The US Is Editing 'The Killing of Osama' Filmby
Jack D. Douglas
The first U.S. edited version of "The Killing Of Osama" made it look like one Seal found Osama and his wife in their third floor bedroom, the surprised and unarmed Osama used her as a shield so the Seal shot her first and then him. It did not seem to occur to them that this made the Seal both a coward – or a terrified incompetent – and a war criminal. By the second day they had edited this scene to have the wife rushing at the Seal, presumably scaring him witless, so he shot her and then shot the unarmed old Osama who was either sitting around or standing around doing nothing but, presumably, looking dumb. This still left the Seal a coward and war criminal, so on the third day they started editing it to have Osama sitting next to a pistolo and an AK-47 which he apparently was too witless, too scared, or too incompetent to use to defend his wife and himself. This still left the Seal a coward and a war criminal, so they started whispering the Seal thought Osama was wearing a suicide vest, in spite of that being a bit bulky and uncomfortable under his nighty. Maybe this will get the Seal off the hook for cowardice, war crimes and frightful incompetence. But it will still get panned by the film critics once they start remembering that Osama was a great warrior leader in Afghanistan fighting the whole vast Red Army and their continual helicopter attacks, working underground with the CIA and their Pakistani intelligence allies, and a master at hiding and escaping from vast armies encircling him and declaring him "A Dead Man," as in the wild mountains of Tora Bora. They have to do some more editing on that final scene, since the credibility of the whole movie depends on it. They'll also have to do some big editing of the scene on the carrier giving Osama a Muslim burial in the sea "in accord with Muslim laws and traditions," which has been totally panned by the Muslim review scholars as "pure schmaltz." Even the Democratic law professor representing the Party at Harvard Law, Alan Dershowitz, joined us secular critics in an op-ed in The Wall St. Journal today in arguing that, if they really wanted to show the world what happened on the set at Abbatobad and that the Seals really murdered [oops, sorry, "bravely took out"] Osama and not some unarmed, innocent Pakistani retiree, they would have had a full scale, normal, SOP police forensic investigation of the body and the scene, just like in all normal movies about real police work. The way Obama tells it the U.S. looks like some two-bit hit man from Jersey dumping the mutilated body of a deadbeat on some coke deal into the water off Staten island.
Frankly, I think even Hitler's film propagandist – Riefensthal – would not be able to touch up this botched script and film well enough to sell it to any competent person over thirteen. Sure, they can get away with it in the short run. JFK and LBJ got away with all kinds of filmatic Big Lies about Vietnam in the short run. LBJ even got away with the Warren Commission absurdities in the official investigation of JFK's murder and the Tonkin Gulf blooper in the short run, but the intelligent public finally caught up with them (though many do not yet even know what the Tonkin Gulf scene LBJ proclaimed but did not actually shoot was about). Bush 2 got away with the Vast Lies about Iraqi WMD's in the short run, but he is now a joke. Of course, even the full-scale, secret Navy forensic examination of JFK's body left some historical zingers flapping around, which have encouraged a lot of people to look deeper into the whole murder mystery and its resolution proposed by the Warren Commission. Obama's Mafioso version of dumping the victim's body into the sea immediately will raise a lot more serious questions than I or Dershowitz have raised so far, once intelligent people get thinking about it. People are already starting to whisper, "Hey, if Osama's wife is really still alive, why not get her critical review of the White House's latest version?" Once the commander of the Navy carrier planes scrambled in the Tonkin Gulf was able to break lose from the total stand-down-and-shut-up ordered by the brass he said there were no North Vietnamese ships and that blew up LBJ's film. If some other brave Seal does not accidentally shoot her in her bed in the hospital, the testimony of "the wife of Osama" or whoever she says she is might blow up Obama's film. If Obama is not careful, this movie they keep editing in full public view will make him a total joke very quickly and his box office receipts will plunge. Or people will see it as so bungled that it becomes a "cult film" spoofing neo-John Wayne Hero fliks and make a bundle by making people laugh. May 6, 2011 Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State. Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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