The Final Countdown – 2/13/24 – Pakistan Faces Uncertain Political Future With No Clear Winning Gov’t

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss top news worldwide, including the results of Pakistan’s elections. 
Mitch Roschelle – Media Commentator 
Tyler Nixon – Counselor-at-law  
Mark Sleboda – International Relations and Security Analyst 
Hamza Azhar Salam – Pakistani journalist 
 
The first hour begins with media commentator Mitch Roschelle, who discusses the special election to replace the ousted U.S. Representative George Santos. 
 
Then, attorney Tyler Nixon joins to weigh in on Trump’s emergency request to SCOTUS to delay his Jan. 6 criminal trial. Nixon and the hosts also discuss Trump’s hearing on the classified documents case and the possibility of Fani Willis being disqualified. 
 
The second hour starts with International Relations and Security Analyst Mark Sleboda, who shares his expertise on the latest out of Ukraine, including the Senate approving a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. 
 
The show closes with journalist Hamza Azhar Salam, who shares his insights on the split results of Pakistan’s elections. 
 
 

DMZ America Podcast Ep 132: Middle East War, Could Biden Lose New Hampshire?, Dead Tree Publications Even Deader

Editorial cartoonists and political analysts from the Left (Ted Rall) and the Right (Scott Stantis) discuss and explain the latest news and events in a unique format where disagreement and debate occurs without yelling or stupid insults.

First up this week: War across the Middle East assumes a “Guns of August” vibe as Iran and Pakistan become the latest countries to launch crossborder missile attacks, with the victims being ethnic Balochis. Ted lays out how Iran is emerging as the big winner from the Israel-Hamas War. Scott pushes back from the American perspective, questioning whether the Islamic Republic is committing diplomatic suicide.

Second: The 2024 Presidential Campaign moves from Iowa to the bizarre New Hampshire primary, which is being skipped both by President Biden and Governor Ron DeSantis. All GOP eyes will soon turn to South Carolina—will the Palmetto State be the last stand for Haley, or DeSantis, or both? Meanwhile, New Hampshire threatens to torpedo Biden for his Big Snub.

Third topic: More depressing news from the world of dead trees, where the Washington Post is losing $100 million a year and the Los Angeles Times is down $50 million despite their deep-pocketed and supposedly brilliant owners. Ted asks Scott, who has worked at numerous papers, why can’t these supposed genius billionaires turn these sinking watchdogs of democracy around?

Watch the Video version of the DMZ America Podcast: here.

The Final Countdown – 1/18/24 – Under Scrutiny: Roger Stone Faces Investigation Over Alleged ‘Assassination’ Remarks

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall cover a range of topics domestically and abroad including Roger Stone’s alleged death threats to Democrats. 

Tyler Nixon – Counselor-at-Law
Scottie Nell Hughes – RT Host 
Lauren Fix – Auto Expert, Car Coach Reports Analyst 
Hamza Azhar Salam – Pakistani journalist 
 
The show begins with counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon, who weighs in on the investigation into Trump confidante Roger Stone for alleged death threats to Democrats. 
 
Then, RT Host Scottie Nell Hughes shares her perspective on the ongoing accusations against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. 
 
The second hour begins with auto expert Lauren Fix who discusses electric vehicles failing to start in the cold weather. 
 
The show closes with Pakistani journalist Hamza Azhar Salam, who shares his insights on Pakistan’s retaliatory strike against Iran. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 7/31/23 – Not So Fast: Hungarian Parliament Delays Sweden’s NATO Membership

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss breaking topics, including Hungary delaying Sweden’s NATO membership.  
Angie Wong: Journalist 
Nebojsa Malic: Serbian-American journalist
Hamza Azhar Salam: Pakistani journalist
Robert Inlakesh: Journalist, writer, and political analyst
 
The show kicks off with journalist Angie Wong to discuss the testimony of Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, Serbian-American journalist Nebojsa Malic discusses Trump’s latest comments on Ukraine, and the Hungarian Parliament delaying Sweden’s NATO membership. 
 
The second hour begins with journalist Hamza Azhar Salam talking about the latest out of Pakistan. 
 
The show closes with journalist Robert Inlakesh discussing the Israeli protests. 

No One Should Have To Earn a Living

            The other day, I caught myself using the phrase “earn a living.” For the first time in my life, I questioned myself.

            The idea that one must “earn a living” is the fundamental assumption of capitalism. When you stop to think about it, that’s some extreme libertarianism.

