Emmanuel Goldstein is dead.

So Bin Laden is apparently dead. The vast majority of the media is going to take this story at face value so while they may be right to do so I'm going to look at the holes and questionable details in all this. To defend myself from the fact at least some of what I say here will look very silly in the coming months I will state this is my initial reaction to the news.

Firstly for several years the only evidence we've had that Bin Laden was alive was the odd taped audio message. Then after he was killed instead of recovering the body to put on show or at the very least have some nominally independent autopsy done his body is dumped at sea. We're almost certainly going to get pictures of the body released but creating photos of the body of someone who hardly anyone has seen for years is pretty doable for the US. More to the point if they had recovered the body so as to dump it at sea why not just hold on to it?

Secondly the timing is odd while it certainly wont hurt Obama in 2012 the election is a year and a half away, plenty of time for the right to trash and undermine the achievement or just plain focus on something else as the elation at Bin Laden's death fades away. On the other hand domestic dissent is growing, the Ryan plan is mobilising boomers' inherent selfishness and protests against austerity are ongoing across the US, most notably in Wisconsin. Now while this unrest was focused on the GOP business interests may well no want any dissent blossoming and so had a wonderfully patriotic distraction occuring. Heck protesters could be dismissed as anti-American for daring to protest at this time of national triumph.

Also a more outlandish point but one I feel worth making, we've had two big patriotic distractions that bolster the status quo and conservative entrenched interests in just a couple of days, first the Royal Wedding and now this. If one did want to distract against something pretty big happening that would upset people those would be pretty solid ways of doing it.

Thirdly this gives carte blanche for further incursions by NATO forces into Pakistan. Obama pointedly commented the attack on the compound was solely a US operation. Worse this compound was near a major Pakistani training base and in an area popular with retired members of the Pakistani military. Pakistani opposition to NATO ground incursions and Air Raids which killed multiple civilians has reached a fever pitch so some kind of justification was needed. Further though Pakistan has been very naughty recently, having the gall do things like charge CIA operative Raymond Davis with murder just because he killed a few Pakistani citizens, heck they've been very naughty for a while what with them overthrowing US puppet General Musharraf (who now lives in Britain with UK tax payer funded protection) and trying to act as a sovereign nation, using democracy to select leaders who might not favour US interests.

With the nature of the killing of Bin Laden in central Pakistan, just miles from the capital Islamabad the US is going to pretty much have a free hand to pursue regime change back to a client dictator.

There are other issues at stake but for now thats what springs to mind, I'll probably try and expand on this later in the day.