Are You Sure About That? "White House PSYOP Script Falls Apart" Cui Bono?

It was falling apart before the first news hit the bought-and-paid-for (very well) MSM. And it's actually pretty funny when you put the now-admitted facts together about the exciting non-events to allow them to continue to plead "fog of war" as an explanation for a re-telling of events that never happened. We now know that the whole place was ISI-owned and -operated, and, oh yes, that million-dollar palatial house had farm animals (buffalos, a cow and chick-chicks) that had to be cleared out by the CIAers. You'd think they might have had a few servants to go to the markets, wouldn't you? No snark used at all.

White House PSYOP Script Falls Apart

Thursday, 5. May 2011

Bin Laden Story Keeps Changing-Obama’s Nose Keeps Growing

The standard, call it classic, definition of PSYOP is badly in need of an update. When you look it up, you see something along these lines [Emphasis are mine]: planned propaganda operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. It is way past time to add ‘domestic’ in there. Isn’t it? Come on; remember our mini PSYOP cases like Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. I say ‘mini’ because they were mini, thus, eventually exposed. The ‘major’ ones, at least here in the US, tend to go unnoticed or not widely debated. Right now, we may be very well looking at one of those major ones as it is unfolding: White House Osama Death PSYOP Script.

On Monday, less than a day after the supposed operation, I started covering the Osama Death sensationalism. In my first post I said: “It is way too early for a comprehensive analysis or even a short commentary.” I wish others, the so-called media had exercised the same restraint, instead of spreading the far-fetched and fantastical script given to them by their masters to fire up and round up the gullible and easily hurray-ing majority.

On Tuesday, I pointed out the uncanny resemblance between the script and method used in the Jessica Lynch PSYOP case and the latest Osama Death case: “It is too early. I can talk about the strange timing, absurdity of some mysterious burial at sea, questionable coincidences, and or our government’s pretty tainted record when it comes to facts: Remember Iraq’s WMD lies, Pentagon’s made-up script on Jessica Lynch, wrongfully accused Steven Hatfill, questionable Anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, Niger Yellowcake fantasy…” Again, it took the resourceful media another 24-48 hours and tons of pounding to make the connections.

Here are the latest changes to the Obama administration’s lies-filled script. Let’s keep track of them, and keep them on the front burner, because as you know, as more come out, as we get more confirmed contradictions, the fantastical story tends to get pushed onto the backburner by the media, from front page stories-headlines to Page A2, and from there to B18, and pretty quickly into the usual black hole:

We have gone from the heavy and intensely fought operation against fighting armed men in the Bin Laden compound to no real fight and only one little armed man:

Four of the five people shot to death in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, including the al-Qaida leader himself, were unarmed and never fired a shot…

We went from armed Bin Laden using his wife as a shield to armed Bin Laden using an anonymous woman as a shield, to unarmed Bin Laden using some kind of a woman as a shield, and now, unarmed Bin Laden in pajamas using no one as a shield!

But last night, the White House said Bin Laden was not armed when a U.S. Navy SEAL confronted and killed him during Sunday night’s assault on his compound. …

Security officials said they did not recover any arms and explosives during their detailed search of the compound and the 13-roomed house, during which they removed two buffalos, a cow and around 150 chickens.

…

We were told that Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion worth over one million dollars, and now we hear it was a humble mud –covered house with not even an air-conditioning system worth less than $250,000:

Bin Laden’s house, described by the US government as a $1m (£605,000) mansion, is in fact worth no more than $250,000 say property professionals in Abbottabad, the town where he was killed.

…

Descriptions of Bin Laden’s hideout have also been prone to exaggeration. After Sunday night’s dramatic raid by US Navy Seals, a senior Obama administration official told reporters that the property, an “extraordinarily unique compound” in an “affluent suburb”, was valued at around $1m. But two property professionals in Abbottabad – a quiet, military-dominated town – said that much of that was incorrect. Based on the size of the plot and the house, which was built in 2005, and using recent property sales as a guide, they estimated that it would fetch no more than $250,000 on the current market.

“Twenty million rupees, maximum,” said property dealer Muhammad Anwar, a 22-year veteran of the local market, at his Abbottabad office. “No swimming pool. This is not a posh area. We call it a middling area.”

…

We were given torture, traditional long-term interrogation techniques and surveillance as the major factors leading to the scripted victory, and now we get official statements from Pakistan indicating that they, the Pakistani intelligence, had provided Bin Laden’s location to Mr. Obama over 2 years ago, and again six months ago!

Pakistan hit back Wednesday about US fears that it could not be trusted with details of the raid on osama bin Laden’s compound and claimed it had identified the potential hideout as far back as 2009.

…

Bashir went on to claim that the ISI passed on its suspicions about the compound in Abbottabad two years ago.

“The fact is, on this particular occasion, it was pointed out by our intelligence quite some time ago to the US intelligence,” he said. “We had indicated as far back as 2009 [it was] a possible place.” The ISI said it again warned just six months ago that “suspicious foreigners” and even “al Qaeda operatives” were potentially inside the compound but denied knowing bin Laden was among them, according to Sky News. There was no immediate response to that claim from the Obama administration.

