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this is from paknews.com
"Interrogating the dead Al-Qaida, or Are we Stupid?
Asim Mughal
There are shrill cries of success and sighs of relief surrounding a news report that is being hailed as the biggest catch so far: No.3 man, Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, of the dreaded Al Qaida is captured, alive! The biggest success in the global war against terrorism. This is certainly excellent news and both the Pakistani and the American authorities deserve congratulations.
Unfortunately, while the coalition is claiming success, there is a run for taking the credit. The American version of the news from likes of CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC hardly mentions the Pakistani role and makes it sound like Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was captured somewhere in Texas, not from Rawalpindi. The Pakistani version earlier claimed this to be a joint operation but now it is claimed to be 100% Pakistani operation (News Link Mar 3, 2003).
The contradictions do not stop here. Americans claim that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is in their custody and is now being interrogated for the second day. Whereas, the Pakistanis are saying that he has not been extradited to any country. Furthermre, it is being said that Sheikh Khalid will be extradited to Kuwait.
Now why Kuwait one asks? Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is being referred to as a citizen of anywhere from Kuwait, Pakistan, Yemen, up to holding 20 passports of different countries. What is his real nationality?
Now, about his role as the key planner of all past terrorism acts and all future acts. It is said that Khalid was the chief/key planner of 9/11 attacks? But wasn't that attributed to Osama Bin Laden? But wait! It was not too long ago that it was claimed that "key planner of the attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh" was arrested.
So, who is the real man?
A more troubling problem is that it was reported by both American and Pakistani authorities back in September 2002 that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was killed in a raid. The reason we remember him vividly was the way his death was dramatized. He was reported as writing words on a wall with his own blood as he was dying ( News Link Sept 15, 2002).
It was reported a few days after the report of a raid that Khalid's wife and children were in custody and being interrogated. ( News Link Sept 20, 2002)
So, maybe all this very confusing to an average buch of people like us, but perhaps someone can tell us who the real Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is? How can Sheikh Khalid Muhammad be in America, Pakistan and Kuwait at the same time? If he died in the gun battle on Sept 15, 2002 in Karachi, who has been raided and arrested on March 3, 2003?
We will all feel much safer when told the truth, rather than some raids and captures which do not add up, as it seems."
Well, this is a step beyond Orwell, no? Although I can't decide whether that's due to ineptitude in execution, or belliegerence in aims. I mean, in Orwellville, someone would just be *erased* out of existence, along with any documentation about them. i don't know if even the Ministry of Truth would be ambitious enough to try to pull a weekend-at-Bernie's stunt with Sheikh Khalid Muhammad--no, he is not dead! see, he is moving, waving, and preparing to pull a pin out of this live grenade! that's not rigor mortis! that's stiffness, it visual symbolizes his fanatical convictions! he is not a beer-chugging, swaggering, crotch-grabbing kinda corpse, we mean, dude! i mean, shit. is the entire American populace, en masse, completely diachronically challenged? how did we get to the point where mpre than half of Americans think that Saddam Husein was behind the WTC attacks considering that 4 days after said attacks, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "U.S. Officials Discount Any Role by Iraq in Terrorist Attacks: Secularist Saddam Hussein and Suspect bin Laden Have Divergent Goals." Why was everyone acting as if Bush learned about the WTC attacks at that moment in the Florida school, which was broadcast live over and over, when this was aired on Tues. Sept. 11th nightly news:
"ABC journalist John Cochran was traveling with the President. He reported on ABC TV on Tuesday morning:
"Peter, as you know, the president's down in Florida talking about education. He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida."
