Murder in the Simulacrum: Bin Laden, unbelievable deaths and depictions of legal exceptionality

A Time Magazine issue released immediately after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, shows the figure of the al Qaeda leader with a red cross marked on his face. Erasure, liquidation, a figure expunged. The magazine issue strikes a note of triumphalism -- the United States had finally gotten its man in the preferred state: dead. But this was no conventional death. Nothing regarding bin Laden's deaths (for he has died several times) has been 'conventional'. From the moment the Twin Towers were attacked on September 11, 2011 and assimilated into the symbolic language of apocalyptic terrorism, the entire 'war' (itself necessarily a questionable state) became an image, be it through the terrorist response itself, or the reaction of the security state.