My blog update originally posted on August 16, 2011

 

I wrote this update by fits and starts over a long period of time. My hesitation - or “dithering”, if you will - originated on my birthday in late April when I realized that the Chinese government had a plan to bring me out on that day, as I wrote in mid-June about the Canadian general election:

The Obama administration was very afraid that I might be brought out during the general election lest it turned into a de facto referendum on my political ideas, in which case his administration would certainly lose.

 

If anyone had any doubt which Canadian political party the Obama administration was enabling, just note that only days after the Liberal campaign put out a TV ad with Mr. Ignatieff saying that “this election is about you”, Mr. Obama launch his re-election campaign with a TV ad saying, through his supporters, that “this campaign is about us.” Not only were Obama and Ignatieff trying to avoid any serious debates on my file by making fun of Chinese names, Mr. Obama was also, in a vain attempt, trying to find an excuse for his repeated use of the word “us” in his inauguration speech.

 

I believe the April 11 leak of an exaggerated draft version of the Auditor General report on G8 spending was a pre-emptive strike by the Obama-Ignatieff camp or its sympathizers in case my last blog update on Ai Weiwei prompted Chinese government to bring me out.  I started writing that update sometime between April 9 and 11.

As it turn out, the Chinese government had a plan to bring me out on April 27, my birthday. That’s why the White House created a big news in that morning by releasing Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate, i.e., to suggest that I was somehow un-Canadian because I was born outside Canada.

 

As you can imagine, realizing that the Chinese government had picked my birthday to try to bring me out came as a bit of shock for me, although I have to admit that deep down inside, there was also a little smugness. However, as I reflected on the significance of Chinese government’s move, I nevertheless felt it was “too personal”, bestowing me a honour that was normally reserved for a beloved national leader. As I said before, I was only a private individual and wanted to remain strictly so. Besides, I did not want to see my personal causes -- the strength of which has always been based solely on facts and logic -- unnecessarily affected by politics.

 

That’s why I had been reluctant to write ever since. Even after I had written something significant - whether it was about the bullshit of Mr. Obama’s bin Laden kill or the American and part of the Chinese political class trying to steal and revise my ideas - I was still reluctant to post them here. Besides, as I noticed, not surprisingly, the Chinese government also knew what I typed into my computer, as evidenced by a June 21 article attacking Professor Fang on the same website where I read Professor Fang’s article referenced below. As such, I figured it probably did not make much of a difference whether or not I posted my writings here as I my views had already been known.

 

With U.S. Vice President Joe Biden embarking on his trip to China today, I feel I’d better post my writings here so that they can be read by as many people as possible. Of course, I can sense there is a fierce internal struggle within the Chinese government and it is not my intention to be drawn into Chinese politics. However, I would loath to see the Obama administration meddling China’s politics into the wrong direction. Put it plainly, the major purpose of Biden’s 4-day visit to China is to put give a strong showing of U.S. government’s official backing of Mr. Xi Jingping, or in as evidenced by, say, the words of Mr. Biden’s national security adviser Tony Blinken: “to get to know China’s future leadership, to build a relationship with Vice President Xi, and to discuss with him and other Chinese leaders the full breadth of issues in the U.S.-China relationship.”

 

To those, I can add a lesser known fact that it was right after I started writing the following update on June 15 that Mr. Biden made a rare telephone call to Mr. Xi in Beijing the next day, also in an apparent show of the Obama administration’s support of him. This was similar to U.S. State department’s May 31 announcement, made right after I had first read Mr. Qin Xiao’s article and did some internet research on him the night before, about the then deputy secretary James Steinberg’s visit to Hong Kong supposedly to have taken place in early June: “In Hong Kong, Deputy Secretary Steinberg will meet with the Chief Executive Donald Tsang, local citizens, scholars, and other civil society organizations to underscore U.S. support for Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic development under the Basic Law.”

