Ralph Nader: The Ghost of Osama bin Laden

By Ralph Nader at Nader.org

(The imagined conversation between the Ghost of Osama bin Laden and President Barack Obama)

The Ghost of Osama bin Laden swirled into the Oval Office where Barack Obama was spending the evening going over a pile of requested sign-offs for drone missions.

Osama’s Ghost: “Mind if we have a conversation one year after you dispatched my body to the ocean sharks?”

With curiosity reigning supreme, President Obama replied, “Ok, so long as you remain hovering and do not alight to defile this solemn room.”

Osama’s Ghost: “Thank you. After your SEALs bravely shot, rather than captured, me while I was defenseless in my bedroom, you told your nation that ‘for the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.’”

“Correct, the form of your presence now attests to that fact,” the President curtly declared.

Osama’s Ghost: “You completely misunderstood. You see my work was completed by the evening of September 11, 2001. After that, the terror that I wanted to implant in American hearts was continued and intensified by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and you far, far beyond what our little, exaggerated al-Qaeda could ever dream of doing.”

“How so? Make it short!” Obama demanded.

Osama’s Ghost: “Okay, you want it short? You and your predecessors are ones who, for over a decade, starved your domestic needs in favor of huge military adventures in Asia and Africa, took away the freedoms of your people and replaced them with fear and anxiety over the wildly overblown but very profitable war on terror. You destroyed the esteem of the world’s people by reacting to 9/11 with aggressive attacks, torture, indefinite imprisonment without charges, secret laws, secret evidence, secret prisons and routine violations of national borders. You backed tyrants in these countries who slay and loot their own people with U.S. weapons, predatory corporations and political cover. You spy everywhere on the American people and watch your own soldiers commit suicide in record numbers. Do you know why these American soldiers are killing themselves, Mr. President?”

“You tell me, Dr. Freud,” said President Obama.

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