Or, more likely, there is no KSM—certainly not as presented—as there is no longer an Osama or al-Zarqawi, and more likely the story of superman-like terror activity on KSM’s part is in fact contrived nonsense, engineered strictly for public consumption. KSM is a Muslim Freddy Krueger, the bastard son of Pentagon intelligence, the Office for Special Propaganda and Machiavellian Nightmares.
KSM is simply too much of a good thing for the Muslim-hating neocons, and that’s why he embodies cartoonish villain qualities, thus revealing the essential simplicity of the Straussian neocon philosophy with its Manichean perspective of good versus evil, light versus dark, and its exploitation of stark moral dualism. As the Straussians believe they are, like Plato, guiding the polis, who are childlike, it is probably natural the requisite myths spun, in the form of “noble lies,” are basically puerile and thus easily deconstructed. Moreover, as “philosopher kings,” the neocons firmly believe the American public, the benighted masses, really do not require more sophistication.
For those unwilling to so easily believe, although captivated by the larger Brothers Grimm story of Osama and his preternatural beings, the corporate media gives us Rosie O’Donnell. “On Thursday’s installment [of the View], O’Donnell actually said that the only reason al Qaeda terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to any of his actions is because he was being held by the CIA at Guantanamo and tortured where it is allowed,” writes Jim Brogan for the Post Chronicle.
In other words, for Rosie and the entertainment establishment, a fluffy counterpart to the corporate department of manufactured news, the existence of KSM and his fantastic deeds are not in doubt, and the issue here, for soft and squishy “liberals,” is rather the immorality of torture. Naturally, this takes away and is a diversion from the core issue: the very posture of KSM is hallucinatory and thus irrational, ascribing to one man a preternatural set of abilities and accomplishments.
But then, of course, most of us, conditioned by television and Hollywood, have bought into the cardinal rule of the entertainment realm: all who enter here must suspend credulity.