Bin Laden Assassination—the Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories about the death of Osama bin Laden have been fueled by the US military’s rapid disposal of the body at sea, and the US announcement it would not release any images of bin Laden’s dead body. When the Americans killed Mullah Dadullah, Taliban’s chief military commander, they publicly showed the footage. Canadian deputy Leader of the Opposition and MP, Thomas Mulcair, stated in an interview with CBC Television:

I don’t think from what I’ve heard that those pictures [of bin Laden’s body] exist.

Fox News has challenged the DNA evidence confirming Bin Laden’s death. Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch said Bin Laden’s death could not be verified. To be 99.9 percent certain of the identity by DNA, as was claimed, the test had to have been compared against the DNA of a mother and father, or several natural brothers or sisters. DNA was available only from half brothers and half sisters, which makes that degree of certainty impossible, unless a busload of them had been tested.

Radio host, Alex Jones, among many others, thinks Bin Laden has been dead for years, and his body had been kept frozen on ice to be used as a propaganda tool at a future politically expedient time. In 2002, he claimed that an anonymous White House source had told him that bin Laden “is frozen, literally frozen and that he would be rolled out in the future at some date”. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said in 2003, “Yes we have been told by intelligence that they’ve got him, Bush may roll him out but because they exposed that at the election they didn’t do it”.

Stephen Lendman, citing former Pakistani president, Benazir Bhutto, said that Bin Laden died of natural causes in mid December 2001. Obama’s announcement was an excuse to involve the United States in wars with Pakistan. Maybe that is why the Pakistanis are particularly skeptical of the alleged raid and assassination.

Abbottabad residents said the announcement of Osama’s death was a US conspiracy against Pakistan. Some residents doubted not only that Bin Laden was dead, but also that he ever lived among them. A local lawyer agreed with Thomas Mulcair:

They’re just making it up. Nobody has seen the body.

Pakistani officials said no firefight had ever taken place:

Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers.

Bin Laden was captured alive, and executed outside the compound in front of his 12-year old daughter. Then his body was taken away by helicopter. An article in the Urdu newspaper Ausaf quoted military sources as saying:

Arabic news network Al-Arabiya claimed senior Pakistani security officials said Osama Bin Laden was captured alive in his Pakistani hideout and then shot by US special forces. His 12 year old saw her father executed and his body dragged to a helicopter.

Another Pakistani official rejected US accounts of the bloody firefight, saying:

Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else. But since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military’s entry into the country, it has devised the [Seal operation] scenario.

Hamid Gul former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) said Bin laden had died many years ago and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. He thinks the American government knew about Bin Laden’s death years ago:

They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment, and it couldn’t be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year’s election as he runs for president.

Contrary to that, others think Bin Laden was actually working with the US during the entire war on terror. Bin Laden was the main source of US help in the war on terror. He had been a US agent in Afghanistan when the Taliban were fighting the Soviets. A source was quoted as saying:

The West has been very pleased with Bin Laden’s operations in recent years. Now the West was forced to kill him in order to prevent a possible leak of information he had, information more precious than gold.

Pakistanis offer a unifying theory for the apparently discordant theories being bandied about. Bin Laden truly did die in 2001, but the US found a body double for them to pretend he was still alive, and to make the Bin Laden videos for “Al Qaida” to release after his death. US agencies and the Pakistan intelligence worked together to keep the double safe, eventually in the compound minutes away from the Pakistani military academy, a very safe place, and a place where videos could be made without fear of detection. Unbeknown to the poor dupe who was now Bin Laden, when the time was ripe, he was to be assassinated as Bin Laden! That is what happened on 2 May, but the release of photos meant the body might be recognized as not being Bin Laden. Diversionary fakes had to be released first, so that when the “real ones” come out, they too will be doubted!

Getting Conned by Bogus Investment Schemes—and Real Ones!

University at Buffalo sociologist, Lionel S Lewis, author of four articles in the journal Society about Madoff investors, explains how the Ponzi scheme works. He says:

To understand how confused thinking is, you need to understand how a con game works and the fact that it requires a “mark” willing to suspend his or her judgment.

First, the “roper”, who could be a brother-in-law, approaches the “mark” and says, “Listen, Bernie can make you a lot of money—a 16 or 20 percent return”. Now this is a far greater return than the standard investment produces, but the “mark” is greedy, like many people, and suspends reason in pursuit of easy cash. Remember, the “mark” is always a willing participant in pursuit of an unlikely outcome.

