THE TIMES |
Tuesday May 10
2011
Times Modern,
pp4-5
Bin Laden
dead?
Only in
theory
With
the death
of Osama bin Laden, the conspiracy
theorists have mined a rich vein of incredulity. Yet, asks David
Aaronovitch,
are the internet and 24-hour news
channels making us all susceptible to exotic disbelief
What Americans
now
"needed" to do, the BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner
told
Radio 5 listeners on Saturday night, was to match the newly released
video of a
blanketed Osama bin Laden watching TV with the rooms in the house where
he was
killed. And to do it so that we could all see. That was what was
required.
But, the
sceptical soul
demands, why would President Obama and company "need" to do any such
odd thing? Might such "proof" be of assistance to the US in fighting
the remnants of al-Qaeda? Hard to see how. Or could it help to reassure
the
world community — some of whom seem to believe that bin Laden should
have been
taken as though he were a local villain being apprehended by the parish
plod —
that the killing was justified? Nope.Sceptical? What is the scepticism about here? Sceptical about what Obama "needs" to do? That's a funny kind of thing to claim scepticism about; more a practical matter than one of belief. Or is the scepticism about there being any necessity to provide evidence? Again, that's a funny thing to be sceptical about. It's almost a one-liner: You say we should not believe things without evidence, but I'm sceptical. (You can have that one for your next dinner party.)
I think it's really a matter of the 'sceptical soul' - that is the person who is by nature a sceptic - and I think Aaronovitch is suggesting that scepticism is relevant here because - you guessed it - he's about to go off on another sneering binge, in which he and the rest of the quietists are, despite appearances, sceptical by nature, while the rest of us are flaky weirdos with fixed ideas.
Gardner's
concern was not,
in fact, connected with the practicalities or ethics of what we may not
any
longer call the War on Terror. His advice was aimed at quieting the
idea that
it wasn't bin Laden who was shot that night in Abbottabad, or that if
it was
bin Laden he was already dead, or any of the other exotic conspiracy
theories
that started almost the instant the news broke.
The fact that Aaronovitch has chosen Frank
Gardner,
of all people, to upbraid for conceding too much to the shabby
basement-dwellers illustrates just how implacable his demand for
orthodoxy is. And see how the sceptical stance 'account of covert op
not to be trusted' has been transformed into a positive thesis - that
what actually happened was one of (x,y,z...), that is, anything incompatible with the official account, including its bare denial. In other words, the rejection of a claim has been presented as a family of positive assertions, the only common component of which is of course the rejection of the claim. Thus scepticism becomes
credulity, credulity scepticism. Voodoo Bollocks!
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