President Obama greets U.S. soldiers at Fort Campbell, KY (AP)
by Jerry D. Rose
When Barack Obama decided early this week not to release “grisly” photos of a dead person alleged to be Osama bin Laden, he used some high-minded self-congratulation for this decision. Not wishing to “incite” world Arab opinion (and further endanger the United States), he wanted to avoid the impression that Americans are “celebrating” the death. That’s the kind of barbarism that led people in less “civilized” times to parade the heads of their vanquished foes on the tops of spears as they passed through crowds of people engaged in frenzied celebration.
A skeptic might feel that there was a more self-serving reason Americans to celebrate: to divert public attention from the cryingly obvious fact that the Navy Seals’ mission was subverted by their failure to bring bin Ladin to “justice,” unless one defines justice as the killing of a “bad guy” rather than bringing him into a court room to face charges against him and for both he and his prosecutors to present “evidence” of his guilt or innocence. Obama gave bin Laden exactly the same “justice” that Jack Ruby gave Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, with the same kind of public adulation for his “patriotism” in having despatched the supposed assassin of JFK. At least Ruby was arrested and tried on murder charges, and would have been executed had his own death intervened in the process. No such fate for the Navy Seal who shot an unarmed bin Laden in the head as his identity is sheathed in anonymity; apparently he is covered by the “heroism” of the Seals mission.
At the very least, the chief defender of our constitution, the President, might have expressed some regret that bin Laden was NOT brought to justice, and perhaps to have demanded some “accountability” from those who subverted the mission by killing him—not to mention, those who eliminated any possibility of posthumous justice by summarily burying the body of the “captured” person at sea, But, so far as I have heard, neither Obama nor any member of his administration have expressed any such regret. Rather, Obama does a redux of George W. Bush’s notorious Mission Accomplishment appearance in bomber jacket and cod piece aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier to announce an “accomplished” mission in Iraq that, to this day, has not been accomplished. He has done what Americans in general have done in truly “bi-partisan” fashion: he has spiked the football, Yesterday he went to Fort Campbell KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division, appearing before an audience of wildly cheering soldiers, as he “culminated a week-long response to the demise of the long-hunted al-Qaida leader, from the White House to ground zero in New York to Fort Campbell,” congratulating the Seals profusely and giving them a special Presidential Unit Citation for their “extraordinary” mission.
No, we Americans don’t need to spike the football, but we need to celebrate and applaud our country’s military operations. We need to bury that football far into the ground of our imperial hubris and toss into the Arabian Sea any interfering debris like the body of the “captured” Osama bin Laden.
……………………………………………………………………..
Jerry D. Rose is the founding editor of the Sun State Activist and the Principled Progressive blog. He lives in Gainesville, FL. He can be reached by email at sunstateactivist2@yahoo.com
A beaten, powerless populace, circling the drain, desperately grasps anything that smacks of pride and ego, even if it violates every principle and judicial precept upon which we supposedly base this teetering experiment in democracy.
That’s how far we’ve fallen. The law, our only protection, is a joke.
Ok, so OBL is “dead” (again). What do you say we pull all of our troops out of the middle east by Christmas and repeal the Patriot act? Mission accomplished. I mean for real this time… right?
Oh wait.. that might adversely affect the bottom line of the Military Industrial Security Police Oil Conglomerate Bankster complex and make our regular payments to Israel more difficult to justify. Never mind.
One of the bedrock, basic tenets of military leadership is “a commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do.”
He gets the credit when things go great, like this mission adn Desert Storm, and the blame when things go wrong, like Desert One and Iraq.
As they should.
They set the tone, train, and establish the priorities and objectives and missions for their units to carry out.
The CIA deactivated their Bin Laden tracking unit in 2005, under President Bush.
President Bush as far back as March 2002 said he “wasn’t concerned about him.”
He couldn’t be, because due to our limited assets, he was concerned about the debacle in Iraq that he’d started.
It was President Obama’s making getting Bin Laden the “focus of effort,” a military term I’m sure most are not familiar with, that led to this successful mission.
The buck stops with President Obama, the Commander in Chief.
I thought I was the only one shocked trial was not an option. Though the end result would have probably been his death, it would have played out before us to accept it. I am guessing behind the scenes is so emotionally charged it is hard for us to get to the same level of perception as those who tracked him down and who took responsibility for it. It is an unfortunate complicated circumstance, and there is a little comfort some evil is gone, just wish it was done fairly.