Osama Died For Our Sins

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I’d bet you’re getting tired of hearing that Osama is dead, tired of reading details that shift daily. And you may still be wondering which Osama was killed this week: the one who supposedly died years back, in a cave? The one who reportedly succumbed to renal failure in December, 2001? Today, we’ll talk about the one recently shot down in the Pakistani suburbs. We will assume that this bin Laden is — or was — the original Osama, one of the 50 children of a wealthy Saudi contractor and an ex-CIA asset in Charlie Wilson’s War.

That would be the Osama who brought jihad to Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen and who belatedly claimed responsibility for the Twin Towers falling, whether his rag-tag group of quasi-soldiers was capable of those precision strikes or not. We’ll talk about the Osama we gave monster-status to in order to frighten cowering, politically-maneuverable Americans and little children everywhere.

Let’s talk about that one because — let’s face it — he was our own unique creation, wasn’t he? We took an obscure Islamic terrorist-cum-philosopher, bent on tribal vengeance, and made him into the global face of darkness. As a nation, we gave up our liberty, our principles and our financial security in order to defend ourselves against this one man and his small band of malcontents. Our elitist Christian apprehension met bin Laden’s elitist Islamic protestation in a head-on clash that provided cover for exploitive neo-conservatism and shock doctrine, growing and blooming on the love of oil and empire. Like “Where’s Waldo?” we saw Osama’s footprint everywhere and followed it with troops, pallets of money and camp followers: military contractors and mercenaries, Starbucks and McDonalds.

In the name of patriotism and safety, we pursued Osama’s shadowy organization with paranoid fervor, even as a new wave of yearning for secular democracy in the Mid-east began to make bin Laden’s influence — never mainstream — obsolete. We pursued him, even as the dangers of corporate plutocracy swamped our own nation and religious authoritarianism regained popularity. We pursued him, without once acknowledging that our own religious right had become America’s Taliban, that our corporate structure had grown deeply dependent upon the tribalism of violence and war, or that the nation itself had surrendered its moral clarity and Constitutional integrity to arrogant, self-serving imperialism.

Eric has already written brilliantly on the topic of projection, so I need say little about the mirroring effect, but let’s take a long look into our cracked, fissured reflection, shall we? They say you can tell the maturity of a civilization by observing how it treats its animals, but that’s not very encouraging, so let’s go on to the next example: how it treats its prisoners. No help there. Both domestically and internationally, we systematically engage in forms of torture when we have judged another’s guilt. Trying to neutralize the international outrage, Obama promised to close Guantanamo, a promise short-circuited by congressional insistence that no “enemy combatant” enter our courtrooms or be housed on our shores. Flying in the face of American tradition, Congress passed a law denying enemy combatants access to our courts or our prisons, making closure of the base infinitely harder. This is another of those blemishes on Obama’s record that he can do little to change.

Was Osama bin Laden assassinated? Was such a maneuver even legal? Michael Moore told Piers Morgan that bin Laden had been executed, and I find that hard to argue. Those who do so maintain that we were, and are, at war with Al Qaeda and there was every expectation that bin Laden was going for a weapon when he was twice shot by elite American special forces. I find that hard to argue as well. The morality of the event is dancing — with the angels — on the head of a pin.

Moore had more to complain about:

“I hear a lot of people often say, what would Jesus do?” he said. “I don’t think Jesus would go down to Ground Zero like a lot of people did…and have a party.” Morgan asked him why he took issue with the way bin Laden died. Moore said that the killing deviated from the notion that everyone has a right to a trial:

“We’ve lost something of our soul here in this country…something that separates us from other parts, other countries where we say everybody has their day in court no matter how bad of a person, no matter what piece of scum they are, they have a right to a trial…after World War II, we just didn’t go in and put a bullet to the head of all the top Nazis. We put them on trial.”

While I agree with Moore that an international trial would have been preferable — and likely show OBL as brutally indifferent to his own Muslim brothers and sisters as was Saddam and now Gadhafi — I’m not sure we’ve “lost something of our soul” by not bringing him to trial. I think we’ve just buried it under some unresolved issues. The safeguards that protected the sanctity of our national soul were deconstructed by a childish president, an ideological old man with a mechanical heart, and those whose simplistic view of life left no room for compassion or mercy; people like John Yoo, for instance, the lawyer who helped George W. bypass the Geneva Convention to clear the path for torture.

