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Monday, August 16, 2010

Bin Laden Dead: Who's keeping the myth alive? Maidhc Ó Cathail


Bin Laden is Dead;

Long Live “Bin Laden”

Who’s keeping the terror myth alive?

In the trigger-happy post-9/11 world, the favoured way to instigate a war is to demand that the designated “evildoer” prove a negative.

Iraq was invaded because it couldn’t prove that it didn’t have WMDs. Iran is under constant threat of attack unless it can demonstrate that it’s not seeking nuclear weapons. And now Pakistan is being chastised for allegedly harbouring Osama bin Laden—who in all probability has been dead and buried for eight years.

Questioning Pakistan’s willingness to pursue bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year told a group of Pakistani editors, “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” And in a recent interview with Fox News, Clinton charged that “elements” of the Pakistani government know where bin Laden is hiding.

But what if bin Laden is not hiding in Pakistan? What if he’s been dead since December 2001? How then does Islamabad prove that some of its government officials are not concealing his whereabouts?

While the mainstream media rarely if ever question the belief that bin Laden is still alive, some cracks have been appearing in the consensus. In a September 11, 2009 piece in Britain’s Daily Mail, Sue Reid wondered, “What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake—and that he is being kept ‘alive’ by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?”

An even more prominent sceptic is UPI Editor at Large Arnaud de Borchgrave whose July 26, 2010 commentary titled “Elvis bin Laden” may herald a new consensus. Sifting much the same evidence as Reid, the “legendary journalist” stated that “some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.”

Both articles cited experts who have studied the post-December 2001 audios and videos and concluded they are fakes.

In 2007, Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does computer voice recognition for bank security, found that the voices on recordings after mid-December 2001 differed clearly from earlier recordings of bin Laden.

Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s religious studies’ department and the foremost bin Laden expert, noted in a 2007 book the inconsistency between the increasingly secular language of the audios and videos and bin Laden’s earlier distinctive religious speech.

Assessing the evidence, Angelo M. Codevilla, a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War and a professor of international relations at Boston University, wryly concluded that “Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden.”

So, if bin Laden is as dead as Elvis, who’s been faking all those scary threats in his name?

According to U.S. and British intelligence officials, al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication, has been run since 2001 by Adam Gadahn, a California-born convert to radical Islam who now goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki.

Gadahn found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County while living with his grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League. Ostensibly a civil rights organization set up to fight anti-Semitism, the ADL is “little more than a de facto adjunct of the Israeli government” which has even been caught spying on American critics of Israel.

Adam’s parents changed their surnames to Gadahn in the mid-1970s. The name refers to the Biblical warrior Gideon who, with the aid of trumpets and clay jars, defeated Israel’s enemies.

As Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo put it, Adam Gadahn is “an awfully odd figure, whose sudden evolution from a nice Jewish boy into Osama bin Laden’s Goebbels is just a little hard to take.”

Equally hard to take is the means by which the public learns of bin Laden’s latest pronouncements.

“Almost every statement by Osama bin Laden published on the Internet...is first made public by SITE and IntelCenter,” according to a Spiegel Online profile of Rita Katz, Josh Devon and Ben Venzke, who founded the two companies that supposedly track al-Qaeda online.

SITE co-founder Rita Katz is an Iraqi-born Jew, whose father was publicly hanged in Iraq after the 1967 War as an Israeli spy. Katz, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, tries to downplay the significance of her background but is not always successful. “When you grow up in a place like Iraq,” she told Spiegel, “you understand maybe a little bit about how Arabs think, and also what they are capable of.”

When Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, analysed a 2006 al-Qaeda video of Ayman al-Zawahiri for alterations and enhancements, he discovered that the As-Sahab and IntelCenter logos had been added at the same time.

Attempting to make light of the understandable suspicions that the “terror trackers” are working for Israeli intelligence, the Spiegel article jokes: “And the conspiracy theories pontificating that SITE and IntelCenter shoot the bin Laden videos themselves will continue to exist in the future. And Katz, Venzke and Devon will continue to see the humor in such theories: Yep, this is Mossad Headquarters. Exactly!”

But with the hunt for the elusive bin Laden having already cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, perhaps Americans should demand conclusive proof that Israel hasn’t conned them into fighting a phoney “war on terror.”

(Maidhc Ó Cathail is widely published writer based in Japan. His work has appeared in Antiwar.com, Khaleej Times, Pakistan Observer, Tehran Times, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and many more publications.)



9 comments:

  1. Many years back when Osama was hiding in Waziristan, many people in the Frontier province knew about it. The reason is that considering the local environment and culture it is not possible to completely hide this kind of information from the public eye. And mind you, that was the time when tribal areas of Pakistan were closed areas and Army had not much of access there.

    These days if Osama was in those areas it would have been known straightaway, because of Army's presence there and also the day and night vigil that intelligence agencies of the whole world are keeping over the region, not only on the ground but also from air and space. High rate of successful drone attacks are a proof of the intelligence coverage of the region.

    Knowing his temperament it is hard to believe that Osama does not want to release his video tapes any more, IF he is alive. It's been a long time we saw a video of his.

