We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

By Noam Chomsky

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky
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Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audioboo
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2652/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

This gets even more smelly!

1. Honoring Islamic traditions when they don't honor us? Come on! How many innocent people have these azzholes murdered and beheaded? Where is the justice for those who died by the hands of Islam recently?

2. Now Osama was unarmed when he was confronted. Why DIDN'T they drag Geronimo back to the USA to be publicly displayed, tried, found guilty, and executed here? America DESERVED to have their enemy dragged back and made a spectacle of.

3. The whole idea of Infuriating Islam more? PLEASE! THEY WANT ANY EXCUSE TO BE PROVOKED! They are the azzholes picking a fight and we have to be sensitive to them? Pakistan has nukes and we are afraid of them using one on us? THAT STILL IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A FEAR OF OURS AND THAT WILL NOT CHANGE UNTIL WE PRESENT THEM WITH APPROPRIATE DETERRENT FORCE! We need to train several nukes on Medina and Mecca. Sorry Saudi Arabia but if we get nuked by Islam the central cities to Islam become justifiable targets!

4. Pakistan KNEW he was there all along. Those two faced liars were trying to placate the local Islamic Majority. They pretend to be our friend for all that aid money we give them and these same azzholes are going to turn against us no matter what. They were just biding their time. Now relations are sour? They always were!

5. WE KNEW HE WAS THERE ALL ALONG! That is why our intelligence resources have been keeping an eye there for two administrations. Obama took the chance to make his presidency look better. He says HIS administration caught the enemy. NO, The CIA and our armed force did with a never before seen sense of unity and cooperation between departments and military and intelligence resources.

6. Assassination is a dirty tool BUT when you want to deal with a problem surgically instead of going through thousands of people to kill your target you send in a hit team and spare thousands of lives instead of dragging our nation into a protracted war just to get one or a hand full of bad men. BTW, Iraq did try to whack Bush Sr. Thank you for remembering...

7. Since people want to give Obama credit for this well, he also shares the blame in calling Osama Bin Laden Geronimo. Again we are talking about a president who used racial rhetoric to get himself elected. I would have called Obama "Piggie" and his men "Piglets." The orders to engage them would have been "Lets make bacon," and when Osama was captured I would have had my men say "We got the piggie and are taking him to market!"

8. On top of that Osama Bin Laden should have been forced to eat RAW PORK! This whole idea of stealing Martyrdom from Obama made him a Martyr. He should have been defiled and horribly in a manner that in Islamic Tradition would have denied him heaven!!! He should have been made a example of and not treated like an enemy soldier.

Sorry but Obama Screwed the Pooch on this one on way too many levels!

And also this whole, "what if they..." moralizing is fallacious to the extreme. We lost THREE presidents to domestic assassinations, there have been nine known attempts on presidents, and oddly about five of them are foreign attempts! So the other guy DOES try the exact same thing you are here morally trying to berate.

Nope, cannot get too much into the thinking of this article. It is Jaded thinking at best.