Home Movies Of The Damned

The CIA and Pentagon released a number of home videos taken of Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan and recovered in the raid that killed him last Sunday.

U.S. officials, who Saturday released five videos, emphasized the recordings and other materials seized at bin Laden's Pakistan compound show the terrorist still had a firm hand atthe tiller, managing strategic and tactical control of his organization, even as he stayed out of sight in Abbottabad.

The undated videos make clear bin Laden "remained active in al Qaeda terrorist propaganda operations, especially in shaping his own image," said a senior intelligence official granted anonymity under the ground rules of a briefing at the Pentagon.

Four of the clips show bin Laden, who was killed along with four others Monday by U.S. commandos, in more formal attire. No audio of the terrorist leader speaking accompanied the images.

The intelligence official said the audio was removed because it would be "inappropriate to spread the words of terrorists and propaganda messages, especially Osama bin Laden."

Besides the missing audio, the videos, according to the intelligence official, were not altered in any other way.

Still, the release of the home movies sends a message to those who doubted bin Laden was killed: Navy SEALs got footage that likely could have been held only by bin Laden at his hideout.

It may also have accomplished something else: diminishing the bin Laden mythology of invincibility.
CNN national security contributor Frances Townsend said U.S. officials "picked these videos pretty deliberately."

Portions are unflattering of bin Laden and reflect his vanity, Townsend said.

And yet as unflattering as the videos are, we still spent trillions of dollars as a direct result of our reaction to his attack on 9/11.  Victory does not get more Pyrrhic than that.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at yet another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.

But it isn’t quite right to say bin Laden cost us all that money. We decided to spend more than a trillion dollars on homeland security measures to prevent another attack. We decided to invade Iraq as part of a grand, post-9/11 strategy of Middle Eastern transformation. We decided to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts and add an unpaid-for prescription drug benefit in Medicare while we were involved in two wars. And now, partially though not entirely because of these actions, we are deep in debt. Bin Laden didn’t — couldn’t — bankrupt us. He could only provoke us into bankrupting ourselves. And he came pretty close.

Here endeth the lesson.