Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden or Usama Bin Laden or Usama Bin Ladin, depending on who you ask, has apparently been assassinated by American forces in a compound in a town of Abbottabad in Pakistan. He was quickly buried at sea, somehow, according to officials. These news broke through this morning and quickly spread like a Cape Town fire, as they would. Consequently US President Barack Obama is now an American hero, having achieved what his predecessor George W Bush could not over a period of 7 years of trying. I remember one of the first things Obama resolved to do was finding and capturing or killing Bin Laden.
He was buried at sea because apparently no country wanted to accept his body and in any case, his killers didn’t want to create a living shrine of him where supporters could go and worship him. How do you bury someone at sea? The only way I can think of is that they cremated him, or they attached him to a block of hard cement and threw him in (Sicily style). How else do you do it? We are told he was shot in the head so he wasn’t blown to pieces and those pieces scattered at sea. I guess we have to trust that he really was “buried” at sea. Somehow.
US intelligence had apparently been on him for months before, tracking and verifying certain information regarding his whereabouts. Abbottabad is about 50km from Karachi and was said to be extremely heavily guarded, raising suspicion among its few neighbours. The other thing was the place’s rubbish bin which apparently never contained anything, despite the compound’s obvious size. Word is, rubbish was simply burnt within the place and never thrown away. Tracing someone’s rubbish is a shitty job but I guess someone had to do it. The place had neither telephone nor internet connections.
The breakthrough came from a trusted Bin Laden courier who was found to live in a suspiciously large compound with no clear line of income attributed to him. By sticking to him and his brother, comparing it to other homes in the area which are up to 8 times smaller, the US intelligence forces concluded that this particular compound must be hiding something or someone of very high significance. That someone would turn out to be OBL.
Although I personally feel this was an historical event, I’m not sure how I feel about it as a human being and citizen of the world. Perhaps I’m indifferent. On the one hand a man like OBL was a killer. But so are many other so-called decent world leaders who, day in and out, plan and order the execution of fellow human beings. One can split hairs about it all day but fact of the matter is, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Queens around the world are killing people daily with their decisions. Innocent people included. The loss of any life is regrettable.
Because this action was top secret, not one of the US’s allies were aware of what was going on except Pakistan. This raises the question of the point of the United Nations, NATO and others in looking after the world’s interests without putting the interests of one country above everyone else’s. That the US acted unilaterally again, leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
We also have the issue of retaliation to think of. While most people blame OBL for the 2011 September 11 attacks on US soil, he was not the mastermind behind it. Yes he rejoiced and thanked the executors but he was not the force behind those murders. His organisation Al Qaeda is a large global force with cells in many countries. Its members will no doubt elect a new leader. Expect them not to take this news with any affection.
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