    Some people in the international media call Pakistan Army and ISI as 'a state within a state'. They might think that Osama could be in the custody/protection of the Army/ISI. Even Hillary Clinton has blamed that 'some people' in the govt are likely to be knowing about Osama's whereabouts. IF these people are hinting at Army or ISI, I don't think they are right. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has proven to be a very highly responsible person. He has, through his patience and concerted hard work managed to detach the Army from civilian/govt affairs. He has restored the Army's image/prestige in the eyes of the public, fought a most successful anti-terror war and earned positive acknowledgment from our friends and allies world wide. Needless to say that the Army has achieved all this under his command but at a very heavy cost in the shape of thousands of casualties. The General won't be thoughtless enough to see his own toil and sacrifices given by Army families go down the drain of history by doing this kind of a stupid thing. He enjoys the respect of American and NATO military leadership as a competent military leader and a trustworthy friend. He has thus carved a name and place for himself in history through his hard work and sincerity towards national cause. HE WOULD SIMPLY NOT LIKE TO LOSE HIS GOOD IMAGE BY INDULGING IN ANY KIND OF WRONG DOING !!

    OSAMA IS DEAD. PERIOD.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Many years back when Osama was hiding in Waziristan, many people in the Frontier province knew about it. The reason is that considering the local environment and culture it is not possible to completely hide this kind of information from the public eye. And mind you, that was the time when tribal areas of Pakistan were closed areas and Army had not much of access there.

    These days if Osama was in those areas it would have been known straightaway, because of Army's presence there and also the day and night vigil that intelligence agencies of the whole world are keeping over the region, not only on the ground but also from air and space. High rate of successful drone attacks are a proof of the intelligence coverage of the region.

    Knowing his temperament it is hard to believe that Osama does not want to release his video tapes any more, IF he is alive. It's been a long time we saw a video of his.

    ...............Continues...................

    ReplyDelete
  3. Some people in the international media call Pakistan Army and ISI as 'a state within a state'. They might think that Osama could be in the custody/protection of the Army/ISI. Even Hillary Clinton has blamed that 'some people' in the govt are likely to be knowing about Osama's whereabouts. IF these people are hinting at Army or ISI, I don't think they are right. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has proven to be a very highly responsible person. He has, through his patience and concerted hard work managed to detach the Army from civilian/govt affairs. He has restored the Army's image/prestige in the eyes of the public, fought a most successful anti-terror war and earned positive acknowledgment from our friends and allies world wide. Needless to say that the Army has achieved all this under his command but at a very heavy cost in the shape of thousands of casualties. The General won't be thoughtless enough to see his own toil and sacrifices given by Army families go down the drain of history by doing this kind of a stupid thing. He enjoys the respect of American and NATO military leadership as a competent military leader and a trustworthy friend. He has thus carved a name and place for himself in history through his hard work and sincerity towards national cause. HE WOULD SIMPLY NOT LIKE TO LOSE HIS GOOD IMAGE BY INDULGING IN ANY KIND OF WRONG DOING !!

    OSAMA IS DEAD. PERIOD.

    ReplyDelete
  4. An unresolved enigma. Who can untangle it? The Americans might do it ultimately.
    Saeed Qureshi

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  5. @Saeed Qureshi Sb: I quite often recall that journey when i was in a que to be on board a domestic flight. That was the the day and time when media was screaming with breaking news of Saddam Hussain's arret story and repeated footage of his discovery out of a mole. In our que of fellow passengers there was quite a large group mix of European American travelllers..while moving in the Que and watching the lounge tv they all were quite leisurly and casualy excahnging their individual comments on the show, when a lady ahead of me (probably a European) in her excitment loudly voiced over.."its all a drama..Saddam is been always an American tool and they knew it al about him and where he was hiding..one day we will all see Ossama being discovered same way out of some keller in White House" We all broke a huge laughter and our journey so continued.

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  6. The Tribals of the North West Frontier (now Kyber Pakhtunkwa) are very savvy when it comes to earning profits.If Osama was alive, he would have been sold five times over, to the highest bidder. There is no way he could escape the treachery and betrayal for that long.

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  7. Thank you for your comments.

    If you follow the link under "Hillary Clinton" above, you'll have an idea whose interests she serves when she implied that Osama was being hidden by "elements" in Pakistan.

    Destabilization of Pakistan is the name of the game.

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  8. Hello Maidhc
    Listen to this LINK. This is of Benazir when she returned last to Pakistan. It is a 15 min live interview to AL JAZEERA. At 6.5 time she talks of the murder of Osama.The interviewer does not check her or question her.
    What the hell is going on?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIO8B6fpFSQ

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  9. This is the first time I have seen this interview. It is really amazing how calmly and in a natural flow she makes the mention of Osama's killing by Omar Shaikh, as if it was a well understood and accepted fact. Moreover, even David Frost does not question or challenge this statement at all. In fact he doesn't look the least surprised and seems to accept it as a foregone conclusion.
    Surprisingly no body ever asked Be Nazir or David Frost how they seemed so sure about Osama's murder.

    ReplyDelete