Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research

A people as gullible as Americans have no future.

The White House’s “death of bin Laden” story has come apart at the seams. Will it make any difference that before 48 hours had passed the story had changed so much that it no longer bore any resemblance to President Obama’s Sunday evening broadcast and has lost all credibility?

So far it has made no difference to the once-fabled news organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which on March 9, eight days later, is still repeating the propaganda that the SEALs killed bin Laden in his Pakistani compound, where bin Laden lived next door to the Pakistani Military Academy surrounded by the Pakistani army.

Not even the president of Pakistan finds the story implausible. The BBC reports that the president is launching a full-scale investigation of how bin Laden managed to live for years in an army garrison town without being noticed.

For most Americans the story began and ended with four words: “we got bin Laden.” The celebrations, the sweet taste of revenge, of triumph and victory over “the most dangerous man on the planet” are akin to the thrill experienced by sports fans when their football team defeats the unspeakable rival or their baseball team wins the World Series. No fan wants to hear the next day that it is not so, that it is all a mistake. If these Americans years from now come across a story that the killing of bin Laden was an orchestrated news event to boost other agendas, they will dismiss the report as the ravings of a pinko-liberal-commie.

Everyone knows we killed bin Laden. How could it be otherwise? We--the indispensable people, the virtuous nation, the world’s only superpower, the white hats-- were destined to prevail. No other outcome was possible.

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Stephen Lendman

[A man lies dead on the ground after an anti-government demonstration in the southern city of Les Cayes, Haiti, Monday, April 7, 2008. Hungry protesters angered by high food prices flooded the streets of Port-au-Prince, forced businesses and schools to close as unrest spread from the countryside. Witnesses said the man was killed by elite protecting hotel 'security guards.' Photo: AP/Nick Whalen/The WE!]

Martelly's mandate is to facilitate profiteering from misery.

Except for Aristide's tenure, what passes for Haitian democracy would make a despot blush, thanks to America's imperial grip on the hemisphere's poorest, long-suffering people.

As a result, last November's presidential and legislative elections might best be called a cruel joke. The entire process was rigged to exclude 15 parties, including by far the most popular, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas.

Moreover, the election was so tainted by brazen disenfranchisement and fraud, including ballot box stuffing and other irregularities, that legitimate independent observers would have demanded throwing out the results and starting over.

Most Haitians, however, weren't fooled. A scant 22%, in fact, voted, a hemispheric low since record keeping began over 60 years ago.

Since no presidential candidate won a majority, a March 20 runoff followed, pitting stealth Duvalierist Michel ("Sweet Micky") Martelly, an anti-populist former Kompa singer, against Mirlande Manigat, wife of former right-wing president, Leslie Manigat. Between them, they got about 11% support in round one, making them both illegitimate presidential choices.

Even more so for winner Martelly with fewer than 22% of Haitians voting, a new record low so embarrassing it was almost like holding a national election and no one showed up. Why bother with only US approved candidates participating, making both rounds fraudulent, illegitimate, and predictable, assuring sham democracy, continued repression, deep poverty, and exploitation for another five years.

Nonetheless, on May 14, Martelly will be inaugurated as president, by imperial selection, not popular mandate. In a nation of about 9.7 million people, he got about 700,000 votes, about 16.7% of registered voters (about 7% of all Haitians), making him perhaps Haiti's least popular president ever. The people's choice, he's not, with good reason.

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Barry Grey
WSWS

Migrants who successfully made the boat trip to the tiny island
of Lampedusa, Italy from the unrest in north Africa receive as-
sistance. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP

The attempt to justify the imperialist war by casting it as a humanitarian intervention to protect Libyan civilians against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi exposed as fraud

The British Guardian newspaper published an investigative report Monday documenting the case of African refugees who were left to die in the early days of the war against Libya by NATO and European authorities who spotted their vessel drifting in the Mediterranean but made no effort to rescue them.

The newspaper, citing the account of survivors and an Eritrean priest in Rome who was one of the last people to communicate with the stranded boat, said the passengers were left to drift in open waters for 16 days, even though the Italian coastguard had been alerted and the vessel had been seen by a military helicopter and an aircraft carrier.

Only nine of the 72 people who boarded the boat in Tripoli on March 25 in a desperate attempt to reach the Italian island port of Lampedusa 180 miles northwest of the Libyan capital survived the ordeal. The others, including 20 women and two babies, died from thirst and starvation while on the boat or after beaching near Misrata on April 10.

The Guardian exposé coincided with an announcement Monday by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR that a refugee boat with as many as 600 people on board sank Friday off the coast of Tripoli. There are no reports of survivors.

UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said that, besides the disaster on Friday, at least three other boats with a combined total of several hundred passengers left Tripoli in late March and disappeared.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research

Brzezinski and Tim Osman (Osama bin Laden) discuss
the string of Jihads that Zbigniew never regrets...

The US government’s bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered.

Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said, “was not armed.”

The firefight story was instantly suspicious as not a single SEAL got a scratch, despite being up against al Qaeda, described by former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as ‘the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

Every original story detail has been changed. It wasn’t bin Laden’s wife who was murdered by the Navy SEALs , but the wife of an aide. It wasn’t bin Laden’s son, Khalid, who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but son Hamza.

Carney blamed the changed story on “the fog of war.” But there was no firefight, so where did the “fog of war” come from?

The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video.

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