 

I don’t know if Mr. Steinberg had eventually made his way to Hong Kong before his return to academic life (although Mrs. Clinton herself had last month), or the above announcement was hastily made just to show the Obama administration’s support for Mr. Qin (a “scholar”) and his Boyuan think tank (a “civil society organization”). The bottom line is this: The U.S. government will never let pass an opportunity to meddle in China’s internal affairs. Human rights and democracy is but one deceitful excuse, as the countless examples above revealed. Depending on the situation at hands, many other deceitful excuses could be invented, too. For example, when I was seen on the opposite of President Hu Jintao in January 2009, Mr. Obama used tackling corruption as his excuse to back Hu as evidenced by his inauguration speech. If Mr. Obama is genuine with tackling corruption, why is he backing “rot fishes” in China now?

 

The truth of the matter is, there is no consistency in U.S. foreign policy except for advancing its own self-interests. For a long time, the Obama administration had used every means at its disposal to hinder China’s move towards democratization because it was in its interest to do so. Given the strong defence China has mounted against the U.S. pressures so far and with its own economy in deep malaise, backing a sub-optimal and indeed, wrong kind of democratization in China now appears to be the best course of action for the Obama administration.

 

The following is my draft written largely between 20110615 and 20110617:

 

“What the f--- are you doing?!”

 

That’s the question yelled out over the phone by Jeffrey Bader, then a State department official in Washington, to Raymond Burghardt, who was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on June 5, 1989, after the then Bush administration had learned its embassy declined an initial request for personal protection from Professor Fang Lizhi, a prominent Chinese scientist and dissident, right after the tragic Tiananmen Square event. 

 

This little detail came from a recently published article by Professor Fang himself. Articles by Prof. Fang I have always enjoyed reading, whether they are related to science, history, politics or travel anything else. Just like reading the writings of Warren Buffett, you can sense Prof. Fang’s integrity and character just by reading his articles along.  

 

Indeed, as Professor Fang noted at the beginning of his article, it was in the interest of preserving history that he wrote about his first-hand experience in the context of Sino-U.S. relations during his one year stay at the Beijing embassy in 1989-1990. Unlike many self-serving memoirs (which Prof. Fang light-heartedly compared to the depreciating U.S. dollar), his article is full of historical facts that are meticulously researched and fascinating to know.  

 

For the benefit of this update of mine, I would like to pluck the following facts from Prof. Fang’s article: Merely weeks after the Tiananmen Square tragedy, the U.S. government granted visa for family members of senior Chinese leaders, including those tainted by that terrible event. And this favoured treatment of senior communist party cadres was a matter of U.S. government policy. 

 

I have no reason to doubt such a U.S. policy would not continue till this day. These facts furnished by Prof. Fang confirmed my own experience with Sino-U.S. relations. The close relationship between the political classes of these two countries is not merely “symbiotic”, as inferred by Prof. Hung Ho-Fung in his excellent article on Sino-U.S. economic relations, America’s Head Servant. It’s concrete. It’s real. And it’s heavily lop-sided in that the influence typically goes from Washington to Beijing rather than the other way around. Moreover, as Prof. Fang observed in his article and as examples in my blogs revealed, Washington’s influence on Beijing’s ruling class is often exerted through corruptive measures, whether they involve manifest monetary consideration or not.

 

Which brings me to the first focus of this update, China’s Rise and Global “New Balance”, an article by Qin Xiao published on Financial Times’ Chinese website on May 30. On first glance, I thought Mr. Qin’s article was one of the many -- especially by those in the American political class -- that were some offshoots of my political ideas. I had become used to seeing them as people do that all the times for whatever motivations. However, I vaguely remembered Qin’s name in an article by Xian Yan (written on behalf of President Hu Jintao), so I did an internet search on him. I was shocked by what I found about him, including those articles written by Mr. Xian. Given Mr. Xian’s background, I knew his allegations about Qin were highly credible and he did not exaggerate a bit when he called Qin a big “rot fish”. I also took note of Boyuan Foundation, a Hong Kong-based think tank that Qin founded and chaired after his retirement from business, with many prominent political and financial personalities from China and U.S. sitting on its board.

