How Osama re-elects Obama

By Pepe Escobar – A nuclear deal with Iran? An organized retreat from Afghanistan? The eurozone picking up a little bit of steam? Stable oil prices? Forget it. The crucial foreign elector recruited for Obama II at the White House is one Osama bin Laden. Call it the “Obama nails Osama” winning strategy.

No wonder the winning strategy has been subcontracted to the Hollywood/Pentagon combo. Washington lost the Vietnam War, but won it in on screen. Oscar-winning director Kathryn Hurt Locker Bigelow had already started the process of “winning” the Iraq War on screen – at least morally. Now it’s time for her new project – an as yet untitled movie – on the “Get Osama” May 2011 Abbottabad raid and the events leading up to it. With POTUS (that’s president of the United States) as the hero of his own action movie.

Move over, Spider Man
So essentially this will be a Hollywood 90-minute multi-million dollar campaign commercial, available all across America’s screens, selling Obama as the macho commander-in-chief George W Bush always dreamed of being. It’s the same modus operandi of the recent blockbuster Battleship – which was nothing but an extremely loud US Navy recruiting commercial.

The Washington, DC-based public-interest organization Judicial Watch [1] has just disclosed a series of documents – 153 pages from Pentagon records and 110 pages from Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) records – described as “almost as hard to get from the Obama administration as buying a winning lottery ticket at the local grocery store”. It took Judicial Watch no less than nine months and a federal lawsuit to force the Obama administration to release the documents.

The records detail how Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal became darlings of both the Pentagon and the CIA. They were granted privileged access to a “planner, Operator and Commander of SEAL Team Six” – the top Special Forces that may (or may not, according to millions around the world) have killed Bin Laden in a raid on his compound at Abbottabad in Pakistan a year ago.

The raid itself is described as “a ‘Gutsy Decision’ by the POTUS’,” and “WH [White House] involvement was critical.”

Bigelow and Boal were even given access to “the vault” – the CIA bunker that was the site of some crucial tactical planning for the raid.

As for the photos and video that should prove – beyond reasonable doubt – that it was really Bin Laden who was killed in the raid, Judicial Watch has been relentlessly stonewalled. For the Obama administration, this is a matter of national security.

What matters is that everything’s cool with the Spider Man Obama operation; with crucial timing, the commercial goes live all across US cinemas on October 12. Talk about an October non-surprise.

Note
1. See here.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).