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On January 14th I posted a poll at Daily Kos asking whether or not bin Laden was alive. Most thought him dead. I’ve just posted a new one. Now, most seem to think he’s alive. Why?
I thought I’d post a new poll after reading emptywheel’s article this morning on the Kerry Report (on Tora Bora and U.S. Afghan strategy), and after reading several of the dozens of articles at memeorandum attached to the New York Times article on the Kerry Report. There was no credible information in any of the articles that might lead one to believe Osama is any more alive now than on January 15th.
At this point in my new Daily Kos poll, the alive bin Laden is a bit ahead and might soon pull away from the dead one.
Does anyone here want to speculate on why Daily Kos readers might put more stock in bin Laden’s continuing survival now than they did 10 and 1/2 months ago?
46 Comments
I’m with dead. It’s entirely plausible. He’s an old man, in failing health, not getting things like health care much.
What I’m really interested in though, Jason, is why people might be either more or less inclined that bin Laden is alive or dead now, compared to January 14th. There hasn’t been any credible evidence to support his continuing existence since that date, or has there been?
Might it be that the liberals and progressives who comment at our lefty blogs support the idea of the guy’s survival because now (as opposed to when Bush was president) they feel that buying the “survivor” line helps president Obama in his quest?
There have been at least 4 ostensible bin Laden tapes presented since January .. January 15…just before Obama took office. One in March denouncing the Pope and the Danish publisher of the “Mohammed cartoons”. Then there was one in mid-Ma. And finally this one
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6185820/Osama-bin-Laden-calls-Barack-Obama-powerless.html
Maybe because it attacks Obama as weak there have been a good number of conservative swinging over to the Pro-”Osama is Alive” side.
I’ve read the articles that came out whenever new “tapes” were issued and there seems to be nothing regarding their provenance that would give them much credibility.
Again, I’m more interested in why moderates, liberals and progressives might be leaning toward bin Laden’s survival.
Maybe the liberals and progressives have left Daily Kos and only Party regulars remain with Markos. -:)-:)-:)
I think the likelihood is that Osama is dead and Ayman is running things.
You are assuming that only moderates, liberals, and progressives are at Kos.
There very well might be some of these.
http://current.com/1u0rq4c
I’ve got at least two of these most-likely paid or idealism-motivated trolls at my place.
They are always so obvious just by their appearance at sites that are the opposite of what they profess to believe in. Even more obvious when they won’t go away.
Off the top of my head, but it seems to me like there was some noise about him being dead (thus your poll, or caused by your poll? only you know for sure) that may have temporally upped the ‘he is dead’ guess. It is a guess, NONE of us know. The regular story from the press and state presumes he’s alive.
Personally, I never did think he was that important alive or dead. I figured the only way 9/11 ever happened in the first place was because it was an inside job. Does it matter if he was an insider or they were just using him? Not really. Either way it is treason.
From the Pakistan Daily on Sept 24/09.
********
“Osama Bin Laden Has Been Dead Since December 2001
“If they didn’t have an Osama Bin Laden, they would have invented one.”
Milt Bearden – CIA agent, in an interview with anchor Dan Rather of the CBS (September 12, 2001)
“The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11″.
(Rex Tomb, spokesman, FBI’s Chief of Investigative Publicity)
Now that even Asif Ali Zardari the President of Pakistan & General Musharraf are stating that Bin Laden is dead, it is high time that we in India began to both debate as well as challenge this sheer calumny.
Basically the truth and the fact of the matter is that Bin Laden has been dead since the latter half of December 2001. So then why did Bush-Cheney & now the Obama-Hillary combine, as well as the Neoconservatives & Zionist ideologues, continue to insist & actively propagate the myth of Bin Laden?”
http://www.daily.pk/osama-bin-laden-has-been-dead-since-december-2001-11175/
“I figured the only way 9/11 ever happened in the first place was because it was an inside job. Does it matter if he was an insider or they were just using him? Not really. Either way it is treason.”
Agreed. And on Kos you get banned for suggesting anything other than the official story – 19 alcohol, stripper, and gambling loving cave men out-smarted the most advanced military in the world, a system that was blinking red.
Kos is so liberal that any refusal to give Cheney the 100% benefit of the doubt on the issue of 9/11 gets a reader banned.
