Has any single human being, either directly or indirectly, cost the United States more money than Osama bin Laden? Even a very partial, very haphazard, tallying of the costs from 9/11 reaches swiftly into the trillions of dollars. … Has any single individual even come close to costing America that much? Adolph Hitler is probably one of the few candidates

That reminds me of this link I posted in 2005, pointing out the cost of the Iraq War was in the region of $1.25 trillion.  Professor Keith Hartley suggested that it would have been cheaper and quicker to have paid Saddam Hussein and his family a few billion dollars to go into exile.

However cheap (relatively speaking) such a deal would be, we know it would never be workable.  Revolutions and regime change stem from the terrible treatment of citizens by their Government and Leader.  These injustices can never be considered ‘corrected’ if the wrong-doers swan off into luxurious exile.  Our sense of what is morally right – that tyrants and genocidaires should be brought to justice (or at least killed) – trumps pragmatic considerations.  We have an inate belief that this approach is worth the continued sacrifice of our soliders, and the chaos and cost in the world economies.  Breaking this understanding, via the sterile calculations of a Cost-Benefit analysis or Return on Investment figures, would ultimately lead to bigger wars.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011

This week, much has been made of the fascinating photograph published by the White House, showing President Obama surrounded by his national security team as they followed the Bin Laden killing, as it happened. The newspapers I’ve read have all carried a knowing analysis of the image, explaining the telling body language and identifying each of the onlookers. Some of the less prominent figures, such as the Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason, suffered the indignity of being unrecognised by the press.

The photo has already been labelled iconic, which I think is an overused word in this era of highly accomplished photojournalism, but it may yet become the most popular photo of Obama’s Presidency (it is one of the most popular photos on Flickr ever). If It does, this will be no accident. The image is as masterful a piece of propaganda as you are ever likely to see.  And, we’ve been here before.

The White House Flickr stream is touted as an emblem of open government. Photographer Peter Souza seems to have a free reign to wander around the Oval office and even the high-security Situation Rooms, with impunity. It conveys a message that there is nothing to hide.

The image in question is particularly good because it seems to portray a very long moment. If Souza had been filming the scene we imagine that it would not have looked very different from the still photograph… apart from some blinking. The uncritical analysis of the image in the press completely accepts this idea. The behaviour of the President during this operation (and indeed all those with a political interest in appearing strong, such as Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, and recently embattled Defence Secretary Robert Gates) has been defined by this image. When voters are asked “is Obama a strong leader?” (a hardy perennial in the opinion polls), this is the image they will remember when they agree.

However, a quick look at the photo’s attributes can remind us how manipulated this image actually is. For example, the file name for the image – which is assigned to it automatically by the camera – is P050111PS-0210. The file names of the images published either side of this one in the Flickr photo stream have the suffix 0106 and 0475, which means that Souza took 368 other photos around the same time, which he and the White House communications team chose not to publish. This is standard practice amongst all photojournalists – for every good photo, there are scores that are discarded because they do not quite capture the story you wish to convey. In this case, I’ll bet there are versions of this image that are under-exposed, or have Obama blinking, or of Joe Biden looking gormless, or with Robert Gates picking his nose, or Hillary Clinton with a double chin. Moreover, there will be others where Biden and Gates, on the extreme left and right of the image, are out of shot, which would be unacceptable.

Interestingly, there is a figure in a black jacket, standing next to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who is out of shot. This man stands with his arms folded (very Alpha Male) and he has a prime position behind Clinton and Gates. He must be as least as important as Tomason and Anthony Blinken (advisor to Joe Biden), both of whom have to peek over the shoulder of Bill Daley, just to get a look-in. I am not suggesting that this is some shadowy figure at the heart of a conspiracy – he might be some lesser aide or bodyguard. I just draw attention to him in order to point out how our gaze and opinions can be so easily directed. “If there aren’t photos then it didn’t happen” is an old newsroom adage. Add to that “If you’re not in the photo, then you weren’t there.”

Don’t get me wrong – I like President Obama, and I share his overall political outlook. One can hardly complain that he and his team choose to present themselves to the world in the best possible light. This is the essence of electoral politics, in fact. However, it is the job of the media to cast a critical eye over the images released to us by governments. The fact that Souza’s photo has been so swiftly elevated to ‘iconic’ status suggests to me that media due-diligence has not been performed in this case, which should be a cause for worry. Body language analyses and ‘who’s who’ type photo articles constitute fluffy, filler journalism. They are appropriate for Royal Wedding coverage, but not for matters of major geopolitical significance.

Crowds assemble to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, 1st May 2011. Photo by thisisbossi on Flickr.

Micah in Kansas City is uneasy about the celebrations surrounding the killing of Osama Bin Laden:

The backlash of ignorant commentary and opinion about the death of Bin Laden on Twitter tonight was disheartening, and I’m so very glad I deleted my Facebook so I didn’t have to gaze upon the even more ignorant statuses of “patriots” glad about the death of another human being.

For me, it was impossible not to make the mental link between the celebrations in America, and the recent flag-waving down on The Mall.  Both events have been obvious moments of unity for the respective countries.  Both events mark symbolic endings to a particular period of national history.  In the British case, the confusion of Princess Diana’s marriage, the sorrow of her death, and perhaps the end of a particular type of monarchy.  In the American case, it is the ending of something much more significant (what Emily Maitliss on the BBC just called a “psychological watershed”), a decade of fear, insularity and a sense of revenge not yet wrought.

Moreover, the Royal Wedding and Osama’s death both signal much more optimistic new chapters.  A pared down, modern and middle-class Monarchy for us.  And for the Americans, a reassertion of their primacy in matters military.

I wonder whether these events can sustain this symbolism.  Wills and Kate are but two individuals getting hitched in a country that has massive economic problems and not a few social and cultural challenges ahead of it.  And in the American case, the death of a figurehead will not in itself stop the Al Q’aeda threat, nor reverse its economic decline relative to the Asian super-powers.  Time will tell whether these outpourings of national confidence, on both sides of ‘the pond’, mark a new period of success or a patriotic dead-cat bounce.

Regardless of the final significance, Micah’s post highlights an crucial difference between the two groups of cheering crowds: On The Mall in London, the flag-wavers were celebrating life;  On The Mall in Washington, they were cheering a death.  I wonder how this essential difference between these two moments of patriotic punctuation will affect the two nations in years to come?

This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.

That was spoken by John Green, the father of Christina Green, 9-year-old girl killed at the shootings on Saturday.  His statement eloquently explains the tough trade-off between liberty and security.  He acknowledges the limits of Government, and that ackowledges that horrible things will happen in a free society, and explicitly says that this is a preferable state of affairs.  It is a difficult case to make at the best of times (I have tried on a few occasions, regarding cannabis, ID cards, and other civil liberties). For Mr Green to say it at the depth of his grief is truly courageous.

Compare this to Nick Clegg and David Cameron, who seem to want to have it both ways.  If you want to argue for more civil liberties, I think you must acknowledge that the mythological state of absolute security does not exist, that there can be negative consequences to liberty… and that we should all be comfortable with that.

Update

When I read this quote I instinctively assumed it was referring to the idea of liberty in general, and did not think too much about the particular tyoe of liberty that Green was advocating. However, a colleague points out that he can only be referring to gun-control (or lack thereof in the American system). And as many others have been arguing these past few days, liberty and the unfettered ‘right to bear arms’ do not necessarily go hand in hand.  Indeed, surely the whole point of consituting a state is to get away from all that! So it is worth adding a line here to emphasise that I do not share Mr Green’s views on gun control, and am relieved that we do not have that sort of ‘liberty’ here in the UK.  There’s no point in whitewashing my original post though – I think it best to leave my excesses and embarrasments for all to read.

Having said that, I think my central point remains.  Mr Green acknowledges that his ideology has negative aspects, and he embraces them anyway.

Governor of the Punjab Salmaan Taseer visits Aasia Bibi, Christian woman condemned to death under the Blasphemy Law. (Creative Commons Licenced photo from salmaantaseer on Flickr)

A depressing story to kick-off the New Year: The governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, Salman Taseer, has been assasinated. The perpetrator cited Taseer’s support for the repeal of Pakistan’s blasphemy law as the motive for the murder.

Human Rights campaigners often spend their time lobbying for the formal abolition of laws.  For example, at the end of 2009 I was involved in a free speech campaign to repeal the archaic law of seditious libel.  Some argued that there was little point in wasting time abolishing laws that have fallen into disuse.  They are de facto abolished anyway:  Couldn’t parliamentary time be better spent?

Certainly not.  There is always the chance that the law might be used by some future, illiberal government.  And in the case of blasphemy in Pakistan, we see how an oppressive law (for that is what the offence of blasphemy is, and must always be) can be used as an excuse for violence.  Supporters of Mr Taseer’s killer now cite the existence of these little-used as their excuse for righteous murder.  You don’t actually need to charge someone under a particular law, for that law to have a horrible chilling effect.

Blasphemy or religious defamation are essentially insults against a person or group of persons on the basis of one’s religious, or it could be another form of group defamation, where one is attacking or insulting members of a particular race or a particular nationality.  But it doesn’t have the effect of inspiring the supports of the speaker to engage in violence; rather it is the opponents of the speaker who might engage in violence.  So hate speech incites; blasphemy and religious defamation provoke.

That seems to me very important.  I think there limited circumstances in which it may be appropriate to punish those who engage in hate speech.  I think there are virtually no circumstances where it is appropriate to punish those who engage in in blasphemy or religious defamation, that is the circumstances in which they have provoked others to attack them.

An interesting retort to this, was to ask whether King Henry V was engaging in incitement to violence when he gives his famous, rousing speech?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

My only response was to suggest that, yes, the French would probably consider Henry’s speech an ‘incitement to violence’ and worthy of censorship, if only they could!  But in practice, such political speech is usually seen as exempt when matters of war and national survival are at stake.  Governments and their populations are usually comfortable with placing extra restrictions on our human rights during times of crisis.

However, there are times when this special exemption might not be as clear cut as we think.  Who, on 14th September 2001, objected to President George W. Bush giving a memorial speech for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre just three days earlier?  Yet it was in that speech that he first used the phrase ‘War on Terror’, a formulation that has become hugely problematic and inciting.  The following week, when America was still reeling from the shock and in need of rousing leadership, the word ‘crusade’ slipped into the President’s remarks, which not only provoked the Islamic world, but certainly had the effect of inciting certain elements of American society to violent, disproportionate action.  The last film I went to see, My Name is Khan, deals with the aftermath of such words.

During the Q&A session, I ask him if he thinks there are any genuine terrorists at the camp. He says there were probably about two or three to begin with. Now there are probably about fourteen, he thinks. The rest have very tenuous evidence against them. Even if some had fought for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in 2001/02, that does not mean they were Al Qaeda operatives, or that they were a genuine threat to western interests.

Now, while I am sure that Stafford-Smith’s claim is based on hard legal analysis, it nevertheless has an anecdotal air when he tells it.  As a long-time activist against the death penalty, and therefore a regular critic of the US Government, it is easy for politicians to pigeon-hole his complaints.  In the cynical merry-go-round of political debate, it is easy to dismiss such claims as the exaggerations of someone trying to win the argument.  A dismissal of the well he would say that wouldn’t he? variety that is tricky to argue against, without sufficent airtime and column inches.

Well, here is some more evidence to back-up Stafford-Smith’s claim.  British journalist Andy Worthington has been compiling The Guantanamo Files, a list of all 779 men who were incarcerated at the prison:

… at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism

And the British Government – a Labour Government, ostensibly on the side of the poor and marginalised around the world – provided succour and support to the Bush Administration as this prison was established and maintained.

The terror suspect who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane is the son of a Nigerian banker who alerted US authorities to his “extreme religious views” months ago, it was reported Saturday.

(Via Andrew Sullivan, who says he is ‘angry‘).

I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s point at the Convention on Modern Liberty last year, about the problem of collecting too much information:

We’ve been told that we’re collecting larger haystacks of information in the hope that it will make the needles easier tio find.  If you look at the 9/11 Commission report, and you find out that in fact the America intelligence apparatus knew that the September 11th attack was happening – in hindsight – but they also knew a million other irrelevancies, and that an adequate approach to discovering it might have been to collect less information, not more.

The video is below:

Why cheer a terrorist? It’s worth considering the situation from the Libyan point of view. First, al-Megrahi’s conviction was not water-tight. The manner of his identification by a witness in Malta was, I recall, highly irregular. I remember seeing a documentary about the case last year, which made me worry about the certainty of the conviction. And if Ordinary Britons are uneasy about the case, you can bet that Ordinary Libyans will be too. The conventional narrative there will be akin to that of the Guantanamo detainees – a Western power pursuing a vendetta against and unfortunate scapegoat.

This doesn’t take al-Megrahi’s side, or excuse Libya’s stte terrorism. But it does give an alternative explanation for the crowd’s exhuberance. It is more an expression of Libyan nationalism, than simply barbarians cheering a murderer.

I am reminded of a Matthew Parris column from two-and-a-half years ago, comparing the British Government’s approach to violence in Northern Ireland, and the radical Islamist threat:

Let’s treat the plotters as common criminals, not soldiers in a global war

It is clear why this distinction is made.  Labelling the attacks “murders” suggests that these are isolated incidents, divorced from ideology.  Meanwhile “terrorism” would point to a Second Troubles.  No-one but the Real IRA wants that.  If/when we fall victim to another Islamist terror attack, it will be interesting to note what language the Government uses then, especially now that the “War on Terror” has fallen out of vogue.