 

With this information on hand, I re-read Mr. Qin’s article. Then I realized his article was essentially a political manifesto for Mr. Xi Jingping, currently the fifth generation of Chinese leadership. Taking advantage of what I have already achieved over the years through my words and actions both domestically in China and internationally on global politics, this manifesto attempts to hijack and revise my political ideas for China’s impending democratization. In Qin’s mind, future Chinese democracy should take on the fundamental feature of the American democracy, i.e., China should have a carbon copy of Wall Street-Washington cohort of political and financial elite at the core of its system of governance. Only that this “power and money cohort” in China -- in the incisive words of Mr. Xian Yan -- has already shown signs of being infiltrated and corruptively influenced by the American political class. No wonder Qin does not have the spine to propose an equal partnership with the U.S. In his mind, the U.S. would forever dominate the world from the top of his “pyramid structure” of international relations and China, together with every other country on earth, would always play a subservient role in its relations with the U.S. (At the mean time, Qin hopes American political class would re-define America’s national interest and “American leadership” on the world stage. Good luck with that!) 

 

There are many other problems with Qin’s article. Personally I was particularly upset by Qin’s dismissal of “conspiracy theory” in connection with his vague reference to American system of governance. As you probably noticed, I listed Conspiracy Theory as one of my favourite movies on my websites recently. Obviously, I did so not because I believe in the storyline of the movie, or more generally, I am a person who is gullible to various conspiracy theories. When I first watched the movie in the 1990s, I did not think much of it except that it was very exciting and entertaining. It was only after I had been released from the mental hospital in 2008 that I found the movie resonate deeply with my personal experience. I am a facts and logic guy, as everyone knows. Indeed, I have not heard people calling me names for a long time and I don’t think Mr. Qin truly believes any part of my writings was merely “conspiracy theory” dreamed up by a mentally sick person. (Dr. Henry Kissinger was more charitable with his “Chinese are good at connecting the dots” theory, which I had subtly responded in my draft on the bin Laden kill to be posted below.) The real problem with Mr. Qin is that, just like the American political class is part of the cover-up of the system of governance here, Mr. Qin is part of a syndicate - with his Boyuan Foundation being at the forefront - that intends to build up that “power and money cohort” as the shadowy overlord of future democratic China. In other words, he himself is part of this conspiracy in the making -- carbon-copied on the American model, I should emphasize -- and that’s why he had to dismiss my “conspiracy theory” about the American system of governance first.

 

As for the timing of Qin’s political manifesto, I had some inkling initially. And my intuition was confirmed a couple of days later when I saw the Wall Street Journal devoting a whole section of its June 2 edition on the internationalization of the renminbi titled Get Ready: Here Comes the Yuan, which included a flattery and indeed, bullshit piece on the China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan. It appears the global environment, particularly the state of Sino-U.S. relations, is such that the birth of the renminbi as a true, global currency is nigh. The “power and money cohort” in China, in collaboration with the American political class, jumped out at this time in order to poach the progress China had made so far and to hijack China’s impeding democratization with a revision of my political ideas. That’s why we saw The Journal, in between the lines, called this their “Trojan horse strategy”. The elites of these two countries must have thought that they were about to take control of the renminbi into their hands, just like the Wall Street-Washington cohort controlling the U.S. dollar.

 

Indeed, the real reason why the Journal had showered such flattery on Mr. Zhou was that he, as one of China’s financial elites, is under the influence of American political class -- a fact inadvertently revealed by, say, James Fallows on BBC and confirmed by my own observations. As I lamented in a unpublished draft last year after China’s central bank abandoned the renminbi-dollar peg:

 

The People’s Bank of China. The Chinese central bank with renmin on its name. But apparently, that’s all there is to it now. -- It’s only in name that the PBOC pledges to serve the interest of the Chinese people.