            Americans are constitutionally guaranteed the right to speak freely, worship as they choose, purchase and own a firearm and keep their homes private from prying government officials. As important as these rights are, none are nearly important as the right to living. You can live without expressing yourself. Religions are fiction. We would be better off without guns.

            Yet life itself, without which no other right is worth a damn, is not guaranteed.

            We need a few things to keep breathing: clean water, food, shelter and medical care. Yet our society can’t even codify the government’s obligation to provide water. While some municipalities push liquid hydrogen oxide to our sinks for free — unless you count taxes — many others charge. Unless you earn that living to which you are not legally entitled, you die of thirst or are poisoned or starve to death or you die from exposure to the elements or you succumb to an injury or disease that science would have treated or cured.

            When you think about it, and we mostly don’t, the gap between the system and our psycho-cultural wiring is a gaping chasm. Capitalism says you aren’t entitled to drink or eat or sleep inside or see a doctor, that you must somehow “earn” those privileges or die. But for hundreds of thousands of years before settled civilization 6,000 years ago led to the grain storage that fed a previously-nonexistent profit incentive, homo sapiens lived in clans of hunter-gatherers.

There are accounts of traditional societies abandoning the elderly or driving the infirm to ice floes. But there is also considerable evidence that early societies took care of those who couldn’t take care of themselves. Archaeological digs have unearthed broken bones that were mended by primitive medical means. Ancient people carried their elderly and sick on litters. Even now, in situations where human beings find themselves separated from civilization’s requirement that everyone pay for the most essential goods and services, the overwhelming tendency is to help one another without expecting remuneration. Parents not only take care of their own children, they pay for the privilege. After a plane crashes in the wilderness or miners are trapped underground or a pair of buildings are destroyed in lower Manhattan, accounts inevitably emerge of the survivors’ camaraderie and generosity.

It would take one hell of a sociopath for a survivor of a shipping disaster to deny a share of his sunblock or his extra hat to his fellows in a lifeboat. Yet we routinely conform to psychosis that violates the communitarianism that is central to the lifestyle of our species. Almost every day, I walk by a woman sleeping outside my apartment building; sometimes I give her money but not always. Except for the cat, the extra bedroom in my apartment remains empty, neat, useless.

I have “earned” a living, you see. She has not.

It is cold. At night, it’s in the 30s.

I don’t know why she sleeps outside. Is she mentally ill? Lazy? Addicted to drugs? Maybe it’s bad luck. She worked in a field that’s no longer looking for workers. I do know she’s cold and hungry.

Capitalism gives me permission not to care. I justify my callousness by judging her choices, none of which I know anything about.

But this is only the beginning of the brief against capitalism. Capitalist society not only denies the concept of a human right to the most basic elements of survival, it creates necessities that no one ever needed or thought about before in order to commodify them and coerce us into feeding these new profit centers.

Were we to advance to the moral heights of our ancestors of previous millennia and constitutionally guarantee that everyone would be fed and housed regardless of their willingness or ability to earn a living as do Congo and Pakistan, it would be a revolutionary political and ethical development.

Yet billions of people would remain deprived of the new necessities of the modern age. Whereas hunter-gatherers spent every waking minute near everyone they knew and loved, we require pricey communications networks in order to keep in touch with our friends and families. Perhaps you are reading these words when they were published, over a Thanksgiving weekend when millions of Americans were driving and flying to visit relatives—spending billions of dollars on gas and airline tickets.

Higher education has become an essential need as well. Before the first settlement in Mesopotamia, people proved their suitability for mating by exhibiting skills like hunting, sewing and cooking. In America today, millions of men remain involuntarily single because women are more likely to have a college degree; they refuse to date “down” to a guy with a GED. A four-year degree at a private college can easily run a quarter million dollars.

Not only do you have to earn a living, what it takes to live has never been more complicated or out of reach.

The country is rich. Not everyone must work. There is plenty to go around. Those who work must share. Socialism and communism are political structures designed to distribute that sharing.

Please retire the expression “earn a living.”

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Democrats Share the Blame for Afghanistan

Arthur Cyr: Disaster in Afghanistan – what next?

           Joe Biden is taking heat from Democrats, not for his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan—that’s popular—but for his haphazard pullout that, self-serving Rumsfeldian stuff happens, wars end messily platitudes aside, could have been executed more efficiently. They blame George W. Bush for starting America’s longest war, arguing that what he began inexorably led to our most shocking military defeat and its humiliating aftermath.

            I am sympathetic to any and all criticism of our intervention in Afghanistan. I was an early critic of the war and got beaten up for my stance by media allies of the Bush administration. But the very same liberals who now pretend they’re against the Afghan disaster stood by when it mattered and did nothing to defend war critics because Democrats—political leaders and voters alike—went far beyond tacit consent. They were actively complicit with the Republicans’ war, at the time of the invasion and throughout the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan.