Criticism of Zionism? Same thing.
You have to wonder who else is on CIA payroll, or perhaps, who isn’t.
I like Rachael Maddow, but she’s a Rhodes Scholar.
That program has some sketchy global conspiracy roots. Cecil Rhodes started the program to train potential future leaders who would work to advance a global government run by British and American bankers.
Bill Clinton, CIA Director James Woolsey, Bill Bradley, Wesley Clark, Dennis Blair, Robert Reich, Dick Luger, Richard Haass, E.J. Dionne, CNN Chairman and Aspen Institute (think Judy Miller and Scooter Libby poetry) President Walter Isaacson, David Vitter, and others are among the Rhodes alumni.
George H.W. Bush was offered a Rhodes Scholarship, but he was born into the Anglo/American New World Order conspiracy, so I guess doing the time in Oxford wasn’t necessary.
I’m not saying all past Rhodes Scholars are part of the same conspiracy, but the conspiracy was and is the point of the program.
I have never heard Rachael say one skeptical thing about the official 9/11 story or the actions of Israel and the AIPAC lobby, but unfortunately that doesn’t exactly set her apart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KynBihT3-U
She won’t touch Sibel Edmonds despite being asked repeatedly.The silence is deafening. Woolsey is still around. Found at AIPAC that I never link to.
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“Former CIA Director James Woolsey headlined AIPAC’s annual Pacific Northwest Dinner earlier this month in Seattle, Washington. Woolsey briefed over 650 state community leaders, pro-Israel activists, elected representatives and students on the joint security challenges facing the United States and Israel. Members of Congress attending the Emerald City event included Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R), Dave Reichert (R), Jay Inslee (D), Rick Larsen (D) and Jim McDermott (D), each of whom spoke about the vital importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
He makes a very interesting comment starting at 6:00.
**********
“9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey finally confesses 9-11 Commission could not do it’s job Part 3 of 3″
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJWBcWAeAw&feature=player_embedded
It’s a good question. For my piece, given that Bin Laden is more myth than man anyway, these things ebb and flow in the imagination of Americans in response to the news cycle.
I’d love to be able to spend more time on this today, but today begins finals prep week, and I’ve got about 140 essays coming in today, as many tomorrow, with 1,160 sets of grades to enter in the next 11 days.
Thanks for the discussions, pups. I’m a 9/11 agnostic, BTW.
Good luck!
Are we having fun yet… you devious blogger..)
Perhaps we should take a survey in order to be sure the average Kossack is over 16 yrs of age.
At least a third had a sane/honest answer.
doesn’t matter
11% 11 votes
don’t know
22% 21 votes
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/16724
hey ed, here’s my resurrected diary from Oct re bin Laden: “Time To Trot Out [the Probably Corpse of] bin Laden as a Tool for War Propaganda”
I said in a comment that Obama’s upcoming Afghan pronouncement and the release of the bin Laden “if only we had escalated those chasing bin Laden way back when and gotten him” is pretty manipulatively convenient. From my research, Obama is dead. One writer called him “Obama bin Elvis”. If Obama refers to bin Laden by name on Tuesday, he is succumbing to “weekend at Bernie’s” strategizing. Pretty low.
Yeah, I’m wondering if and when the current president will say the words “Osama bin Laden” in a way that indicates you and I are supposed to believe the guy isn’t under 3,500,000 tons of rocks in the Tora Bora mountains.
It really doesn’t matter, and if our Government knew they wouldn’t tell us because Him as an excuse would vanish.
We have spent trillions on two useless wars fueled by Him and 911. we didn’t get Him, are still in the two wars, haven’t rebuilt the trade center, and are worse off, no safer, and actually in a more dangerous world then before He became our villian.
The previous administration killed more people, cost us more, and made more ememies than Bin Laden did. Yet we will supposedly keep hunting for him, fighting wars started over Him, and using Him for an excuse.
We won’t expend anything to hunt down the people in the last administration who were more of our enemies than Him, and seem to want to forgive them for what they cost us. We are still supporting the people in Congress that enabled them, relying on the same intelligence agencies that failed us, and bragging up our military that couldn’t get Him and were not only used but failed to get Him or handle the wars.
We are fools chasing ghosts, while killers walk free among us. It doesn’t say much for Country or people we are a part of.