 

This was the same central bank which in March 2009 threw out the recycled idea of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as a potential reserve currency, apparently after everyone had just figured out the strategy for making renminbi a reserve currency, as interpreted from my words and actions. That probably explained the “gaffe” by Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner when he was asked to comment on the SDR idea as proposed by PBOC at a think tank gathering. In Mr. Geithner’s mind, he must have been comparing the SDR idea with the renminbi idea. Of course, the SDR idea was better for America, if it was ever going to fly. But isn’t it obvious that the renminbi idea is far better for China, and indeed, for the entire world? Then why was the central banker of China propose something that was not in the best interest of the Chinese people? Besides, the fact that Secretary Geithner was so eager to speak positively about the SDR idea revealed that he was extremely unwilling to see the renminbi idea to become a reality, which also implied that, in his estimation, the renminbi idea was highly feasible. And that just made the renminbi idea so much more worthwhile for the Chinese government to pursue.

 

In other words, Mr. Zhou brought out the SDR idea in March 2009 to appease his American masters. It was for this same reason, I believe, that Mr. Zhou was picked up to fill the top spot in the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” list by the American magazine Foreign Policy last year. But a “thinker” with the age-old idea of S.D.R.? Who would have thought our political classes can be so brazen, even intellectually? Shameful, indeed.

 

While I am at it, why don’t I point to another Chinese financial elitist who is under the influence of the American political class. Mr. Wang Qishan, who was similarly honoured by the Time magazine, is in fact the Vice Premier overseeing China’s financial industry. If my gut feeling is correct, he is the one who passed on to the then U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics the knowledge that Russia had urged China to dump America’s agency debts in concert. If Sino-U.S. economic relations contained “a balance of financial terror” in the words of former Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, Mr. Wang’s action amounted to divulging a potential nuclear strike plan to China’s opponent. I don’t understand why such a person can still remain in charge of China’s day-to-day financial operations.

 

As everyone knows, I am all for a genuine and enduring cooperative relationship between China and the U.S. based on the common philosophy of Pragmatism. However, if my experience teaches us anything, it’s that pragmatism works only when both sides adopt a pragmatic approach. If both governments base their decisions on facts and rational analyses and negotiations, there will be more peaceful cooperation rather than confrontation in their relationship. And if they had done that, the idea of renminbi as another global currency would have taken off in a cooperative atmosphere a long time ago. Yet, as my previous blogs showed, it is Mr. Obama who is bent on having a duel-out with China, thinking that perhaps he has an advantage, especially in the military sphere. That’s the fundamental reason for the sometime rocky relations between those countries in the past few years. That’s also why there is still some uncertainty in the road ahead, as evidenced by the heighten tensions in the South China Sea. Or the fact that Google and the Obama administration had tried to insinuate that the Chinese government was behind some of the recent cyber-attacks. When the Pentagon made public that it was prepared to use force against any such attacks that it deemed acts of war, it had effectively lowered the threshold of military action to an arbitrarily low level, given, among other things, how notoriously difficult it is to ascertain the origin of any cyber-attacks. Indeed, I sensed Mr. Obama’s strong inclination to produce a military confrontation with China right after his bin Lade kill.

 

In situation like this, it’s critically important for the Chinese government to muscle every strength they have in order to show that the renminbi is worthy of a true, global, reserve currency status on par with the U.S. dollar. That’s essentially what China has been doing. It is largely because of the strong defence the Chinese side has played that we have arrived at this point where the birth of renminbi as a global currency is nigh. My writings also helped with persuading some of the world leaders and global elites. From my experience during the Canadian general election in May, it appeared that even Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a lot more serious about my political ideas than I initially thought when I wrote the above update on Michael Ignatieff.

 

Indeed, my political ideas, even though not yet fully implemented, has already been brought some competitive advantage to China with its revelation about America’s political decline. Not surprisingly, it is also the No.1 thing that the American political class is afraid of as it concerns their so-called “global leadership”. That’s why, with the cooperation of some of their Chinese counterpart, they wanted to see my ideas revised. That’s also why a message in Obama’s bin Laden kill was to kill my embryonic political ideas. Although many in the American political class do not like it when I said that the American empire was in a (relative) decline, others, such as George Soros and former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, have also talked about such a decline, especially in America’s political and economic power. Indeed, that’s part of the reason why the U.S. government had finally decided to turn the page on its “war on terror” with the bin Laden kill. Only in Qin’s manifesto, China could never become a “politically competitive” country to the United States, because he revised my political ideas and frankly, surrendered, on behalf of that “power and money cohort”, to the American political class.