'ABC News' Special Report "
i mean, a definition of consciousness is to some degree contingent on an awareness of one's own consistency, something the American public seems to lack in a big way.
obviously--if Shrodinger's Khalid Muhammad is really the man resposible for the highjackings, then I *am* glad that he has been captured, and he should be tried for mass murder. But I just don't believe that it's necessarily really him, or that he is not a media construct to begin with. I am not being pomo about this--obviously there were persons responsible for the hijackings and the attacks, but the identity of this conveniently captured man, right as the US is about to bully its way into a war with Iraq, the world community be damned, all the while incurring criticism for failing to get Osama, after that whole big "dead or alive" bravado, falls at some unknown place on a spectrum between "a real terrorist big-shot who supervised the 9-11 attack" and "some random dude" both in terms of his actual physical identity and in terms of his relevance on the Al-Qaeida ladder of hierarchy. I mean, substitute "identity" for "momentum" and you've got a terrorism-specific version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. If you know for sure who the bad guys are, who the fuck knows where they are? If you know where they are with enough certainty to do a media-illuminated capture, well, in the context of our Benjaminian "state of emergency," the "who?" of the conveniently caught is more problematic. Especially when they are caught months after they supposedly die a highly dramatic death, scribbling on the wall in blood (by this point that is SUCH a stock cliche from the vaults of the public imaginary, by the way, that even Foucault would be bored by it! Writing in feces as Geoffrey Rush playing De Sade did in "Quilts" was far more interesting). Incidentally, I really believe that the only reason they have not made a big public capture of an Osama doppelganger (hired or coerced) is because they are afraid of a tape that would end up on Al-Jazeera immiediately afterward. So anyway, my point was, I guess, really obvious and unoriginal: the orwellian nature of the baseline discourse makes it impossible to approach any dispatch from above with trust or certainty, regardless of how true or false the story happens to be, because there is no criteria anymore to differentiate the two from each other. It's like the gov't/press coalition has Munchhausen syndrome (you know, the one Eminem's mom had) where they keep telling us that we are sick and need to be taken care of (duct tape all the windows, dress for the weather (i.e. no "Give Peace A Chance" T-shirts in an upstate mall), try not to talk so much or so loudly, take two aspirins and call the FBI in the morning, cuz there are some brown people in your building--and while you are at it, don't forget to register your Middle East Studies professor at campuswatch.org). Except the meta-disease that they keep telling us we have is stupidity, and because we believe it, we do have it.
"Interrogating the dead Al-Qaida, or Are we Stupid?
Asim Mughal
There are shrill cries of success and sighs of relief surrounding a news report that is being hailed as the biggest catch so far: No.3 man, Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, of the dreaded Al Qaida is captured, alive! The biggest success in the global war against terrorism. This is certainly excellent news and both the Pakistani and the American authorities deserve congratulations.
Unfortunately, while the coalition is claiming success, there is a run for taking the credit. The American version of the news from likes of CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC hardly mentions the Pakistani role and makes it sound like Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was captured somewhere in Texas, not from Rawalpindi. The Pakistani version earlier claimed this to be a joint operation but now it is claimed to be 100% Pakistani operation (News Link Mar 3, 2003).
The contradictions do not stop here. Americans claim that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is in their custody and is now being interrogated for the second day. Whereas, the Pakistanis are saying that he has not been extradited to any country. Furthermre, it is being said that Sheikh Khalid will be extradited to Kuwait.
Now why Kuwait one asks? Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is being referred to as a citizen of anywhere from Kuwait, Pakistan, Yemen, up to holding 20 passports of different countries. What is his real nationality?
Now, about his role as the key planner of all past terrorism acts and all future acts. It is said that Khalid was the chief/key planner of 9/11 attacks? But wasn't that attributed to Osama Bin Laden? But wait! It was not too long ago that it was claimed that "key planner of the attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh" was arrested.
So, who is the real man?
A more troubling problem is that it was reported by both American and Pakistani authorities back in September 2002 that Sheikh Khalid Muhammad was killed in a raid. The reason we remember him vividly was the way his death was dramatized. He was reported as writing words on a wall with his own blood as he was dying ( News Link Sept 15, 2002).
It was reported a few days after the report of a raid that Khalid's wife and children were in custody and being interrogated. ( News Link Sept 20, 2002)
So, maybe all this very confusing to an average buch of people like us, but perhaps someone can tell us who the real Sheikh Khalid Muhammad is? How can Sheikh Khalid Muhammad be in America, Pakistan and Kuwait at the same time? If he died in the gun battle on Sept 15, 2002 in Karachi, who has been raided and arrested on March 3, 2003?