Now the deadbeat dads of defeat are trying to stick the GOP with sole paternity. This is a ridiculous attempt to rewrite history, one that damages Democratic credibility among the party’s progressive base, which includes many antiwar voters, and risks the possibility that they will make the same mistake again in the future.

            Twenty years later, it is difficult for some to believe that the United States responded to 9/11 by cultivating closer ties to the two countries with the greatest responsibility for the attacks, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and attacking a country that had nothing to do with it, Iraq and another one that had tenuous links, Afghanistan. Yet that’s what happened. And Democrats participated enthusiastically in the insanity.

The sweeping congressional authorization to use military force against Afghanistan and any other target chosen by the president (!) was introduced in the Senate three days after the attacks by Tom Daschle, the then-Democratic majority leader. Every Democratic senator supported destroying Afghanistan. So did every Democratic member of the House of Representatives except for one, Barbara Lee, who was roundly ridiculed as weak and naïve, received death threats and was denied leadership posts by her own party to punish her for refusing to play ball. The legal justification to attack the Taliban was a bipartisan affair.

            Democratic support for Bush’s war reflected popular sentiment: voters of both parties signed off on the Afghan war by wide margins. Even after weeks of bombing that featured numerous news stories about innocent Afghan civilians being killed willy-nilly, 88% of voters told Gallup that they still approved of the military action. Approval for the war peaked at 93% in 2002 and started to decline. Nevertheless, popular support still hovered around 70% throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, a number that included so many Democrats that then-Senator Barack Obama ran much of his successful primary and general election campaign on his now-obviously-moronic message that we “we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan” when Bush invaded Iraq. “Our real focus,” Obama continued to say after winning the presidency, “has to be on Afghanistan.”

            Nine months into his first term, Obama felt so confident that Democratic voters supported the war that he ordered his surge of tens of thousands of additional soldiers above the highest troop level in Afghanistan under the Bush administration. 55% of Democrats approved of the surge. Domestic support for the war only went underwater after the 2010 assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. troops in Pakistan seemed to render the project moot.

            There was a strong antiwar movement based on the left throughout the Bush and Obama years—against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched against the Iraq war. Opposition was sustained over the years. Far fewer people turned out for far fewer protests against the Afghanistan war. It’s impossible to avoid the obvious conclusion: even on the left, people were angry about Iraq but OK with Afghanistan.

            There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Republican Party and President George W. Bush for the decision to invade Afghanistan. The war was their idea. But they never could have started their disaster, much less extended and expanded it under Obama, without full-throated support from their Democratic partners and successors.

This story has few heroes.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

20 Years After 9/11, We’re Still Morons

USA No Forgetting 9-11 Flag - 9-11 Flag - We won't Forgetting Flag -  FlagsFlagpoles, Flags, Mounts, Lights, Motorcycle Accessories

           If crisis creates opportunity, we couldn’t possibly have squandered the possibilities presented by 9/11 more spectacularly. We certainly couldn’t have failed its tests more completely. Twenty years after 9/11, it is clear that the United States is ruled by idiots and that we, the people, are complicit with their moronic behavior.

            We had to do something. That was and remains the generic explanation for what we did in response to 9/11—invading Afghanistan and Iraq, directing the CIA to covertly overthrow the governments of Haiti, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and a bunch of other countries, lamely legalizing torture, kidnapping via extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo and other concentration camps, building a drone armada and sparking a drone arms race.

            Acting purely on speculation, news media was reporting as early as the afternoon of September 11 that Al Qaeda was responsible. That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney argued for invading Iraq. We began bombing Afghanistan October 7, less than a month later, without evidence that Afghanistan was guilty. A week later, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden; Bush refused. Before you act, you think. We didn’t.

            What should we have done—after giving it a good think?

            A smart people led by a good president would have had three priorities: bring the perpetrators to justice, punish any nation-states that were involved, and reduce the chances of future terrorist attacks.

            The 19 hijackers were suicides, but plotters like Al Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who lived in Pakistan, were not. Since we have an extradition treaty with Pakistan, we could have asked Pakistani authorities to arrest him and send him to face trial in the U.S. or at the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Instead, we kidnapped him to CIA “dark sites” including Gitmo and subjected him to waterboarding 266 times. Because of this and other torture, as well as his illegal detention in violation of habeas corpus, KSM can’t face trial in a real, i.e. civilian, court. Not only will 9/11 families never see justice carried out, we’ve managed to turn KSM into a victim, just as he wanted.