…

And last but not least, they told us our President and Presidents’ Men were watching the entire operation, second by second, via satellite and real time. Now, our President and Presidents’ Men are backpedaling in face of exposed lies and contradictions, and use ‘Fog of War’ for lack of truth and accuracy. Did the fog fog up the White House real-time TV show and mislead our popcorn-eating President and his Men?!

The White House Tuesday blamed “the fog of war” for conflicting statements in its recounting of the events surrounding the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden…

I will be covering this topic as it unfolds further, and I am asking you to help us with keeping this major domestic PSYOP on the front-burner, as you know, when sticky and revelatory facts come out contradicting our officials’ story line, things tend to get buried and transferred to the back-burners!

My favorite good-guy reporter, Danny Schechter (accompanied by the lovely Cherie Welch), possesses a few more pieces of the puzzle over at his place where he asks the question "Was it a military or media operation?":

Nailing Bin Laden: Was it a military or a media operation? Why now? The tip on bin Laden’s whereabouts came in back in 2010. You have to assume the house was under surveillance. If they thought they “bagged him” they would be watching closely and choosing the right time to deep six the target (I actually wrote this lead paragraph sentence before reading this “Breaking News” from the Washington Post: “CIA had secret outpost in Abbottabad”).

The CIA maintained a safe house in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for a small team of spies who conducted extensive surveillance over a period of months on the compound where Osama Bin Laden was killed by U.S. special operations forces this week (U.S. officials).

Both Afghan agents and Pakistani intelligence say they told the US about the house as early as 2009.

They knew he was there. That was a reason drones weren’t used. And Torture did not find him.

The CIA wanted a more controlled high profile and dramatic intervention for public consumption, for what, in the end, was a marketing campaign— marketing the centrality of the agency’s role in a war whose main audience is not on the battlefield, but in the homeland.

They needed a heroic narrative to revive support for a war they have been losing, and a scalp to sell to a conflict-weary and disillusioned population. It is no surprise that the Seals labeled UBL “Geronimo” reviving memories of fighting guerilla-style Indian wars. Muslim renegades are apparently our new “savages.”

The Native Americans took their enemy’s head and hair—Donald Trump, beware; we shoot out their eyes and waterboard their brains.

The target was not “the terror mastermind” but the American people. It was an exercise in political mobilization and perception management. It was the ultimate media operation, relying on many of the tactics used in Iraq that I document in my film “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception.”

We are as conscious about what we say as what we do, we always fashion a propaganda storyline demonizing the enemy who is often compared to Hitler. Bin Laden lived in a “million dollar mansion” (It cost $48,000 to buy six years ago). He was heavily armed (he wasn’t). He hid behind female human shields (he didn’t). Who cares about facts… this was a TV orchestrated event. The Daily Mail in London complained that their raising questions led to being derided as “cheese eating surrender monkeys.”

They could have captured him, but that would lead to the hassle of putting him on trial. Besides, what if he revealed his long connection with the CIA and US officials? Can’t have that. So the kill order was given, along with a quick disposal of the body, mafia-style (as in “sleeping with the fishes).”

The legal justification was self-defense, an argument that any government can use to dispatch its enemies.

Why was it done, and why now? It was certainly not because Al-Qaeda is ascendant. Our experts believe only 100 of them remain in Afghanistan, where their capacity has been diminished. Remember: Al-Qaeda is not a centralized top-down machine but a decentralized and sophisticated network.

We can only surmise all the factors, but the larger context here has fallen away with the focus on the narrowness of the dirty details, many calculated to inspire enthusiasm for the bravery and heroism of the death squad, but not any reflection of the strategy and larger context of the events.

Even as the cover stories about what happened fell away into the foggy soup of covert action and its contradictions, it devolved into to a case of excuses about haste– ‘he said that but didn’t mean it’. Even as the raid inspires mass euphoria and self-righteous blood lust, the full meaning of it is missing in a media that is much better at the how than the why.

First of all, this operation reflected the reorganization of the national security state with the CIA taking over from the soldiers. This operation was Leon Panetta’s last hurrah as Spook-in Chief before he uses his covert ops portfolio to takeover the Pentagon.

Second, that most hyped soldier’s soldier, Generalissimo David Petraeus, who has failed to end the insurgency in Afghanistan (and who is now warring on Pakistan) is being moved into Panetta’s job. A Navy Seal Commander has now been promoted to the Central Command.

The bottom line: public accountability and open disclosure has become a thing of the past. No wonder the ongoing campaign to ‘get Wikileaks’ before it exposes more secrets.

As the military privatizes wars, and, in effect, goes underground, there is a recognition that, despite the size of our forces and the power of our technology, we have, in effect, been losing to peasants with suicide belts and unconventional tactics we continually underestimate.

Writes former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, “Americans are too busy celebrating to think, a capability that seems to have been taken out of their education.