We will all feel much safer when told the truth, rather than some raids and captures which do not add up, as it seems."
Well, this is a step beyond Orwell, no? Although I can't decide whether that's due to ineptitude in execution, or belliegerence in aims. I mean, in Orwellville, someone would just be *erased* out of existence, along with any documentation about them. i don't know if even the Ministry of Truth would be ambitious enough to try to pull a weekend-at-Bernie's stunt with Sheikh Khalid Muhammad--no, he is not dead! see, he is moving, waving, and preparing to pull a pin out of this live grenade! that's not rigor mortis! that's stiffness, it visual symbolizes his fanatical convictions! he is not a beer-chugging, swaggering, crotch-grabbing kinda corpse, we mean, dude! i mean, shit. is the entire American populace, en masse, completely diachronically challenged? how did we get to the point where mpre than half of Americans think that Saddam Husein was behind the WTC attacks considering that 4 days after said attacks, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "U.S. Officials Discount Any Role by Iraq in Terrorist Attacks: Secularist Saddam Hussein and Suspect bin Laden Have Divergent Goals." Why was everyone acting as if Bush learned about the WTC attacks at that moment in the Florida school, which was broadcast live over and over, when this was aired on Tues. Sept. 11th nightly news:
"ABC journalist John Cochran was traveling with the President. He reported on ABC TV on Tuesday morning:
"Peter, as you know, the president's down in Florida talking about education. He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida."
'ABC News' Special Report "
i mean, a definition of consciousness is to some degree contingent on an awareness of one's own consistency, something the American public seems to lack in a big way.
obviously--if Shrodinger's Khalid Muhammad is really the man resposible for the highjackings, then I *am* glad that he has been captured, and he should be tried for mass murder. But I just don't believe that it's necessarily really him, or that he is not a media construct to begin with. I am not being pomo about this--obviously there were persons responsible for the hijackings and the attacks, but the identity of this conveniently captured man, right as the US is about to bully its way into a war with Iraq, the world community be damned, all the while incurring criticism for failing to get Osama, after that whole big "dead or alive" bravado, falls at some unknown place on a spectrum between "a real terrorist big-shot who supervised the 9-11 attack" and "some random dude" both in terms of his actual physical identity and in terms of his relevance on the Al-Qaeida ladder of hierarchy. I mean, substitute "identity" for "momentum" and you've got a terrorism-specific version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. If you know for sure who the bad guys are, who the fuck knows where they are? If you know where they are with enough certainty to do a media-illuminated capture, well, in the context of our Benjaminian "state of emergency," the "who?" of the conveniently caught is more problematic. Especially when they are caught months after they supposedly die a highly dramatic death, scribbling on the wall in blood (by this point that is SUCH a stock cliche from the vaults of the public imaginary, by the way, that even Foucault would be bored by it! Writing in feces as Geoffrey Rush playing De Sade did in "Quilts" was far more interesting). Incidentally, I really believe that the only reason they have not made a big public capture of an Osama doppelganger (hired or coerced) is because they are afraid of a tape that would end up on Al-Jazeera immiediately afterward. So anyway, my point was, I guess, really obvious and unoriginal: the orwellian nature of the baseline discourse makes it impossible to approach any dispatch from above with trust or certainty, regardless of how true or false the story happens to be, because there is no criteria anymore to differentiate the two from each other. It's like the gov't/press coalition has Munchhausen syndrome (you know, the one Eminem's mom had) where they keep telling us that we are sick and need to be taken care of (duct tape all the windows, dress for the weather (i.e. no "Give Peace A Chance" T-shirts in an upstate mall), try not to talk so much or so loudly, take two aspirins and call the FBI in the morning, cuz there are some brown people in your building--and while you are at it, don't forget to register your Middle East Studies professor at campuswatch.org). Except the meta-disease that they keep telling us we have is stupidity, and because we believe it, we do have it.