Yoo quickly grabbed a piece of the glory in nailing OBL this week, arguing that it was ‘enhanced interrogation’ that provided the clue that led to Osama’s compound. He regretted that OBL wasn’t captured and his secrets twisted out of him using the very techniques he still argues are necessary for homeland security and the pursuit of American interests. Contradicting him, our old pal Rumsfeld originally said that the nickname of the courier whose telephone call was intercepted was not obtained through specialized interrogation, but he later backed up for FOX’s Sean Hannity, arguing the efficacy of brutal torture techniques on the whole.

Not to be outdone, Dick Cheney jumped in to say it was likely water-boarding that yielded such critical information, causing the torture apologists to chime in, all singing their nationalistic song about “ticking time bombs” that promote the end as justification of the means. (That may or may not have caused Sarah Palin to congratulate George Bush on Osama’s capture: you never know why Sarah does stuff, you can just count on it to amaze you.) In truth, the tip that identified Osama’s courier came from Hassan Ghul in 2004, an al Qaeda operative who was not water-boarded and who volunteered the information as he became close to his captors.

While we ostensibly no longer overtly torture in this nation, we have not given up the option to render prisoners to places that do. We need to look in that mirror a bit longer before the image comes clear enough to give up such heady powers. Meanwhile, we must acknowledge that torture is the tool of empire. It can only exist in hands powerful enough to change its status from criminal to ‘necessary.’ Extreme brutality terrifies, it coerces, it physically controls and mentally handicaps. Guantanamo is full of people who are no longer able to separate truth from fiction, their life so disrupted, their ability to reason so wounded that they are unable to assist in their own defense, should they be allowed one. They are caught in limbo.

And surely Moore’s comment on what Jesus would do comes full circle on this mention of empire. The Romans knew how to torture; they’d perfected the cold, ruthless skills of occupation on a grand scale. Obviously, death by torture is very familiar to Christians everywhere, who celebrate its consequences every spring. The cross itself is an object of torture and humiliation that many of us proudly wear around our necks (the addiction to gore and nihilism has always been humanity’s lowest common denominator.) Mel Gibson’s depiction of the scourging and crucifixion of Christ — enhanced by 21st century special effects — causes some to swoon each Easter season, while small children peek between their fingers and older ones thrill to the violence. As always, the same preachers practicing Islamophobia today condemn to hell those who killed Jesus, even though He, himself, condemned none. And that’s the answer to what He would do, of course. In all likelihood, the Christ would do now what he did then: ask for healing for the persecuted and mercy for the persecutors.

Obama — the one called too effete, too wimpy, too indecisive to handle national security — has skillfully settled the question of al Qaeda’s influence into the coming decade. Whether we approve of this kind of military strike or not, it took cojones to accomplish, which is why the Pentagon calls him “Cool Hand Luke” and his popularity has taken a leap, even among Republicans. Al Qaeda will re-form and limp along now, but it will never again be associated with every random bump in the night because Islam’s tall prophet of destruction is dead. We have passed through the ring of fire that European nations have long since survived, enduring a test of courage as their nation is attacked. We will have discovered that we too can live through such a test without fainting in fear, although we did so more often than not, through this last long decade.

But the Pandora’s Box opened by those who sought to take advantage of 9/11 must be shut if we are to rise above our limitations, if we are to restore our honor. So long as the topic of torture can still cause a firestorm of controversy, the mirror is too cracked to repair, the reflection too harsh to continue without further harm. This must be settled. We have been brutal in interrogation, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that those we train to engage in these events are any less scarred by their activity than those who serve in war to kill and terrorize the enemy. We have a karmic load to settle, and we cannot do that until we are willing to admit our errors. We are a nation of laws, or we are not. We are a nation growing in compassion, or one growing in militaristic opportunism. War, brutality, cruelty, rape? We grow beyond this now or we consume ourselves, and deservedly.

We have exorcised some of our fear and guilt by killing one Osama bin Laden, the face of hostile, vengeful Islam, but he died for our sins as much as for his own. Unless we can put this kind of hateful activity behind us, we have to question not which enemy will be next to frighten and motivate us to more violence, but which of us will be the next to die for the sins of those around us.

Martin Luther King said it best: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” When the mirror shows us darkness and hate, we must shine with light and love, in all aspects of our lives, personal and political. Until we do that, Jesus is still a tortured redeemer and there will always be another Osama waiting to satisfy humanity’s taste for blood.