The con man—Madoff in this case—takes the “mark”’s money and spends it. He doesn’t invest it. He doesn’t realize a “return” on an investment. He just pays millions of dollars in finder’s fees to the “ropers”, gets them to pull in more “marks”, and uses that cash to pay off any of the “marks” who pull out of the scheme early, and spends the rest on estates, cars, vacations and yachts until the money is used up. Eventually the scheme collapses. The “marks” lose their money. In con terms, they’re “trimmed”. At this point, it is the job of the roper and other inside men in the con to “cool the mark out”—calm the waters to protect those perpetrating the con.

They do this, Lewis says, by pointing out to the mark that “he knew he was taking a risk (‘16 percent return? What were you thinking?’) and could have lost more, then sends him off, embarrassed, with his tail between his legs, but with a little cash, glad he’s not living on the street in a refrigerator carton”. The well cooled mark, according to Lewis, recognizes his part in the con. He’s not happy but he doesn’t call the cops, grouse about his losses on TV or blow up Madoff’s house.

Lewis is saying that people are voluntarily conned. They take a silly risk with their own money, knowing it looks fishy, but are so greedy, they do not accept a quick profit themselves from the scam, and get out while they are in the black. Instead, they hang on and on, reaping in the ill-gotten gains, maybe investing some of it anew, until the scheme inevitably falls apart. It is a pyramid selling scheme. It is illegal, and no one is justifying Madoff. He is in jail where he belongs, but the victims are still beefing, though it was a case of caveat emptor. They were buying a share in the scam, and were getting paid as long as new “marks” were being found. Now, they say they are victims of an investment con, that there were proper investments and they did not get their proper share. But there never were any proper investments! Lewis says:

Despite the fact that Madoff never ran an investment fund, no money was “made” on their behalf and there are no profits to return to them.

The scheme got so big and collapsed so swiftly that the “marks” were never cooled out:

So we find them posturing loudly as enraged victims online and off—in the papers, on television and radio—demanding “profits” they apparently think actually exist—they do not—and are owed to them—which is not legally the case.

Lewis focused on 167 people who invested with Madoff. He collected oral and written testimony, including lengthy interviews, from 42 of them and used other written material. Some investors, however angry and ashamed they are, and regardless of how much money they lost, have not sued and made a fuss. A lot of those people won’t talk to anybody. Lewis says:

Some who lost a lot were grateful they hadn’t invested more or glad to get back even a tiny percentage of what they lost, while others who lost less want everything they were “promised”—the 16 or 20 percent profit. They won’t accept that the “promise”, along with their gullibility, was part of the con, that they never could have won at this game, and still can’t, no matter how many attorneys they hire or how often they get on television.

What is sad is that many of those “trimmed” in the scam had worked hard to put together some cash, then greed got the better of them, they thought they could join the ruling class, and make buckets of money, and opted for Bernie Madoff’s shortcut to riches. They were gambling with their life’s savings, and gamblers know that they should only play on their gains, and should cut their losses. Of course, any pyramid scheme ends up with far more losers than winners, but the few winners can make fortunes out of all the little steers who are roped in.

The answer with any gambling—investing, if you prefer to call it that—is not to invest more than you can afford to lose. The trouble these days, is that the ruling caste are forcing the small guy into risky investments because the return at interest has been cut to zero. We can leave our life savings in the banks earning nothing, but eroding away by inflation and bankers’ bonuses, so we have to put the cash into something riskier.

Stockmarket crashes suit banks and financial speculators because it is the small investor who loses by bad timing and their inability to swing markets with sheer volume of investment, or influence, by buying stocks, talking them up with rumours of takeovers and such like, then selling at a profit while the stock is high. Joe and Jane will read the rumours and buy in too late when the stock has started to rise, then find the stock crashing again when the big man sells out. They lose! These are not strictly scams because it is all legal since Reagan had his bonfire of the regulations, a reason for much closer new regulation of the money markets. But Republican propaganda has it that regulation is a bad thing. Yes, it is bad for the crooks at the top, but just fine for the rest of us.

Our Decline Begins with Glenn Beck

Kevin Kalmes (opednews.com) writes that the decline of a civilization begins with a breakdown in the most basic principles of a civilized society:

• morality
• spiritualism
• social mores
• rule of law
• moral philosophy
  
  • good v evil
  • virtue v vice
  • justice v lawlessness
  • truth v prevarication.

Sounds just right except for “spiritualism”, but I’ll take it to mean spirituality, and I can accept that when it means the oneness of things.

