May 2, 2011

Bury the body on Diego Garcia

The rumor is that the U.S. government will bury Osama bin Laden's body at sea to prevent it from becoming a shrine for terrorists (kind of like how Stalin had Hitler's body burned, then had the ashes mixed into concrete).

One word of advice: Don't.

Nobody will believe the story.

Bury the body on Diego Garcia, the U.S. base in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

P.S. Oh, well ... They didn't listen to me.

What's the deal here, anyways?

If it was all a fake, why fake it in the heart of the most sophisticated town in Pakistan, with people with Twitter accounts around? Why cause a massive diplomatic crisis by implying that the Pakistani inner circle was hiding bin Laden? Why not stage a fake somewhere up in the mountains?

If it's for real, why bury the body at sea when Diego Garcia is completely owned by the U.S. military? Then, if too many questions get asked, the U.S. could produce the body at a later time.

32 comments:

  1. Too late:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-is-killed.html?hp

    But does it matter? Photos will have been taken by now.

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  2. How about dressed in a floral print skirt and petticoat hiked up to the waist with his hind end pointing toward Mecca?

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  3. News stories are already stating as fact that the US buried Osama bin Laden's body at sea on the lame excuse of "Muslim burial customs" (I'm pretty sure most Muslims would not object to waiting for more than 24 hours to ensure a body was buried in the earth, and not at sea) and the alleged "fact" that no country would accept the body (did they ask?), when, as you mention, Diego Garcia is nearby and under US control.

    At this point, photos of the dead body won't matter. Photos can be faked. Lacking an actual body to examine, disposed of under rushed and hushed circumstances, fairly screams out conspiracy and SOMETHING TO HIDE. No one will believe that they dumped the body at sea "out of respect for Muslim burial customs" when we have not shown much respect for Muslim traditions before, and certainly not when those traditions interfere with USG propaganda. A dead Osama corpse on public display is good USG propaganda; a mysteriously vanished corpse is not. I don't have a clue what is really going on here, but I doubt that it has gone down exactly as we are being told.

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  4. Yeah don't Muslims take burial conditions pretty seriously? Bent over, dressed like a girl, smeared in pig's blood, a Koran sandwiched between his naked buttocks, encased in glass and put on public display might be the way to go.

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  5. I don't believe we buried him at sea out of respect for Islam. There's got to be more to it than that.

    Bin Laden has severe kidney problems and probably received dialysis treament from the Pakistani government. Maybe we were worried that if we gave his body to a third part, someone would autopsy the guy and find out that he'd been getting dialysis - and then the fingers of blame would start pointing to Pakistan. Disposing of Osama Bin Laden at sea prevents the autopsy. That's my guess.

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  6. Muslim burials customs require the body to be interred in earth. Burial at sea is anathema.
    But that's beside the point isn't it. Saddam family is happily buried in Iraq. They do so when they actually have the body. The juniors were embalmed and paraded on TV. They didn't care about Islamic burial customs, then. When they had the body, fair and square, that is.

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  7. Burying the body at sea. LOL. Yeah, that's not suspicious. They're getting rid of bin Laden's alleged corpse faster than they shipped the steel from the twin towers to China to be scrapped. Let's not even consider the possibility that all those "conspiracy kooks" who've been saying that he's been dead for a long time might be on to something.

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  8. Disposing the body so quickly will inevitably lead to widespread suspicion that there was something to hide. After all these years what's the rush? The body could have been viewed by a panel of physicians of reputable standing from a variety of countries beforehand.
    There's just too many loose ends in this entire saga for anyone not to feel that the whole story has never been fully revealed.

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  9. As I seem to recall, Bin Laden had a large contingent of really convincing body doubles traveling around Afghanistan at the time of 9/11/01. They were given armed escorts and heavily fortified compounds to live in. It's amateurish for the Obama White House to be dancing a jig at the goal post at this time.