Your way with words seems to inhabit the realm between anachronistic and poetic. Many good points. Is English your first language?
Yes English is My first language. I am an Author. My book, “Why we have so many American Problems and what we can do about them,” is availabe at all online book stores.
I try to express myself so that people can understand me.
You do.
My use of “anachronistic” wasn’t meant to be disparaging. Winston Churchill’s use of language, for instance, tended to be very anachronistic.
Edward Teller wrote: Does anyone here want to speculate on why Daily Kos readers might put more stock in bin Laden’s continuing survival now than they did 10 and 1/2 months ago?
Many of the people over at Dailykos are Obama bots. They know that Obama is intent on escalating in Afghanistan. So to them, it’s better to have “a live Osama bin Laden” than a dead one, otherwise there is a kind of feeling that all is for nothing with the $40 billion dollar a year esclation Obama is intent on making.
I pretty much gave up on the place after posting this diary during Operation Cast Lead. But I thought it fitting to revisit the place where I’d polled on this before, and you can get a decent polling sample number there sometimes.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Torture, domestic wiretapping, and comfortable retirements for Bush war criminals are also now okay, because Obama says so.
Markos is probably CIA, since he was trained by them and said he would have no problem working for them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK6CinsGYC0&feature=related
Manufactured dissent and consent, depending on who is in charge. Defining the “far left wing” while banning readers who ruffle the feathers of the establishment.
BillWalker thanks for that video of Markos and the CIA.
On the video clip, Kos says that in 2001 he was broke and applied to the CIA for a job and went to “the end” by almost signing on. He gives as his reason for NOT signing up with the CIA the following: the Howard Dean campaign took off and he chose that instead.
The problem with that explanation is that Dean was running for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and his campaign had in no way “taken off” back in 2001. Wikipedia says that he became the frontrunner only as of 2003. AND he filed his papers for candidacy on May 31, 2002: well after 2001 that Kos is talking about.
So Kos’s explanation seems to make no sense and be factually wrong. NOTE that he does not say in the video that he ever joined the CIA (as the title to the clip and many of the comments at YouTube suggest). What he does say is that he filled out all the paperwork and was ready to sign up in 2001 but for the Dean campaign. In the clip, he praises the CIA for building the world up.
He completed CIA training and lied about his reason for not joining the CIA. He also said that he would have no problem working for this do gooder organization.
I’m going to jump to the wild conclusion that he did indeed join the CIA.
The hype of dailykos on the network news, and the shrill demonization of kos by Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, only gave dailykos street cred, and attracted hundreds of thousands of new readers to the site.
Bird is the word:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
Your hypothesis certainly seems borne out by what Markos did to Dennis Kucinich. Recall that when all of the candidates were running for the Democratic nomination and Obama was not well known that Markos kept pummelling Kucinich saying he was “too ugly” to be President. Whenever he printed Kucinich’s name, he printed it something like this: Ku#@!#*&!
It was a real hatchet job and I kept wondering why the personal attacks on Kucinich.
Note too his 2001 explanation for giving up the CIA for the Dean campaign makes absolutely no sense.
They do work together.
Chris Matthews has a similar story.
I saw the clip of Marcos a while ago and knew immediately he is CIA. No doubt about it in my mind what so ever. Nice propaganda job, no? He really sold us down the river.
I think it is treason, but I believe they went after me personally and spoiled all my relationships with my family, so I have ‘issues’ and I am not unbiased.
And here is a possible right wing rough equivalent of Markos’ function:
http://rawstory.com/2009/11/report-fbi-viewed-ultraright-radio-informant-turner-irreplaceable/
Two “extremists” on either side of the political spectrum, defining the outer edges while working for the same oligarchical establishment.
Divided we fall.
And they keep playing it on us over and over and over again.
I stir up TEA partiers and what happens?
Beck arrives to steal their message, twist it to fit the corporate elite’s. It is a very effective technique. I have no doubt we will see it being pulled on us every time.
Based on reviewing various foreign news reports long ago, I concluded long that OBL died of advanced kidney disease in the vicinity of Tora Bora in December, 2001. I’m reasonably certain Bush knew that and Obama has known it since he was elected, if not before.
I presume the poll results flipped because Obama’s main reason for escalating the war in Afghanistan is to get OBL and even a skilled and persuasive liar like Obama realizes he can’t sell killing a dead man as an excuse for war.