            The Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Pakistan’s CIA, financed and provided intelligence to Al Qaeda. Pakistan harbored bin Laden. Pakistan played host to hundreds of Al Qaeda training camps. Pakistanis I talked to after 9/11 were shocked that the U.S. didn’t attack their country, instead giving its Taliban-aligned dictator General Pervez Musharraf billions in military and financial aid.

            Evidence linking top Saudi Arabian officials to 9/11 has been scarce. But 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, several are reported to have met with mid-level Saudi intelligence agents before the attacks, and, most notably, Saudi Arabia exports its radical brand of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, all over the world. The Taliban and Al Qaeda initially recruited many of their members from Wahhabi madrassas financed by the Saudis in Pakistan and Central Asia.

            We should have treated 9/11 for what it was: a crime. Policemen, not soldiers, should have tracked down the perps. They should have been given lawyers, not torture. They should have faced fair trials. But if we had to go the military route, we should have invaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two countries responsible, not Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that had nothing to do with it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were and remain far more dangerous to their neighbors than Afghanistan or Iraq.

            Occupying Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of Islamic extremism and global terrorism, would have done a lot to reduce the threat of another 9/11. But the most effective way to make us less of a target is to make the rest of the world look upon us with favor. Some people will always hate us. That’s inevitable. Our goal should be to reduce their number to as close to zero as humanly possible.

            We can’t eliminate anti-Americanism by killing its adherents. We’ve been trying to do that for 20 years using drones and missile strikes; all we’ve accomplished is killing a lot of innocent people and making the rest of the world look at us with disgust and contempt. You kill anti-Americanism by treating people everywhere with respect and kindness. That includes those we suspect of doing us harm.

            Unfortunately for us and the world, we learned nothing from 9/11. Not even losing Afghanistan back to the Taliban in the most humiliating U.S. defeat since Vietnam, having nothing to show for 20 years of war, has taught us a thing. We’re still a hammer that sees everything as a nail, a blunt, stupid people whose idea of a plan is to keep indiscriminately bombing innocent civilians.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Abandon Afghanistan and Don’t Look Back

Uncertainty Surrounds US Pullout From Afghanistan | Voice of America - English

            Joe Biden deserves nothing but praise and support for his decision to honor America’s commitment, negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban, to finally withdraw from Afghanistan. After more than 20 years of wasted lives, endless property damage and squandering of billions of U.S. tax dollars that would have been better spent on just about anything else you could think of, it’s incredible that corporate media is still giving airtime to the idiots and warmongers who want to keep troops over there. “I have heard general after general, as you have, say, just give us a little more time,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz said July 4th.

It’s been two decades. There was no legal or moral justification for the war to begin with. They’ve had too much time as it is.

For those of us who have been closely connected to America’s longest war last week’s abandonment of Bagram airbase, the biggest U.S. facility in occupied Afghanistan, makes the long-promised withdrawal feel real.

And the hand-wringing over what comes next has built to a fever pitch. Will the Taliban come back? Will it be like 1997 all over again, with women subjugated and horribly oppressed? Will the Taliban kill the translators, fixers and other Afghans who worked for U.S. occupation forces? Will Afghanistan once again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks like 9/11?

Some of these questions are reasonable. Others couldn’t be less so, based as they are on assumptions fed by lies.

What’s important to remember is the motivation for sewing these doubts. The military industry and its pet media outlets want to change our minds about withdrawal or, if they fail to do so for now, to set the stage for ground troops to invade again in the near future.

Afghanistan will not “again” become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the United States or any other Western power because it was hardly one in the first place. In 2001 there were four Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan; there were 6,000 in Pakistan. On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The attacks were planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Most of the funding came from the royal family of Saudi Arabia, as did 15 of the 19 hijackers; none came from Afghanistan. It is true that the hijackers all trained in Afghanistan but that’s a distinction without a difference; they could just as easily have picked up the same education in Pakistan, where 99% of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and personnel had been situated.

There is good reason to worry about the immediate future after we leave. It is likely that the Taliban will quickly topple the militarily inferior and wildly unpopular U.S. puppet regime installed by the George W. Bush Administration. Neighboring countries are bracing for flows of Afghan refugees; hundreds of Afghan government soldiers have already fled to Tajikistan. Violence is inevitable: military casualties in the civil conflict, reprisals against political opponents and repressive acts against women and other targets of Muslim fundamentalists. But nothing can change the truth: Afghanistan is not a U.S. colony. It is a sovereign nation. As such, it has the right and duty of self-determination. The Afghan people must sort out amongst each other what kind of future they want to have.

In the event of a Rwanda-scale genocide, intervention could be justified in conjunction with an international force under the auspices of the U.N. At this writing, however, that seems unlikely. The Taliban are far more sophisticated, younger and modern than the regime that took over Kabul in 1996. So is the population that they seek to govern. Afghans are interconnected with the wider world and its culture via the Internet and cellular phones. They are Muslim extremists, but they are far more pragmatic than ISIS. Afghanistan under the Taliban will feel more like Pakistan than ISIS-held Syria. As is currently the case, rural areas will be more conservative—burqas, girls banned from schools, the occasional stoning—than the cities.

Certainly the United States has the moral obligation not to repeat its habit of discarding its local employees after withdrawal. We should offer green cards and economic support to our Afghan collaborators on an expedited basis rather than the shameful foot-dragging that has been reported. Otherwise the Taliban may execute them as traitors.

Be prepared, as Biden’s September 11, 2021 deadline for withdrawal of the last U.S. troops draws closer, for a rising chorus of voices calling for him to change his mind. Don’t abandon Afghanistan again, the war pigs will cry.

Don’t listen to their siren song of imperialism. The invasion was a mistake, the occupation was a mistake, and so was our propping up of our corrupt puppet regime. We never should have been there in the first place and it has taken 20 years too long to get out.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden: Seven Questions Americans Should Ask Now

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has unleashed a ferocious debunking of the official Obama Administration narrative, dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” of the 2011 assassination by Navy SEALS of Osama bin Laden. Everything you think you know about the killing of the Al Qaeda leader accused of ordering the 9/11 attacks, Hersh asserts, is total bullshit.

For its part, the White House is kind of sort of denying Hersh’s alternative history.

“The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” Hersh writes in the London Review of Books.

Here are the seven things Hersh’s piece makes one wonder about:

Osama Bin Laden Seymour Hersh allegationsOne: According to Hersh, the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency kept bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad between 2006 and 2011, kind of the way the Burmese junta did to hot dissident lady Aung San Suu Kyi. So when the SEALs came to kill him, it was less like bad-ass, well, SEALs, than shooting fish in a barrel. Anyway, they hid America’s most wanted man ever from us. Why are we paying the Pakistanis $1.6 billion a year? If we paid them $2.6 billion, would they be nicer to us?

Two: According to Hersh, careful intelligence gathering, torture, tracking that courier guy, none of that stuff led to bin Laden.

It was greed: ISI agent Amir Aziz walked into the U.S. embassy in Islamabad with evidence bin Laden was in ISI custody. “Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up,” Hersh says. He adds: “The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.” If you came into what we must assume is a significant share of $25 million — even if it’s just $5 million — wouldn’t you retire? Are all Pakistanis workaholics?

the killing of osama bin ladenThree: Hersh says there was no firefight, that bin Laden never resisted, much less got off a shot. “The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme,” he says.

What about when the assassinations are executed with drones? Does the Obama Administration pretend drone victims first have to point a gun at the drone before the Hellfire missiles are loosed?

Four: After the raid, the SEALs were ordered to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) so the public wouldn’t learn that the rubout was a cowardly act of, one might say terrorism. “On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private,” Hersh wrote.

But two SEALs did talk, including Matt Bissonnette, who wrote the book “No Easy Day” (which was actually a walk in the park for all involved, excepting UBL and his family). Is it a violation of your NDA if you squawk, but it’s a lie, and it’s the same lie as the government’s?

Five: “Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers.” Hersh says there was never a “trove of terrorist information” because bin Laden was a prisoner, no longer the tactical head of Al Qaeda.

If the tapes weren’t terror stuff, what were they? Where are the videos now? Note to Langley: if there’s a VHS version of the 1988 cult movie “Tapeheads” in the bin Laden trove, do get in touch — I’ve been looking for that one.

Six: Remember the Pakistani doctor, still in prison, accused of using his vaccination program as a ruse to collect UBL’s DNA? Hersh says he did nothing of the kind — that the CIA threw him under the bus to cover for Aziz. “A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole issue of how we got the DNA.’” What did Afridi do to get picked as a scapegoat? Is this what happens when you refuse to contribute to the Abbottabad Fraternal Order of Police fundraiser?

Seven: Hersh says “the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place… there had been ‘no burial at sea.’ added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials.’” There was also what Hersh terms “a complication”: “some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.”

Do terrorist body parts often rain from the sky in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Were any goatherds, or goats, bonked on the head by bin Laden bits?

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