    And all may not be as it seems. It could be that this "hit" was engineered in collusion with the ISI and the corpse of the putative Bin Laden quickly dumped in the ocean when it was discovered to be one of the body doubles. Or this whole operation could be a reelection ploy, perhaps giving Obama the cover to pull out of Afghanistan. The Obama Administration is highly secretive and corrupt. Who would put it past them? They only have to keep things bottled up until Nov '12.

    Let the stonewalling begin.

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  10. It's the same thing as the long form birth certificate. We'll have to be satisfied with an easily forged pdf.

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  11. I personally would have found it very satisfying if they had followed Half Sigma's suggestion that they bury Osama's corpse in a pig skin to deny him paradise.

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  12. Harry Baldwin5/2/11, 6:19 AM

    We buried him at sea so we could say, "Osama sleeps with the fishes."

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  13. Muslim burial customs apparently had an impact on the infighting over who would be Caliph after Mohammed died. The story is that Ali missed out because he wanted to make sure Mohammed was properly buried (under the bed of one of his wives!) and so couldn't attend the convention that selected the Caliph.

    Yes, the funeral and internment happens quickly, compared to other religions, but not that quickly, and it doesn't involve burial at sea.

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  14. Perhaps the burial was a promise made to whoever gave us the intel on OBL's location.

    Abbottabad looks to be ~200 clicks inside the Pakistani border, and maybe 250 from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. I wonder how we got our helicopters that far inside Pakistani airspace without them knowing and/or caring.

    As for dialysis, surely that can be done at a home, if you have enough money, no?

    It's certainly a national security win for Obama. I *hope* it provides the excuse to get us the hell out of Afghanistan. If it was faked for that reason then even I might consider voting for Obama.

    But anyhoo, what sort of genius builds a massive compound with 18 foot walls but doesn't bother to dig an escape tunnel or a panic room or something? Hell, *I* want one of those and I don't even have a $25 million price on my head.

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  15. Diego Garcia is British Overseas Territory - the sovereign soil of Her Majesty. It has around 50 British officials stationed on it. Taking bin Laden's corpse to the island would have necessitated the involvement of British customs officials and compliance with English law regarding the transportation and burial of the deceased (possibly even requiring an inquest by an English coroner).

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  16. Should have buried him in Costellobad.

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  17. 1 day later, i'm now starting to have doubts about this being true, too. quickly buried at sea. what? and how much evidence has the US government given us? can people link me up to any?

    i believe this is possible but again, like the birth certificate release, it's kind of fishy. the timing, and the "blink and you missed it" press conference where they announce he's dead, he's already buried, and oh yeah, we're going to provide very little evidence of any of this.

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  18. "Diego Garcia is British Overseas Territory - the sovereign soil of Her Majesty. It has around 50 British officials stationed on it. Taking bin Laden's corpse to the island would have necessitated the involvement of British customs officials and compliance with English law regarding the transportation and burial of the deceased (possibly even requiring an inquest by an English coroner)."

    I highly doubt it. British officials have little real say in the daily goings on in a US military base. Also the British kicked the native inhabitants off of the island of Diego Garcia precisely so that the US could have a no-outside interference, no civil population, low profile, hush-hush military base. The British government isn't too inquisitive about what goes on there (see: rendition flights).

    And it's not like they couldn't have just kept the plane in the air with air-to-air-refueling and sent the body to Gitmo, if they wanted to, or if Diego Garcia were problematic. Point being: British or no British, a burial in a remote US military base like Diego Garcia or Gitmo removes the "threat" of the burial site becoming a jihadist pilgrimage site.

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  19. Buried at sea, eh? Reminds me of something from William S. Burroughs:

    ‎'Order in the Court!'

    D.A.: 'Gentlemen of the jury, these 'learned gentlemen' claim that the innocent human creature they have so wantonly slain suddenly turned himself into a huge black centipede and it was 'their duty to the human race' to destroy this monster before it could, by any means at its disposal, perpetrate its kind...

