By defeat and victory, I don't mean over OBL. I mean over the topic that has motivated truth activists for the last 10 years -- finding out the truth about 9/11 and who was involved in the crime.
With the killing of bin Laden in Pakistan, we now have the most spectacular revelation about 9/11, OBL and AQ ever -- that it is patently obvious that OBL was under the protection of Pakistan's armed forces and/or intelligence services -- and what are most bloggers saying (or at least those I've skimmed)? That none of what we've learned in the last few days is real. OBL was thawed out, he was already dead, the fact that he was dumped at sea means they never had a body, etc., etc., etc.
This is one of the reasons I stopped participating in any of this a long time ago.
Ever since I first started looking into the holes in the official story and writing about it, back in the old days on the DU 9/11 Forum, I was always as interested in how we know what we know as in what we know. I may be interested in what others might call "conspiracy theories" but I'm also interested in trying to figure out the method to determine what is real -- to figure out what is the best way to gather and analyze information -- in other words, in epistemology. I do not think we live in a hologram, nor that everything we hear from official sources is automatically a lie. So, I look at the official stuff and the mainstream media, taken with a grain of salt, and correlated, cross checked -- a pale imitation of what Paul Thompson does; then look at unofficial, independent, dissenting information; add the information that the government didn't want us to see, such as leaked information published; and try to draw a conclusion.
With that epistemology, a long time ago, I concluded that the best explanation for at least part of the 9/11 story, was that foreign military/intelligence elements were involved (rogue or not), which was the biggest hole in the 9/11 Commission Report, which literally edited Pakistan and Saudi Arabia out of the picture. (Whether those foreign intelligence factors implicated US or western forces was a different and more complicated issue.) For this, I was banned from a forum by someone who is posting in this very forum these days, with a dismissive post saying something like, that HamdenRice is always going on and on about bullshit about foreign terrorists and spies in foreign lands plotting terror plots -- as though to accept that there were indeed foreign terrorists (whether manipulated or not) was beyond the scope of acceptable opinion.
So here's what we learned in the last few days (if you accept my epistemology): OBL has been living in a gigantic multi-million dollar compound for the last five years in a city that is under the complete control of Pakistan's military within walking distance from its version of West Point.
The newspapers in Europe, India and Pakistan are going apeshit about this 'cause to paraphrase Ricky Ricardo, Pakistan got some 'spainin to do.
Meanwhile, here in the good ole US of A, the nation and mainstream media and truth community and blogosphere suffer a collective hysteria of cognitive dissonance. Since this can't be true, it isn't true, but for different reasons.
For the mainstream media, it's because the 9/11 official story can't be wrong. So Pakistan's military and intelligence services were massively incompetent! (Where have I heard that before?)
For the truth bloggers, it's that OBL was already dead, or never existed, or whatever, I don't really give a fuck anymore. I was reading a post here the other day and someone wrote something like, "I used to push the Pakistan ISI angle, but now I know I was wrong, because of this fake OBL killing." This is sad because what I'm reading is that now that events, as created by the Obama administration and reported in the mainstream media, have proven one very plausible scenario sketched out by the truth community years ago, that scenario cannot be true -- cognitive dissonance of another flavor. In this reality, truth is an infinitely receding mirage -- the minute a theory is proven to be true through revelations from mainstream sources, it is proven to be false, because "they" would never let the truth out.
So the Seals never killed OBL or had his body -- this despite the fact that the independent Arab and Pakistani media are reporting various statements from the survivors of the attack, such as OBL's wife and daughter, who are making allegations about how OBL was killed. Oh well, I guess they're in on it too, or maybe they're all just actors and actresses or even holograms -- the Pakistani journalists, and the 12 year old girl who "claims" to be OBL's daughter, the wife with the gunshot wound to the leg, the Pakistani officials who don't deny there was a raid and that OBL was living there. They're all lying about Papa bin Laden being shot by the mean Americans and taken away in a helicopter. Ha ha ha! I hate to sound like the assholes of the DU 9/11 Forum, but jeez, just how big do these conspiracies have to be?
Elements of the story of how information was obtained for the attacks on OBL have even appeared in Wikileaks document dumps (maybe Julian Assange is a plant or a limited hangout!). Before there was wikileaks, there was the French intelligence document dump reported by Le Monde, which confirmed elements of the story of the complete penetration of AQ by foreign intelligence services.
Look, I agree with Izzy Stone that governments lie. But I think he meant governments lie to us, not that they lie to themselves when they are writing top secret memos to each other that get leaked by whistle blowers.
I do think that the way this story has been released obviously was done so for maximum political benefit. I've concluded that it was in part orchestrated. That's different from thinking it's entirely made up. But it's being orchestrated in ways that actually are good for the "side" that wants to begin trimming back imperial over-reach. Let's see, Gates is forced out when Obama blindsides him with demands for $400 billion extra pentagon cuts after he's already delivered what he thinks are the max he can offer; Panetta the budget ax man moves from CIA to the Pentagon, but before he goes, he gets to play the starring role in the killing of Emanual Goldstein so nobody will fuck with him at DOD; McChyrstal gets a bone thrown to him that the whole hunter killer thing works; etc., etc., etc.
In this way, Jack Riddler's post about 11 (or was it 12) dimensional chess got things just about right, except for the irony level, which pretty much destroyed the argument. Obama doesn't have to start playing multi-dimensional chess now that the pieces have miraculously fallen into place; he and the Democrats have been lining up the pieces for two years, but of course, if you think that a new Democratic administration should be able to just come into Washington and boss the Pentagon around like an elected king George II, then you haven't been paying attention to history or you've forgotten all the stuff you've been spouting about deep politics, and don't remember what happened to JFK, Carter or Clinton. (Don't you think that Hillary has a few inside baseball tips for Obama given what she saw in the first few months of the Clinton administration, not to mention her exasperated complaints over the "vast right wing conspiracy"?) The Democrats have been salivating over the "peace dividend" ever since Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the Kremlin, and if you can't see the deep political struggle that's been going on for the last two decades, it's not because the evidence isn't there, it's because you just don't want to see it.
So thank you President Obama for joining the Truth movement. If "truthers" can get themselves to believe what the widows of bin Laden and the Pakistan government are saying, then the edifice of the official 9/11 story is nothing but a termite infested wooden shack at this point. The MSM is congratulating President Obama for having the "balls" to launch this attack because it could have failed, but the most audacious part of it was doing so in a way that destroys a pillar of the most sacred narrative of the post 9/11 decade. I'm sure that the politics over doing so were ferocious -- even more so than perhaps over the more prosaic operational issues.
Meanwhile, just keep telling yourself that it's all just a tv movie, that there never was a body, that OBL has been dead for years, whatever.
