Dennis Hollingsworth

Schrodingers Cat Bin Laden

It took ten years to track down Osama bin Laden and the full force of the armed forces of the United States came down to a few milliseconds where members of a SEAL team made the decision to put two rounds in his head.

Or so we are told.

Every knows not to trust initial media reports, especially in such a scenario where a fugitive of the dimensions of OBL is concerned. Was he executed? I don't think so, but then from my experience of the military, I don't see evidence of that, especially at such an attenuated level of the military personnel involved. It must be admitted that fugitives of the rank of bin Laden have an extremely narrow opportunity to display the signals that would convey a surrender status. But there have been a flurry of different reports of what happened on the bedroom floor of his compound, and with the likelihood that such details will remain top secret, we will probably not know. So, like the fabled Schrodinger's Cat, even though Al Qaeda has confirmed his death, we don't know exactly in what circumstances he died. And despite the argument that the photographic proof should be withheld in order not to provide the world with another image of a martyr, the world will fill in the blank with several images anyway, all probably much more vivid than the actual video probably recorded by the commando's headsets, much less than the usual forensic fotos that this kind of thing would render. I guess this would be the argument to publish them.

One thought, by the way: I've once considered that we had needed actors like Humphrey Bogart during WWII to evoke the kind of mentality needed to fight a war, to do the ugly things that needed to be done in a time of armed conflict. What a surprise that this today was expressed in the figure of President Obama, whose Chicago legacy writ large and clear the spirit of prohibition era hard knuckled decisiveness in his attack on Al Qaeda. Predator drones are still on the hunt, meting out death sentences by executive order.

As for the vividness of the public's imagination, said imagination was probably led by our entertainment industry. It's curious to connect one of the initial reports of Bin Laden's last moments depicting him as using one of his wives as a human shield, receiving a head wound for his trouble, with a scenario first imagined by Call of Duty, Black Ops. Above, please watch one of the opening scenes for what might be the animating imagery for the wife-as-human-shield fantasy, which in turn was superseded by another report that bin Laden first evaded the first shot at him as he poked his head out of a bedroom doorway, to be double tapped inside shortly thereafter.

Decide for yourself which account is true. Regardless, for much of the world, he will be both alive and dead for a long time to come.