Osama bin Laden as Global Shock Jock

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted October 31, 2004.

Looked at realistically, Osama bin Laden's intervention in our presidential election was undoubtedly an act of immediate organizational weakness, not strength. Had he had been capable of orchestrating the bringing down of another American tower or its equivalent, he certainly would have done so, but it was no less ingenious for that. His last major intervention, his self-scripted action-adventure film in real time, "The Humiliation of America," cost his organization hundreds of thousands of planning dollars and 19 suicidal believers (plus the price of airplane tickets, box-cutters, and mace). Still, those 19 followers and the almost 3,000 dead from the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and United Flight 93, which never made it to Washington thanks to the heroic action of its passengers, was clearly a cheap enough price to pay in his eyes for the notoriety he instantly achieved.

On the other hand, his new intervention – the video seen 'round the world – must have cost but a few riyals. All that was needed, after all, was home-video equipment, a lectern, a brown cloth for a backdrop, and Osama's elegant Halloween costume, described in the New York Times as "traditional white robes, a golden cloak and a turban." ("I'll take the sheik outfit for $39.95!") In terms of price, impact and horrific effect, however, it's already the real-world equivalent of that bargain-basement horror film success "The Blair Witch Project," and it was even released on the eve of Halloween. In this video are echoes of so many other horror films in which the dead return to life, the vampire is not slain, the zombies walk yet again. Remarkable.

Let no one say that Osama isn't a thoroughly modern man. His timing was TV perfect. He has, as they might say in Hollywood, a golden gut and the purest instincts of a network programmer. And he's an incredible ham – or at least a man willing to change roles as well as costumes as the opportunity arises. In this video, to judge from the transcript, he's abandoned the role of Islamic true believer (and of course mass murderer) to take up the bloodless role of rational critic. As a friend of mine said, he's joined the Capital Gang – or is it the Peshawar Gang? Osama as pundit.

He offers a reasonably detached assessment of our president's actions and his own, suggesting that the Bush administration learned its ways from the corrupt Middle Eastern regimes with which the Bush family was long associated. ("We have not found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half of which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents. Our experience with them is lengthy and both types are replete with those who are characterized by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth.") He considers the Patriot Act and election fraud in Florida like any TV talking head. ("So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act under the pretences of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors and did not forget to import expertise in election fraud from the regions presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.") He analyzes why the president acted as he did. ("All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.")

Then, like any good TV critic, like, say, Tom Shales of the Washington Post, or perhaps like one of those generals from some recent American war brought in to analyze the way the present one is being fought, he offers his critique of how the president played his role on Sept. 11, 2001: "It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone at a time when they most needed him. But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers we were given three times the period required to execute the operations."

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of The American Empire Project. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.

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