Birthday Tribute To A Dead Or Living Legend -- Osama bin Laden Turns Fifty

You know you've arrived when even your "enemies" celebrate your birthday. And the IHT has obliged with a 50th birthday celebration for Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden was born 50 years ago Saturday, and although he has not been heard from for months, his friends in the Taliban are certain that he is not dead.

"He is alive, I am 100 percent sure," a Taliban spokesman, Hayatullah Khan, said in an interview. He said senior leaders were in touch with bin Laden, reinforcing a widely held view that he is hiding near the rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Khan said special prayers were offered by Taliban fighters in camps in Afghanistan to mark bin Laden's birth on March 10, 1957, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabian.

"We prayed that Allah may give him 200 years to live," Khan said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. "When we woke up today, we offered collective and long prayers for him because he is a great mujahid."

Oh yeah, man, he's still alive, even though nobody has seen him in a long time, man! Oh yeah, man, he's still alive and he's gonna live to be 200. Oh yeah, man, I heard it on my sattelite phone! Oh yeah, man. Because you'll believe anything!

It's not just the International Herald Tribune. Even Democracy Now! did a big hairy deal on Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, in which Amy Goodman interviewed the famously-unknown so-good-as-to-be-unpublishable truth-telling journalist Robert Fisk in honor of Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's 50th birthday. Fisk, the intrepid truth-teller, said he hadn't seen Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden since 1997. Oh yeah, man!

But

The United States fears that Al Qaeda, terrorism network he founded is rebuilding its base in Pakistani tribal lands and has forged ties with affiliates in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The key words of that sentence come right at the beginning. The United States fears! And it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden is alive or dead; and it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden founded al-Q'aeda or whether it was the CIA who did that, and it doesn't really matter whether its true what they say, that al-Q'aeda doesn't exist; and in fact it doesn't really matter whether any of the things we fear are real or not, because the basic reality now -- in the so-called "post-9/11 world" -- the world supposedly brought upon us by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden -- is that reality doesn't matter anymore -- at all! And fear is everything.

We waste hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't even have and we waste thousands of young lives that should have been put to better purposes -- and we do it in order to kill hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people (whom we can now call terrorists, if we like) -- and to consign their nation's most precious natural resource to foreigners of our choosing!

And it's all because we're afraid. And we're afraid because we were attacked by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden! Oh yeah, man!

Bin Laden is revered by some, reviled by others, as the symbolic leader of a global jihad against the United States, an effort that had its seeds in the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

Um ... unless it has its seeds in the arming and financing of Muslim guerrilas by a succession of American administrations beginning with Jimmy Carter, who was taking advice from Zbignew Brezhinsky. They recognized a chance to help an enemy of an enemy and they did so. Take that, Soviets! The enemies of our enemy were armed to the hilt by Ronald Reagan and betrayed by George Herbert Walker Bush. Oops! All of a sudden we had a bit of a problem!

Or did we? Nafeez Ahmed, who has been doing serious research on the topic for years, has come to the conclusion that al-Q'aeda is a covert operations instrument of western intelligence agencies.

And other credible evidence suggests that al-Q'aeda doesn't even exist. So it could be -- especially when it comes to North American operations -- that al-Q'aeda is more often a scapegoat than a villian.

In other words, perhaps Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's "terrorism network" is not quite the problem it's sometimes made out to be:

It resulted in the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

That's the official story, but unless somebody can convince me that Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden scheduled all the war games and put the explosives in the towers, I'm not very likely to believe much that appears in the mainstream media about Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden and his so-called Holy War against America.

Should I?

The Taliban were ousted from power by U.S. forces in late 2001 after their leaders refused to surrender bin Laden. At first, President George W. Bush sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan, scouring the deserts and mountains for bin Laden, offered a $25 million reward and said he should be captured "dead or alive."

But after the effort failed and Bush turned his sights on Iraq, he said capturing bin Laden was "not important," and eventually the CIA even disbanded its unit that tried to find him.

Which speaks for itself, I think.

And so, without further ado ... [drum roll, please!] ...

On behalf of all our friends and protectors, who keep us safe from the scary scary fears they just happen to provide, a rousing Happy 50th Birthday to Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, wherever you may be buried.

Love and Kisses,
The M-I-C