Assassinations never make the world a safer place - journalist

The US is not going to release a photo of the dead Bin Laden, claiming it could pose a threat to its national security. However, journalist Afshin Rattansi says it's not the only uncertainty surrounding the demise of the 'Washington-made monster'.

He claims the reason why Osama Bin Laden was killed and not captured is that the US has something to hide.“They obviously didn’t want the embarrassing revelations of how the United States basically created Bin Laden, as it has created so many Islamists, as it has funded so many Islamists around the world,” he said. “What is so terrible is how the American population are being lied to about how exactly that went on. When you saw those chants of ‘USA!’ around Ground Zero, I think very few people seemed to understand that Bin Laden was a creation of America.”“Assassinations, as we have known, usually don’t make the world a safer place and we must not allow the United States to make it an even less safe place,” he added.Dr. Serja Trifkovic, an author and expert on foreign affairs, says that Osama Bin Laden was never meant to be captured alive and there are very good reasons for that.“I suppose those who decided that he should be taken out had reason to hide some embarrassing revelations if there were to be a public trial,” he said. “Those revelations probably go back to the 1980s when Bin Laden and his networks were in their nascent stage and the CIA and MI6 and Pakistan’s ISI were very active in promoting their growth in the highlands of Afghanistan. I think that the manner in which western intelligence agencies hoped to use Islamic radicalism as a tool of late Cold War policy in the 80s was something they would prefer not to have publicly known.”However, dead or alive, Bin Laden’s fate does not really change anything in the organization and the functioning of global terrorist groups and organizations.“The real legacy of Bin Laden is that we have an organization that is not hierarchical in structure, that has a network of autonomous or semi-autonomous self-starters that can perfectly function without even a formal figure head and in that respect his departure would not change anything,” he said. “The real question now is whether the Americans will sober up about the ambivalent role of Pakistan that has been, so to say, ‘hunting with the hounds and running with the hares’ for far too long.”

Frank Anderson, ex-CIA division chief and president of the Middle East Policy Council believes that Osama Bin Laden’s death has a social, physiological and political significance for the psychology and morale on both sides of the conflict. Anderson says that there will certainly be an immediate spike in motivation to avenge the death of Bin Laden amongst various terrorist organizations. However that “soon will be balanced by the effect of the information that was gathered from [Bin Laden’s] house, which is probably more important in the counter-terrorism sense than his own death.”When asked about the reasons behind the White House’s refusal to release the photographs of Bin Laden’s body, he said that “we could issue as many photographs as you want, but the conspiracy theorists would say they’ve been ‘doctored’.”