Has bin Laden Begun Talking Yet?

Can we believe the U.S. government’s version of Osama bin Laden’s death? Of course not. The point is not that the details of such operations are rarely announced the following day. (Recently, for example, it was reported that the CIA has declassified the formula for invisible ink, which was in use at the beginning of the 20th century.) The point is that U.S. policy for at least the past 15 years has been one of double standards, lies and obfuscation.

Beginning with NATO enlargement and the instigation of wars in the Balkans, there followed accusations that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, support for Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia, and finally a very loose interpretation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya.

Leave aside the question of whether the policy of a country with pretensions to world dominance can be held to a different standard. Focus, rather, on a far simpler question.

President Barack Obama solemnly vowed that he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. To this day the prison has not been closed. It is clear that Congress hampers the president, and it is not at all obvious what to do with the prisoners, who can neither be brought to trial nor released. Nevertheless, facts are facts. The illegal military prison continues to function.

With the details of the operation against bin Laden having been made public, it has been revealed that the world’s No. 1 terrorist was tracked with the help of prisoner interrogations (torture, to be exact). It would be difficult to think of a better justification for this prison (and, on the whole, for the practice of torture and secret prisons) in the eyes of the public. So it turns out that to not believe the official American version is not respectable, but to believe it is too naïve.

Now imagine if you were an American. Would you refuse to take advantage of such a valuable source of information about international terrorists and their cooperation with the Taliban, as well as with the Pakistani army and intelligence services? It is hardly believable. In these circumstances, the task would be not to eliminate him but to take him alive at all cost.

Taking into account how unceremoniously Americans treat even ordinary terrorism suspects, one can easily imagine bin Laden’s confinement at a military base where specialists would work on him at their leisure. Do you find the picture too implausible? What do you say, then, of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who offered contrived evidence at the U.N.?

Is Barack Obama any different? What do you say, then, of the illegal arrest and secret transfer from Liberia to the U.S. of Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko?

Unfortunately, Americans allow themselves to do such things, and one cannot take their words at face value in a situation like this. So the picture is quite imaginable: Bin Laden accepts his role as the CIA’s leading analyst on Islamic terrorism and betrays his “business partners” out of self-interest. Presumably he hopes that he will be killed less excruciatingly and a bit later.

I do not want in the slightest to sling mud at the U.S., which should be acknowledged as has given a lot to the world. The problem is in its extraordinary cynicism while pursuing its interests and in the impunity with which it acts, thereby provoking a deep mistrust of everything that is said and done on its behalf.

In Russia we are used to looking for a motive of a “cut” behind every action of the authorities. The more the Libyan civil war develops, the more it resembles an attempt to get a cut of frozen Libyan assets abroad. A few tens of billion of dollars (without taking into account future oil revenues) is a sum large enough for specialists from a private Western military company to organize a little war. Fortunately, they have a great deal of experience — in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq.