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 May 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. More