I sort of predict that somebody in the Obama administration will go beyond the past tense referrals to bin Laden in the Kerry Report on Monday, to test the waters on whether or not the president should directly refer to ObL in the present tense in his Tuesday West Point speech.
Dead
and does not matter
the warmongers are moving ahead with the plans basically written out at the Project for a New American Century website
any thoughts concerning the plausibility of the old guy going around saying that he’s Paul McCartney?
Whoever that guy is I can say one thing for sure about him:
He knows how to rock. Man, can that guy rock. amazing.
Add Anderson Cooper to the probable CIA Operation Mockingbird list. From Wikipedia:
“During college, he spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency. Although he technically has no formal journalistic education, he opted to pursue a career in journalism rather than stay with the agency after school,[6] having been a “news junkie” “since I was ‘in utero.’ ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_cooper
After reading Russ Baker’s “Family of Secrets,” I feel pretty comfortable adding Bob Woodward to the Mockingbird stable.
Woodward was a Naval Intelligence officer until senior administration official suggested the Washington Post hire him. The Post (an organization central in the history of Operation Mockingbird) hired Woodward, but since he had no journalistic training they sent him to a smaller paper to learn how to become a journalist.
The Nixon Whitehouse was crawling with advisers who were secretly with the CIA, and there is an intriguing amount of evidence suggesting that Nixon was set up to a certain extent by his own party.
CIA prince George H.W. Bush was the head of the Republican National Committee at the time.
He was definitely set up. From pages 5 & 6 of a PDF.
*********
“DEAN: I think, I think that, uh, there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer–within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows
geometrically now because it compounds itself. Uh, that’ll be clear as I explain you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and it basically is because (1) we’re being blackmailed; (2) uh, people are going to start perjuring themself very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to
protect other people and the like. And that is just–and there is no assurance–
PRESIDENT: That it won’t bust.
DEAN: That, that won’t bust.
PRESIDENT: True.
DEAN: So, let me give you the sort of basic facts’ talking first about the Watergate; and then about Segretti; and then about some of the peripheral items that, uh, have come up.First of all, on, on the Watergate: How did
it all start, where did it start? It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn’t set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the Re-election Committee.
PRESIDENT: Hmm.
DEAN: Not being in this business, I turned to somebody who had been in this business, JackCaulfield, who is, I don’t know if you remember Jack or not. He was your original bodyguard before
PRESIDENT: Yeah.
DEAN: …they had…
PRESIDENT: Yeah.
DEAN: …candidate, candidate…
PRESIDENT: Yeah.
DEAN: …protection, an old New York City policeman.
PRESIDENT: Right, I know, I know him.
DEAN: Uh, Jack had worked for John and then was transferred to my office. I said, “Jack, come up with a plan that, you know, is a normal infiltration, I mean, you know, buying information from secretaries and all that sort of thing.” He did, he put together a plan. It was kicked around, and, uh, I went to Ehrlichman with it. I went to Mitchell with it, and the consensus was that Caulfield wasn’t the man to do this. Uh, in
retrospect, that might have been a bad call, ’cause he is an incredibly cautious person and, and wouldn’t have put the situation to where it is today. ”
http://nixon.archives.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/trial/exhibit_12.pdf
That’s an interesting idea.
can you elaborate?
Great post and comments. Now I know why I never felt comfortable at Dailykos.
I vote OBL long dead and most of the tapes pure cinema, CIA style.
It is a curious question. Our government thinks bin Laden is still alive, but this is the same government that thought Iraq had WMD and couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble happening right in front of it.
I always thought that if our government were serious about finding out whether bin Laden was dead or alive or in capturing Zawahiri they should have given some of us bloggers security clearances and let us go over their evidence and interview their people. It’s funny how you never can get the right answers if you keep asking the wrong questions.
If we want to get bin Laden out of the caves, we should start throwing mp3 players with huge speakers on them down into the caves. On each mp3 player would be a copy of the audiobook “Going Rogue.” The mp3 players wouldn’t have on-off switches. He’d be out in the open within minutes.
As long as she’s doing the reading on that tape. That voice of hers would send him running from his underground abode alright; whether he’s dead or alive..’g’.