 

As for America’s financial and economic problems, they are well-known and I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll just note that on the day after the bin Laden kill, Treasury secretary Tim Geithner postponed the deadline to August 2 for the U.S. Congress to raise America’s debt ceiling, which was required in order to avoid a disastrous default on U.S. debts. Now the American political class is even blatantly floating the idea of a “technical default”, which prompted the Chinese warning that such an antic was tantamount to “playing with fire”, meaning we could all go down with the smokes. Of course, such an outcome is always a possibility as long as the Obama administration does not take a genuinely pragmatic approach. -- Another obvious route to such a disastrous outcome would be for Mr. Obama to gamble for a military solution to his economic problems, as warned by George Soros. Indeed, I feel that’s exactly why the Obama administration had used the bin Laden kill to drum up American jingoism.

 

It is extremely dangerous for the control of a country’s currency to fall into the hands of a selected few with money and power, as can be seen from the American experience. Neither unchecked power nor unfettered greedy greed can be sustainable in the long run. In the case of China, if the renminbi falls into the hands of the “power and money cohort”, there will be added danger of that control being further taken away by the American political class. If that happens, even if the “power and money cohort” succeeded with their “Trojan horse strategy” in poaching the gain China has made with respect to the renminbi internationalization so far, much of that gain could easily be lost in the future. Instead of being regarded as a second U.S. dollar on the world stage, Chinese renminbi as a future reserve currency would risk becoming a second Japanese Yen. Instead of being a true competitor to the U.S. dollar for the benefit of the whole world, it would end up playing second fiddle to the hegemonic dollar.

 

Why could the Japanese Yen never become a reserve currency on par with the U.S. dollar? This is because Japan is a politically subservient country to the United States. If the Chinese “power and money cohort” becomes the overlord in a future democratic China as so desired by people like Qin Xiao, China would risk becoming a politically subservient country, too. For the foreseeable future, the primary interest and motivation of many in the Chinese “power and money cohort” is to protect their ill-gotten gains of the past decades. That crippling disadvantage along would give the American political class a huge upper hand in its dealings with China. In fact, Qin Xiao knew this and that’s why, instead of envisioning a more democratic international order where China and the U.S. are true equals, Qin proposed a “pyramid structure” of global pecking order with the U.S. would forever sitting on the top to appease the American political class.

The following is my draft on the bin Laden kill as of 20110508, with minor editing:

 

I have been “dithering” on whether to write about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Yes, this event is connected to my situation, even in part to send me an intimidating message. But I am not bothered by it at all. For the most part, this event is pure political theatre, staged to bolster Mr. Obama’s political fortune and to temporarily brighten the mood of the American people and boost their confidence in their government. Indeed, insofar as bullshit can be both words and actions as Professor Harry Frankfurt noted in his excellent essay, one may precisely call this American political class act bullshit. But bullshit it may be, it was designed to mostly fool the American people. I did not see any compelling reason to have to pop the bubble.

 

Watching the aftermath of the bin Laden kill gradually persuaded me otherwise, however. I was reminded - not by the kill operation itself but by its worldwide aftermath - that the United States is still the world’s pre-eminent power. Even though many world leaders knew the truth about the killing, I believe, they were careful in their official responses not to undermine the true objectives of the American political class. What’s particularly disquieting for me was to see the global mainstream media, also dominated by the U.S., propagate the official lines of the Obama administration even in the face of mounting inconsistencies, contradictions and sometimes obvious lies coming from top Obama officials in describing the event to the global public. I guess Thomas Friedman did not call America a lying power for nothing.

 

Before Sunday night’s news about the death of bin Laden, I knew from my previous experience with successive U.S. administrations that bin Laden was either dead already and the U.S. government knew about it, or, he was under strict control of the U.S. government. (As more information became available in the subsequent days, of course I came to the conclusion that he was alive and under the U.S. control until Sunday May 1.) This was because successive U.S. administrations had produced purported bin Laden tapes and released them in connection to my situation, often when my story was on the verge of becoming public.

