, people are going to be warned, intimidated, killed, for speaking up. Secrets are kept, people do sit on knowledge for fear of their lives. A doctor arrested and imprisoned for 30 years is indeed curious. [It could be a message to anyone else who is causing problems with this story.] There is a story there. At this point, that’s all we know. Something is up.
Here’s my frame of reference: One, my familiarity with propaganda in general, and knowledge that Americans swim deeply in its waters, leads me to immediately be suspicious of everything I see in major media outlets. These are not credible people – they are mostly third-rate hacks who hold high profile due to their credulous and unquestioning attitudes.
So I begin to look for the real story under the lies. I’ve been doing this ever since I learned of OBL’s interview in September of 2001 in which he denied involvement. We then had the words of two high Pakistani officials that he was dead, both speaking matter-of-factly. Over the years I’ve seen his image used in various films for various purposes, and the images are obviously fake, using impostors. Because of the phenomenon that Ellul describes above, that people don’t take time to question what rolls before their eyes, these scams are easy to pull off. Even if people are somewhat in cognitive dissonance seeing an obviously fake image, they move along to the next story.
But there is wide skepticism among a minority of us, so that in the aftermath of the supposed killing, we learn that OBL was vain, and died his hair for various TV appearances. This is standard, along with drugs and porn. They are cleaning up, doing their details, putting the story to sleep once and for all.
Relations between the Pakistanis and the American military are mixed, with the US providing weaponry and working with the intelligence forces, holding sway over the government, and yet with resistance within that government and general resentment of Americans in the population what with our random killings and acts of terrorism against their people. So it’s love hate, love from a compromised class, hate from everyone else. Out of that, you are going to get a confused picture. Pakistan is not a monolith, nor is its government. Its intelligence services are largely under control of the US.
Enough. You’re on your own guys. Back to your eternal vigilance.
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“Pakistan is not a monolith, nor is its government.”
Precisely why I think it would be nearly impossible to involve Pakistani security in a a cover up of this scale. Pakistani intelligence is not well controlled by the US – they are not controlled by the Pakistani government either.
I understand that you doubt official sources, but I don’t understand in what way you are doubting them. Are they being put upon by their respective governments to keep the story secret, or are we feeding them false stories? The former is believable in the case of the US news sources or even the BBC, but al Jazeera and other sources? It seems unlikely.
Of course, that’s not proof, nothing like it. A DNA test of his alleged children would at least establish that he continued to live after 2001. Until then, any number of things could have happened, but to announce with such certainty that the whole thing was a hoax is a bit premature. It’s possible that someone else important (but unknown) was killed, and bin Laden’s name substituted in, or that bin Laden was in fact the target, but was intentionally or unintentionally not killed.
Or you could be right – perhaps it is as you say, Osama died in 2001, and now that we want to leave Afghanistan, we ‘killed’ him. But then, the timing is strange. The last ten years in Afghanistan have been expensive and largely unproductive. Why not kill him in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq? Hell, even find a million Iraqi dinars under his pillow. Bottom line? While no one can prove what happened there, circumstantial evidence suggests that something happened, and a straight up denial is no more enlightened or critical than unqualified belief.
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At least you are not in unqualified belief. The big problem I have with this story is complete absence of evidence. On the other hand we do have independent testimony of his death, suspicious impostors doing videos, and a
Swiss bank outfit that claimed that only one recorded voice since 2001 was sure to be Osama, all others questionable.The Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence said it is 95-per-cent certain the [11/2002] tape does not feature the voice of the long-absent terrorist leader.
And in fact he was ‘dead’ until 2004′ when he came back to life. Prior to that time, Bush claimed not even to care where he might be.
Hard to imagine Pakistani intelligence, also not a monolith, to be independent. US has extensive influence, probably infiltrators at every level.
As to why people behave as they do, keep in mind that what we see and hear in this country heavily filtered. Also understand that the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims do not believe the 19 Arab story about 9/11. So I assume there is massive suspicion about the killing as well.
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You and i have discussed this several times before. The conspiracy here in my opinion is the involvement of the Pakistani government in 911. The real question is why the us govt has not called them on it and what that implies.
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An operation like 9/11 had to have a vast amount of planning behind it. The idea that 19 ragtags pulled it off is pulp fiction. Pakistani involvement would not surprise me, nor Israeli or American. The only thing I regard as a certainty is that Osama was not part of it. All of the other circumstances surrounding him, his propaganda value, the use of impostors to make films and recordings, and then this “kill” operation, so easily seen through, indicate military intelligence.
We can only speculate, but that 30-year jail sentence just handed down is a fascinating morsel.
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