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JSOC: The Black Ops Force That Took Down Bin Laden

Bin Laden’s death and American ties

Scahill has written well and often on the increasing resorting to the “dark side,” and America’s privatization of intelligence and “security” to Blackwater et al. His knowledge is, and has been, impressive. But his account of the assassination of Osama bin Laden (if that is, indeed, what it was) lacks the perspective needed at this time. It is too much an excited recounting of the “inside” stuff; it teaches us little of context. More to the point is Juan Cole’s recent profile—in Informed Comment—of bin Laden. What stands out in Cole’s writing—as opposed to Scahil’s—is not only the reach of bin Laden back into the 1980s and the funding and use of him by the CIA and the Saudi monarchy but the embeddedness of bin Laden and his cohort in the wider compass of the “cold war” and our efforts to use those like him to crush the Soviet Union. That bin Laden was fostered and funded by the Reagan and Bush administration and thereafter until we no longer needed him, has received not enough attention. His involvement with several US administrations and Saudi projects over twenty years would have provided a treasure trove of both information and understanding of what we were doing and with whom, and critical information on linked terrorist cells, projects and operatives still at large and those emerging from the terrorist cauldron.

Yet he is now dead and we will never know. An assassination team did not really try to capture him, question him or put him on trial—instead, they executed him. As in a John Le Carré spy novel, closure was assured.