Lies my president still tells me?

As the president’s ratings continue to sink, his approval for four wars diminishes, and there is a rise in the 14 billion-plus national debt ceiling being pushed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, all with Wall Street speculation driving up gas and food prices, what better time for Barack Obama to announce the assassination of Osama bin Laden by a team of Navy Seals. It’s a homemade bomb of good news to wipe away all the bad.

Fibbing, the president refers to bin Laden as the murderer of millions of Muslims, though bin Laden was originally recruited to fight with the Mujahadeen in a Jihad against the Russians who had attacked Afghanistan to keep a government they favored in power. This Mujahadeen was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, then NSA adviser to Jimmy Carter. The Mujahadeen itself was armed, trained, and paid for by the CIA. Al Qaeda was a file name in bin Laden’s laptop, meaning “the base,” a list of the best men Osama fought with against the Russians. Al Qaeda was branded in 2001 by the CIA as the world’s most dangerous terror group, even though the agency had bought and paid for the creation and maintenance of the group.

Obama also calls Osama the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist, but he neglects to mention not for the crime of 9/11. There was not enough evidence, according to the FBI, to keep him number one terrorist on the 9/11 list. As to the mostly Saudi “purported terrorists,” whose pictures were hastily pulled out of an FBI file, FBI chief Robert Mueller said shortly after that we couldn’t be certain they were the perps. Actually, seven or eight of them had been living in Middle Eastern countries at the time, and were victims obviously of identity theft. Also, why show any if there is not complete certainty?

As to the airliners they purportedly hijacked, there are many who do not believe the impact and/or fires of the airliners brought down the World Trade Towers. Some 1,300 hundred engineers and architects believe the Towers were brought down by internal demolition, as was Tower 7, never hit by an airliner, but “pulled” by internal demolition at the request of its owner, Larry Silverstein, because “there had been so much pain and suffering there . . .” His announcement was made at 3 PM on 9/11 on national TV. Sure enough at 5:20 PM, down came Tower 7 in 6.5 seconds into its footprint, which was conceivably the paradigm for Tower 1 and 2, leaving the desolation of Ground Zero. Trouble is it takes months not hours to rig an internal demo for a 47-story, steel framed building, so it had to be set already.

As to the Pentagon, it turned out there was only an eighteen foot wide entry hole and an even smaller exit hole. As you may know, military officer April Gallop, who had a top Pentagon security clearance, and who was back after a two-month maternity leave, her son Elisha in his basket beside her, experienced an internal explosion when she turned on her computer. It stopped the Pentagon clocks 7 minutes before Flight 77 purportedly hit the Pentagon, leaving no engines, no scuff marks, no luggage, no bodies, nothing but questions.

As to Shanksville, none other than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, recently blurted out that the “the Muslim terrorists were . . . the people who blew Flight 93 out of the air.” No, Don, that was probably us, too.

As to bin Laden, he entered the American Hospital in Dubai in July of 2001 for kidney dialysis, and also met there with the Middle Eastern US CIA station chief. How could a man that ill have survived the balance of a decade, escaping from Tora Bora later in 2001, as US troops unsuccessfully tracked him? It would have been miraculous if not hard to believe.

In fact, the dean of American scholars on 9/11, David Ray Griffin, wrote in one of his many 9/11 books, Osama bin Laden—Dead or Alive- that Bin Laden passed in Pakistan (most likely from his kidney affliction) in December 2001. There are death notices from Pakistan newspapers reproduced in the book, announcing that Bin Laden was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Pakistan, in keeping with the traditions of Islam. This fact was mentioned in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and Yahoo News, but in slightly different contexts.

That is, the body of bin Laden, according to Huffington Post, was “dropped in the sea in order to leave no definitive location for his final resting place” and done so only hours later. It was CNN that originally reported “the drop” hours later. And so, are we to take it as an article of faith that there was a body, or at least photographs somewhere of the deceased, bullet-riddled Osama bin Laden. The religious issue aside, without a body we really have no case. And invoking Muslim tradition becomes a thin argument. In Griffin’s book, several years earlier, the burial country was stated as Pakistan, the locales those of the newspaper notices.

