Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Bin Laden - misc. thoughts

Whether we show pictures or not, we can be sure of two things:

1. He will now become a martyr to the terrorists who took their lead from him.

2. Many will not believe that he is dead. Call it the Elvis phenomenon (where even a body & a burial ceremony did not stop random sightings).

3. They found only 5 computers, 10 hard drives and no internet access? Hard to believe that anybody in charge of an ongoing world-wide conspiracy managed to do this with so little electronic technology.

4. I have no idea what Bin Laden wanted to accomplish when he ordered 9/11, other than to prove that we were vulnerable. But with that one act, he set the U.S. well along the path to becoming a police state. 10 years later, one needs a passport of some kind to travel to Canada or Mexico. Flying means the equivalent of a full-body search, either electronic or manual. Guantanamo and torture are supported by our leaders and way too large a proportion of our population. Torture, thanks to Bin Laden, is now only wrong when other countries do it because they do it without justification while we do it with justification. (Needless to say, those who use it in other countries probably use the same justifications that we do.)

10 years on, we have become a harsher country, a less free country. But Bin Laden only provided the push. As a nation, we did not have to fall off the cliff. We chose to respond to terror with terror. Bin Laden proved just how thin the veil of "civilization" is and how easy it is to breach it.