From the grave, Benazir Bhutto tells the world that bin Laden has been murdered. Wait, what?

This has been covered frantically in the blogosphere since Bhutto’s assassination but not really covered in the mainstream media– Benazir Bhutto nonchalantly mentioning the men who killed bin Laden and the answer is not the US. So there are several points this brings up…

-The US is not in complete control in the “War on Terror” as we’re constantly told. This is pretty obvious, but we’ve been led to believe that one day George W Bush would be carrying bin Laden’s head in a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. Every time stories of bin Laden’s death are circulated, the story is buried.

-With bin Laden dead, the US perhaps fears it would lose its propaganda focus. We’ve been led to believe that without bin Laden, the War on Terror would either be won or in its “last throes”. Without bin Laden, there’s no longer an easy household name to put on the war. With one man, one name, it’s easy to pretend that we’re in WW2 again with Hitler, the Nazis, the Germans within defined borders.

-If bin Laden was killed in inter-tribal warfare or by some other rival extremist group, it erases the easy peasy black and white reality that the White House tries to feed us. Us vs. Them. And by Them, we mean an entire network of billions of terrorists working in unison under a more or less central authority. With that myth in place, the conflict seems more dire, the enemy seems more capable and the threat seems larger. The loss of life on 9/11 was perpetuated by a small group and could have happened at any time in the last 40-50 years with a minimum of effort and planning. Without bin Laden in the picture, the US has to work to create a new tale to make it seem that we’re up against a juggernaut and not just swatting flies.

So far since Bhutto’s assassination there have been 3 causes of death– first she died in a bomb blast, then she died from a bullet to the neck and finally the Pakistani government wants everyone to believe that she died when she hit her head on her sunroof. And in all of this, they all want everyone to believe that it was Al-Qaeda. Because it couldn’t be agents of the Musharraf government, because he’s our friend. And because of course the only group of “terrorists” out there is Al-Qaeda. At this point, even with unprecedented information sharing around the world, governments still feel the need to feed the world bald-faced lies. But they keep getting away with it. It will be interesting to see where Pakistan goes from here– with Bhutto back they were beginning to show so much promise.