 

The first time I noticed that a purported bin Laden tape was probably the work of the U.S. government was a couple of days after I published my second report on the Cecilia Zhang murder cover-up, in the final days of 2006 Canadian general election. As I was striving to become public on my own before the end of the election campaign, the major purpose of the then Bush administration in producing and releasing that tape was mostly to urge “people in the loop” to not afford me such an opportunity. I mentioned this incident in my previous blogs. Since then, there had been a couple of additional purported bin Laden tapes that were connected to my situation, although I did not write down the details of them. (I should note that not all purported bin Laden tapes had a manifest connection to my situation.)

 

I am a facts and logic guy. To me, one connection might be a coincident, but two or more would constitute a pattern. As such, I had long concluded that Osama bin Laden was either dead or the U.S. government had absolute control over him. Otherwise, the U.S. dirty trick of issuing tapes in his name would risk being exposed.  

 

After the latest purported bin Laden tapes that were connected to my situation surfaced in January 2010, my feeling was mostly a sense of amazement over just how “thick-skinned” -- to borrow a word from former U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr. -- the U.S. government was, as reflected in my January 31, 2010 blog: “You’ve got to marvel at the U.S. government for the way they value their enemies.”

 

Since these latest two tapes came out a relatively short time ago, I was able to revisit them and piece back their connections to my situation. When the first one came out on or around January 24, 2010, I probably did not think much of it, unaware of its connection to my situation. This is because, as I mentioned in one of my recent updates, I did not realize the occasion of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address on January 27 would be a good opportunity for my story to break. It was after Mr. Obama’s address that I realized that I had missed the opportunity and that the Chinese government was actively trying to bring me out.

 

Apparently, the main purpose of the Obama administration in producing and releasing that tape was so that they could comment on it with the phrase “reflected glory”, as widely reported at the time. Of course, to suggest that any attempt on my part to be brought out on January 27, the day of the State of the Union, was an attempt at “reflected glory” - presumably off Mr. Obama - was a spin of gigantic proportion by the Obama administration.  If I had attempted and succeeded in becoming public on that day, there would be no glory at all for Mr. Obama. Indeed, it would have turned his supposedly glorious occasion into a major embarrassment in front of a worldwide audience. And that’s why his administration released that tape in the first place: To discourage me from doing so. Only that they underestimated my political obtuseness.

 

When I realized that the Chinese government was still actively trying to bring me out, I started writing my January 31 blog on Thursday January 28 and had “planed to published whatever I could finish on Friday morning”. It was in this context that the second purported bin Laden tape of the month appeared on Friday, January 29, 2010. And the purpose of the U.S. government this time around was similar to their very first such work in January 2006: To insinuate and to create a public impression that I was somehow comparable to bin Laden if and when I did become public. It’s not a coincident that the voice on the tape called for the boycott of the U.S. dollar. Nor was it a coincident that the tape said the West was responsible for global warming, echoing the final paragraphs of my blog on the Copenhagen conference that the conference had been hijacked by western governments, published barely a month before. The tape even contained some obvious nuts such as “intellectual” and “fact”, etc.

 

With the timing of the release coinciding with my potentially becoming public, and with its similar arguments and even similar language to those in my writings, this tape would have been very effective in associating me with bin Laden in public’s minds. What’s more, when you want to propagate lies, you’d better destroy truths. And nothing can be more effective in destroying truths than running them through the mouth of a widely perceived villain. As The Guardian newspaper noted with respect to the tape’s message on climate change, “this was the last conversion to the environmental cause that anybody would have wanted.” Of course, if people knew this tape had actually been produced by the Obama administration, it would have greatly helped them in figuring out what Mr. Obama really stood on climate change.

 

Indeed, this January 29, 2010 tape, PRODUCED BY THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, contained lots of other truths, too. In fact, insofar as the tape was produced with undermining my writings as its goal, its content, such as those on the U.S. dollar, on (financial) speculation, or on the soaring living costs (of the world’s poor), etc., was actually far ahead of my pursuit of truths at the time, reflecting Obama administration’s underestimation of my political obtuseness. Overall, this tape again showed that the U.S government and the American political class does possess the truths. (Of course they do. After all, they are not stupid.) And they would go to elaborate length to try to hide and even destroy them because they are afraid others might get to know these truths.