    'Are we to gulp down this tissue of horse shit? Are we to take these glib lies like a greased and nameless asshole? Where is this wondrous centipede?

    ''We have destroyed it,' they say smugly...

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  20. So the remains of Osama are eventually to be caught in some fisherman`s nets :) But what he is still ALIVE and enjoying water boarding as we speak???

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  21. Bring me the head of Diego Garcia .. or feed it to a pack of purple-assed mandrills.

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  22. The Brits had a perfectly good way of preventing a shrine to an executed terrorist. But if my memory serves the Brits were less sensitive to the religious needs, back in the days when James Abbott restored to the Muslim population of Hazara the religious freedoms which were suppressed under Sikh rule.

    The 1853 assassin of Colonel Frederick Mackeson in Peshawar was hanged before being sewn into a pigskin ('most abhorrent to Muhammedans' said John Lawrence, who gave the order) and cremated in the Hindu fashion before the ashes were thrown in a river.

    (info from Charles Allen's brilliant 'Soldier Sahibs' - a must-read book since 9/11)

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  23. After we killed Saddam Hussein's sons in 2003, it took us 11 days to bury the bodies. The Hussein boys are Muslims, but we get 11 days to bury the bodies. For Bin Laden, however, we claimed we needed an immediate burial at sea because of respect for Islam. Why the two standards? What's do different about Bin Laden and the Husseins?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/world/after-war-uday-qusay-funeral-for-hussein-sons-call-for-death-america.html?ref=udayhussein

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  24. I know this isn't a very liberal blog, but one should at least be aware that there is a moral case against the disposession of the Chagos Islanders by the powers that be.

    Thought experiment: compare your political positions on eminent domain in the US Supreme Court's Kelo case and the expulsion of the Chagossians.

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/may/28/a-black-and-disgraceful-site/

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  25. I keep thinking of the beginning of "You Only Live Twice" when James Bond is apparently buried at sea, only to have the casket revealed as an undersea lifeboat so Bond can take on a new identity...

    Will bin Laden's rhinoplasty be more effective than Sean Connery's brow lift?

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  26. Gc's right. Let's not be defeatist.

    1) 1st possibility: Bin Laden alive, being tortured into betraying all the guys who helped him, so we can kill them. Win!

    2) 2nd possibility: Bin Laden dead, but we dumped his body untraceably, so, darn, no one can prove he isn't being tortured into betraying his buds. Win!

    3) 3rd possibility. We got rid of a minor health hazard without bothering to dishonor the bitch. No win, no loss.

    Two out of three are wins, the third no loss. I don't count the possibility that keeping the meat around for 'independent' sources to check and be satisfied that their various conspiracy theories are false would work, because that's just crazy talk. Conspiracy theorists admitting they've been proved wrong by evidence? Did UFOs just check your oil or something?

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  27. Freakin A, this sounds like a Peckinpah film.

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  28. Diego Garcia is actually British territory. They allow the US to use the base there, jointly with the UK. They've agreed to cede Diego Garcia to Mauritius when it's no longer needed for defense purposes (around the time Hell freezes over.)

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  29. afternoon delight5/3/11, 12:21 PM

    People believe this government-sanctioned murder? Coming at a time when this administration wants desperately some trump card? Bin Laden! The Boogeyman is dead! Americans are such kids.

    That CIA creation has been "killed" so many times (by heresay) over the past 10 years, that I thought this was a broadcast of the famous BBC production called, "We Thought You Were Dead."

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  30. "Anonymous said...

    Freakin A, this sounds like a Peckinpah film."

    I read your comment three times before it sunk in. Now I get it. It does, too.

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  31. If Bin Laden's body had been buried on the Arabian peninsula, the chances of the grave turning into a shrine would be close to zero. Wahabism strongly prohibits that sort of thing, to the extent that Saudi kings are buried in unmarked graves. Something doesn't add up.

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