[Dryerase] TIME magazine advocates assassination

[Asheville Global Report]

Asheville Global Report
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TIME magazine advocates assassination

By Eamon Martin

Asheville, North Carolina, Nov. 26 (AGR)—  Back in 1999, in an extremely 
self-referential article paying tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, TIME magazine 
Chief Foreign Correspondent Johanna McGeary characterized herself as a 
disciple of the anti-colonialist Indian leader. A self-described “sixties 
kid,” McGeary bragged about her principled kinship with “Martin Luther King 
Jr.,” “Nelson Mandela,” and “the environmental marchers [against the World 
Trade Organization] in Seattle.” Further demonstrating narcissistic, 
journalistic co-optation at it’s worst, McGeary went on to mythologize 
misty-eyed about her and her fellow activists’ “passionate commitment,” and 
“nonviolent activism,” a Gandhian tradition, she implied, that they helped 
keep alive in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.
Whatever “passionate commitment” to nonviolence that McGeary clearly went 
out of her way to espouse at the time was demonstrably abandoned or exposed 
as being the superficial fakery it actually was in the Nov. 25, 2002 issue 
of TIME.  In its feature article, “Why Can’t We Find bin Laden? An inside 
look at what the US is doing to nail him — and why the campaign has fizzled 
so far,” McGeary and congressional correspondent Douglas Waller teamed up 
to not only answer that question, but to provide their own narrow and very 
violent options for dealing with the al-Qaida leader.
Waller, it should be noted first, is no adversary of the military. In 
recent years the writer has made a side career as the US military’s first 
choice for book market boosterism, authoring such propagandistic titles as 
The Commandos and Air Warriors. For the latter, his website boasts: “he put 
you in the cockpit with the Navy’s daring carrier pilots.” Now, for his 
latest release, BIG RED: Three Months On Board A Trident Nuclear Submarine, 
“the veteran TIME Magazine correspondent penetrates for the first time one 
of the most secretive worlds in the US military — a Trident nuclear 
submarine with its 24 strategic missiles and more than 120 nuclear warheads.”
These Washington insiders must have felt so confidently inside the 
consensus of military opinion that they didn’t feel the need to cite even 
one US official when they framed a short list of tactical possibilities in 
tackling the al-Qaida “master terrorist.” McGeary and Waller suggest that 
nothing short of brutal murder is in order for Osama bin Laden:
Theoretically, there are four ways to take him out:
1) Spot him with a Predator drone and drop a precision-guided weapon on 
him. Fast, cheap, simple. It worked in Yemen on Nov. 3, when a drone’s 
missile obliterated a car carrying five other al-Qaida operatives [actually 
six men, one of whom was believed to be an al-Qaida operative, another of 
whom was a US citizen - ed.] . But an air strike inside Pakistan would 
require more cooperation from President Pervez Musharraf than the US has. 
Pakistan only reluctantly agreed to allow the US to use its airspace and 
bases to stage the Afghan invasion; it would balk at Predator drones flying 
all over the country.
2) Detect him electronically, triangulate his position quickly, listen long 
enough to make sure he’s the right man, then drop a bomb fast.
3) Track him down the old-fashioned way, paying off locals until he’s just 
around the corner, then surround him, strap on the night-vision gear, take 
out the guards and do him in.
4) Persuade someone else to get him.
Read in its entirety, the article might easily be interpreted as suggesting 
that heightened American anxiety in reaction to CIA and FBI warnings of 
“spectacular” terrorist threats alone is reason enough to drop a bomb on a 
single man. But, significantly, McGeary and Waller deduce, “bin Laden’s 
demise” is an “important symbol of success” for George W. Bush’s terror 
war. The article concludes with perhaps another self-referential clue to 
the authors’ modus operandi: “In symbolic terms, the value of getting [bin 
Laden] — dead or alive — remains incalculable.”