 

Still, the messages in the tape also took a more extreme view than mine in certain areas. Of course, this was done deliberately by the Obama administration in order to misrepresent my writings and undermine the appeal of my ideas. Take the U.S. dollar, for example. While I think the dollar hegemony (rather than the dollar itself) is a problem, I have not called for a total boycott of the dollar, unlike the taped message. Rather, what I have put forward is a plan for the world to gradually move off the dollar hegemony into a genuine multi-currency monetary regime that is more balanced and more sustainable in the long run. Indeed, as I said before, my plan is not even a bet against America’s economic future. It is a bet for America’s long-term future.

 

There is simply no comparison between me and Osama bin Laden, no matter what these U.S. government tapes attempted to insinuate. For one thing, bin Laden was vehemently anti-American. Yet I am not against America. I am just against American hegemony as everyone should because it means inequality among peoples of the world, among other things. For another, bin Laden was a bona fide terrorist who had no qualm in using violence, including violence against innocent civilians, to achieve his objectives. Yet I only advocate change through evolutionary, peaceful and gradual process, whether it’s for China or for the world at large.

 

Once we know that bin Laden was either dead and the U.S. government knew about it, or he was under strict American control, the next question naturally is: Why didn’t the U.S. government come clean with its people and the world about it? And the answer is not that difficult to figure out. Simply put, the U.S. government needed bin Laden to justify its continued “war on terror”.  The U.S. government needed an enemy, as it always does, to justify its worldwide network of military bases and its astronomical military budget.

 

With the help of a little logic and common sense and mindful of the spins and disinformation put forward by the Obama administration, we can easily reaffirm our above conclusion by sorting through media reports on the bin Laden kill. Bin Laden was evidently not in some kind of hideout that neither the U.S. nor the Pakistani government knew about. The Abbottabad compound bin Laden was staying was essentially a secret CIA prison -- one of the many around the world, apparently -- run by the Pakistani authority at the behest of the U.S. government. Only that this one was specifically built for bin Laden five or six years ago to make his imprisonment more resemble a house arrest. Putting bin Laden under house arrest in total secrecy served the U.S. government’s most important objective of keeping its “war on terror” going and was probably the most important aspect of counter-terrorism cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani governments.

 

So now we can see, once we know the so-called bin Laden compound is a CIA prison, that it’s not a coincidence the mansion had been built so close to Pakistani military instalments and other institutional establishments. Neither was it a coincidence that bin Laden had never set his feet outside the compound. Nor that he had only two “couriers” to “protect” him while presumably sitting on top of a vast global terrorist network and, if you believe in the Obama administration, actively directing its day-to-day operations. Nor that having lived there for more than five years as the world’s most wanted terrorist, he had never thought of having an underground tunnel dug as an emergency escape route. (Note that some reports even said that he was restricted to live on the top two floors of the house during his entire 5 years there.) Nor that the commandos sent in to kill him had insider information about the occupants of the house. (Which led to such wild media speculation as that one of his wives might have turned against him.) 

 

Indeed, for the CIA director Leon Panetta and President Obama to send a team of highly trained commandos to kill Osama bin Laden in one of their own secret prisons, the whole charade was just so laughable and so, well, politically theatric. For, if the U.S. government had just wanted to “bring bin Laden to justice”, a mere phone call to its Pakistani counterpart would have sufficed. Apparently, the U.S. government had several political objectives in mind in staging such a dramatic midnight raid: (1) To turn the page on its “war on terror” and to expedite its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in order to avoid a Vietnam-style retreat; (2) To boost American people’s confidence in their military and their government and to possibly set the stage for a different war; (3) To bolster Mr. Obama’s image as a Commander-in-Chief that he so desperately needed (and therefore his political fortune) and to a lesser extent, Leon Panetta’s image as a competent incoming Secretary of Defence; and (4) To create another huge bin Laden-related news to coincide with my potentially being brought out on the eve of the Canadian general election.