Again according to Huffington Post, “The fight lasted 40 minutes . . . a surgical raid” conducted by a Navy Seals unit. Bin Laden’s adult son was killed, as were two of his couriers and a woman being used as a human shield [though one paper said it was bin Laden who had done that]. Bin Laden himself ‘did resist the assault force,’ a senior administration official said. How did he resist? Reports on Sunday night said the terrorist leader was ultimately shot in the head.” But how did he resist?

It turns out also that Osama wasn’t living in the caves of the Afghan/Pakistan border when this happened. He was secured in a “massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army, as described by The New York Times.

Huffington Post added that, “The house at the end of a narrow dirt road,” “was roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, but had no telephone or Internet connections . . .” Would that be to avoid detection? It would seem that a compound of that size without communications would do exactly the opposite. But the Times continues, “When American operatives converged on the house on Sunday, bin Laden ‘resisted the assault force’ and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior administration official said, but details [and everything else] were still sketchy. Obviously, the story’s still being worked on.

Huffington added details that, the neighborhood in Abbottabad was “insulated from urban areas or places susceptible to natural disaster and terrorist attacks. The home was ‘roughly eight times larger than the other homes in the area,’ and it was surrounded by 12-to-18-foot-high walls, topped with barbed wire. It had two security gates and a value of roughly $1 million . . .

“An even more telling clue for intelligence operatives: The occupants of the house were burning their trash rather than putting it out for collection.” That doesn’t sound like a world-class terror group in action, does it? But “One senior administration official suggested bin Laden had been staying at the compound for at least six months without moving. Bin Laden was known to have regularly shifted locations to evade capture, so it’s unusual that he chose to stay in one spot for such an extended period.”

Perhaps it was that, as HP adds, “More recently, the Obama administration had reduced the number of drone strikes in the area—while ramping up surveillance—in an effort to give the al Qaeda leader a heightened sense of safety in his home.” I’m sure the real estate agent pointed that out to Osama.

Knowledge of the presence of a “high value target,” i.e., bin Laden, came through “a courier who had a close relationship with Osama.” Osama was also mentioned by the ever-confessing, ever-waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed, supposed mastermind of 9/11. And so Santa’s helpers “ . . . began working on a plan to get him [Osama].” And on that evidence they prepared to attack a massive compound. Or course, the deft attack team managed to have one of its helicopters crash nearby due to mechanical failure. One of three men killed in the gun battle was said to be bin Laden’s son (reminiscent of Kaddafi) and the other two his couriers. What, no carrier pigeons?

Of course, the announcement received the full drama of Obama’s rhetoric Sunday night, coming directly from the White House. America’s thumbs, regardless of the anomalies, were thrust up in victory gestures hither and yon. And he dutifully warned us that this victory must not signal an end to our vigilance against terrorists and those who would seek to harm us. What he didn’t mention was that since our original mission to attack Afghanistan was to get Osama, now that that was accomplished, we could be pulling our troops out of A-land, and Pakistan (with whom we did not consult on this mission), and Iraq, still smoldering in the ruins of our shock and awe, and out of Libya, convulsing under NATO air strikes.

You have to stop and think for a minute, who are the real terrorists here? I know Obama said, “We didn’t ask for this fight. It was brought to us . . .” It could as well have been brought to us by George Bush and Company as a kick-off to their hegemonic march for oil in the Caspian Sea Region and Iraq, which march has not diminished but expanded beyond Pakistan into Africa now, and is still bankrupting us, morally and financially, and killing many in its wake.

The real celebration should come when every single American soldier has come home, when jobs have begun to be created in the hundreds of thousands, and when the economy is pulled back from the brink of catastrophe. I’ll save my celebration for that day and let this clever intelligence move pass. Call me cynical if you wish, but Libya was supposed to be a “limited mission,” also said about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And meanwhile, they are all still ongoing. And I have difficulty swallowing this Pyrrhic victory and its rigged tale.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.