Kevin continues saying that the degradation of moral responsibility and the deterioration of moral character defines Glenn Beck. He embodies all that is wrong with a civilization that has lost its moral compass. The loss of a moral code allows the basest of human flaws to surface and spawn the antithesis of civilization. When Beck speaks of the antichrist, the beast God will destroy just before the final defeat of Satan, he is speaking of himself. And for the first time, he would be correct in his splenetic blasphemy!

The moral supervision of our Nation needs to first defeat antichrist Beck before we can recalibrate our moral compass and return to the moral code that Americans used to value.

That's all right on the nose, say I. Basically the man's one of a load of opportunistic self serving creeps, who haven't a Christian thought in their heads, and never have had. They are only qualified to speak evil, so that's what they do.

Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio Promote False Beliefs

A survey of 750 Americans showed that people who relied on Fox News for their information were more likely than others to know four rumors about the New York City mosque—all of which have been refuted—and to believe them. Survey participants were all asked to rate how much they relied on various media outlets for their news. They were also asked whether they heard any of the rumors and if they believed in them.

The rumors were that:

1. the proposed center is scheduled to open on September 11, 2011 in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks
2. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist sympathizer who refuses to condemn Islamic attack on civilians
3. the Muslim groups building the center have deep ties to radical anti-American and anti-Semitic organizations
4. the money for the center is coming primarily from foreign financial backers associated with terrorist organizations.

The results showed that people who said they relied on Fox News, either online or on television, were more aware of rumors about the mosque and were more likely to believe the rumors though they were untrue than those with low reliance on Fox. An average respondent with a low reliance on Fox News believed 0.9 rumors on average, while an otherwise average respondent with a high reliance on Fox believed 1.5 rumors—an increase of 66 percent. Respondents who relied heavily on CNN or NPR believed fewer false rumors, the study found. High reliance on CNN reduced the number of rumors believed by 23 percent, while heavy use of NPR reduced belief by 25 percent.

Erik Nisbet, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, conducted the study with R Kelly Garrett, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State. All the comparisons were made while holding constant other variables, such as education, party affiliation, ideology, and other media use. Garrett said:

Our analyses demonstrate that the relationships we found aren't just a side effect of some other characteristic, such as political ideology or party affiliation. These results suggest that even a well-educated, liberal Democrat would be more likely to believe the rumors, if he relied heavily on Fox for his news.

Reliance on conservative talk radio had a similar effect on users as did Fox News. Those with a heavy reliance on conservative talk radio heard on average two rumors, compared to 1.5 rumors for those with a low reliance—an increase of 33 percent. People who relied heavily on broadcast television news—ABC, CBS or NBC—were less likely to have been exposed to the rumors. Heavy reliance on those sources was linked to a 22 percent decrease in rumor exposure compared to those with low reliance on those outlets. Broadcast news placed less emphasis on the mosque controversy than did the cable news outlets.

People who said they relied heavily on newspapers for their news (either print or online) increased their exposure to rebuttals by 67 percent when compared to people who relied little on papers. These rebuttals were shown to strongly promote accurate knowledge about the rumors.

The best way to get accurate information about the proposed Islamic cultural center seemed to be newspapers, according to the study. Nisbet noted that it was not just because newspaper readers are more attuned to politics. Comparing people who paid similar attention to the mosque controversy, those who read newspapers still had greater exposure to the rebuttals. Nisbet said:

This is one of the unique contributions of newspapers in the media landscape. When you consider that newspaper readers are more likely to be exposed to rebuttals of false information compared to other media outlets, it is worrying that newspapers in general have been struggling. It is something we should be concerned about.

The findings suggest that among those who believed none of the four rumors, two-thirds are opposed to the proposed project. But that increases to 82 percent among those who believed three or more rumors. Even more dramatic is the effect that belief in these rumors has on support for mosques outside of New York. Predicted opposition to building of a mosque in the respondent's own neighborhood increased from 39 percent among people who believed none of the rumors to 63 percent among those who believed three or more of the rumors. Nisbet observed that:

These rumors have a negative effect well beyond the specific controversy in New York City. They seem to shape attitudes about Muslims and their role in our society, no matter where we live. That's a big concern.

The survey was designed to focus on how differences in exposure and belief in rumors and support for the proposed New York mosque were associated with media use. That is what it did but it is too small to accurately represent the whole American population. Nevertheless, the survey worryingly indicated the potentially unsocial effects of a type of reporting that falsely emphasizes human prejudices rather than seeking to correct or minimize them for the sake of social harmony.