“Americans are so enthralled over the death of bin Laden that they do not wonder why information gleamed years ago would take so long to locate a person who was allegedly living in a million-dollar building equipped with all the latest communication equipment next to the Pakistani Military Academy. Allegedly, the “most wanted criminal” was not moving from hide-out to hide-out in desolate mountains, but ensconced in luxury quarters in broad daylight. Nevertheless, despite his obvious location, it took the CIA years to find him after claiming to have gained information of his whereabouts out of captives in secret prisons. This is the image of the CIA as the new Keystone Cops.”

Like the Canadian Mounties, in the end, Navy Seal Unit 6, armed with lethal weapons and an attack dog, got their man—with not inconsiderable collateral damage — in what the New York Times called an “extremely one-sided encounter.”

It was, let’s admit, a liquidation, right out of the KGB playbook.

Politically— and yes, there was a political agenda here too: the bin Laden operation was part of a chain of calculated presidential promoting exercises including the announcement of his re-election campaign and massive fund-raising effort, his deals with the Repugs on the budget, the release of his birth certificate, his interview with Oprah, his shakeup of sorts of the Pentagon, his bringing the CEO of GE and William Daley into the White House, on and on.

The “new” Obama wants to be seen as a warrior, not a wuss, as long as he is not forced to go after Wall Street. Right now, his victory is viewed widely for what it is; vengeance. Or in the words of the street, “payback.”

Nailing Bin-Laden has to be seen in the context of his Spring offensive grounded in symbolic advances, to get his poll numbers up and his campaign rolling, to make him look invincible, and to “triangulate,” by moving to the center and pre-empting/co-opting the right. He now has Bush and Cheney praising him.

Concludes Roberts, “Obama needed closure of the Afghan war and occupation in order to deal with the US budget deficit. Subsequent statements from Obama regime officials suggest that the agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm. The military/security complex will become richer and more powerful, and Americans will be rewarded with vicarious pleasure in victory over enemies.”

Adds Tom Engelhardt, “Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.”

Disclosure: In case you wonder, I am not now nor have I ever been a supporter, sympathizer or rationalizer of bin Laden’s violent Jihad. The fact that I feel I have to even write this should give readers insight into the climate of permissable discussion. I am not unhappy to see UBL moving on to the next world. even as some believe he really died long ago. I agree: Good Riddance, but we need to analyze this event more closely. Will it help end the war or will “our success” convince the Pentagon it needs to be expanded? The issues of the raid’s legality need to be discussed.

Video Blackout Reported

CLG: Blackout during raid on bin Laden compound –The head of the CIA admitted yesterday that there was no live video footage of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound as further doubts emerged about the US version of events.

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off. A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound. NYTimes Rationalizes/ Explains/ Defends Administrations “mistakes”

“In the view of officials from past and present presidencies, it was a classic collision of a White House desire to promote a stunning national security triumph — and feed a ravenous media — while collecting facts from a chaotic military operation on the other side of the world. At the same time, White House officials worked hard to use the facts of the raid to diminish Bin Laden’s legacy.

“There has never been any intent to deceive or dramatize,” a military official said Thursday, asking that he not be named because of ground rules imposed by the Department of Defense. “Everything we put out we really believed to be true at the time.”

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that as more and more members of the 79-member assault team were debriefed after the raid, revisions inevitably occurred.”

. . . Bin Laden’s DNA Finding Questioned.

Mike Ruppert quotes a DNA specialist in a piece on Speak Truth to Power:

“I am a molecular biologist and I’ve built a lucrative career in human genetics. I have run one of the world’s largest and most productive DNA genotyping facilities and now I am helping to build the global market for clinical whole human genome sequencing for the world’s largest human genome sequencing facility. I have worked with the absolute best genome scientists from the military, academia, medicine, and industry from around the world. I know DNA.

And, one thing I know about DNA is that you cannot, repeat CANNOT: take a tissue sample from a shot-in-the-noggin-dead-guy in a north central Pakistan special forces op, extract the DNA, prepare the DNA for assay, test the DNA, curate the raw DNA sequence data, assemble the reads or QC the genotype, compare the tested DNA to a reference, and make a positive identity determination…. all in 12 hours - let alone transport the tissue samples all the places they’d need to have gone in order to get this done.

Some might try to argue that ruggedized, field ready kits could test a DNA sample- which is true if one is attempting to determine the CLASS of a bacteria. It is not true if one is trying to determine the specific identity of an individual. Any way you slice it, the real work would require days, and I find it unlikely (although not impossible) that an aircraft carrier would have a laboratory outfitted for this kind of work… it is not the Starship Enterprise out there. Reuters: 
Pakistanis say U.S. shot bin Laden in “cold blood”

A senior Pakistani security official said U.S. troops killed Osama bin Laden in “cold blood”, fueling a global controversy, and straining a vital relationship Washington was trying to repair on Thursday. 

 

. . . Taliban leaders dispute bin Laden death



ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 5 (UPI) — Taliban leaders disputed the killing of Osama bin Laden, with some claiming the al-Qaeda leader had died some time back, Pakistan News International reported. 



Pakistan Defends Intelligence Service After Bin Laden Operation

So it goes. - K. Vonnegut _________________________