Commentary By Ron Beasley
On the 8th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan it might be a good time to ask - whatever happened to Osama bin Laden? I have always thought that he has been dead for all or most of those eight years and I'm not alone. Romesh Rathnesar first suggested that Osama bin Laden was dead in June of 2002. In April of this year Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said that there was no evidence that Osama was alive.
He said that neither his own advisers in Pakistan nor US
intelligence agencies had detected any trace of the al-Qaeda leader
since Al Jazeera television broadcast an audio recording of his voice
in March.But even then, unlike on previous occasions the
authenticity of the voice purporting to be bin Laden was not confirmed
by the CIA.There have been regular reports of bin Laden's ill
health, notably speculation about his kidneys failing. Mr Zardari said
his own advisers believed there was substance to the rumours."The question is whether he is alive or dead. There is no trace of him," he said.
"There is no news. They obviously feel that he does not exist any more but that's not confirmed."
But it's David Ray Griffen, author of Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? who's done the work and seems to have the evidence the Osama bin Laden is dead and probably has been for most of the eight years. I heard Griffen on the Thom Hartmann show this morning and he presented his evidence. The following is from a review of Griffen's book by Tod Fletcher at Global Research.ca.
Osama Bin Laden: Dead Or Alive? by David Ray Griffin is a crucially important and timely examination of the whole range of evidence bearing on the question, is Osama bin Laden still alive? The importance of this question for the present comes from the fact that the United States under its new president is escalating its offensive in Afghanistan and expanding the war into Pakistan, and has claimed that the �hunt for bin Laden� is one of its principal motivations for doing so. Either explicitly or implicitly, the US government and major media outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post continue to assert that bin Laden is alive, hiding in the tribal territories on the �AfPak� border, posing an undiminished threat to US security.In his gripping new book, Griffin strikes at the root of this pretext for war by closely examining all the evidence that has come out since September 11, 2001, either indicating that bin Laden is still alive or that he is in fact dead. His conclusion is that bin Laden is certainly dead, and that in all likelihood he died in very late 2001. Griffin shows that many US experts in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency came to this very same conclusion long ago, but their views, which do not support the continuation of what President Obama, borrowing the term from Dick Cheney, calls �the long war,� have received very little media attention. Were they to do so, one of the main props for the war regime would be undermined.
But bin Laden is worth more alive than dead so his death has been covered up. And he is still being used today by the hawks to justify AF/PAK policy.
He shows that the US military in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in
2003 employed a psychological operations unit to produce bogus evidence
of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, as a pretext for the
invasion. The psyops unit produced a �letter� from a Jordanian in
Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, that was then �intercepted�, purportedly
enroute to Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. The psyop was advanced
after the invasion by the New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, who
wrote front-page stories presenting the �evidence� as genuine.
Journalists at other organizations, including Newsweek magazine and The Telegraph
of London, however, thought it highly likely at the time that the
letter was bogus. Griffin concludes that the target of the
psychological operation was the US public. He asks, could something
very similar have been going on with the �bin Laden messages�? Does
the US government desire to expand its war operations anywhere, say
into the precise places it claims bin Laden is still living in? Based
on the evidence Griffin presents, there is no reason to assume that
comparable psyops would not be utilized to achieve this goal.
And something many of us have noted - the timing of the messages:
Griffin shows that another reason to suspect the inauthenticity of the
�bin Laden messages� is that they frequently were released at key
moments when they would benefit the Bush administration in the pursuit
of particular objectives. In other words, the �messages� were almost
always objectively detrimental to the enemies of the US, and beneficial
to the Bush administration or the Blair government. Griffin lists 11
specific instances of this unusual characteristic of the �messages.�
I don�t buy much of this. Granted I can�t know if Osama is alive right now, but al Qaeda, like many such organizations, has never been shy about admitting the deaths of their leaders when they occurred, given that they can then turn them into martyrs to inspire others to join their cause. Would bin Laden be an exception to that rule for some reason?
ReplyDeleteZardawi and the Pakistan intelligence agency have long since wanted to pretend bin Laden and his extremist buddies aren�t really a problem for Pakistan, given their support for the Taliban that sheltered them, so I wouldn�t put too much faith in their claims. They don�t want to hunt down the Taliban leadership that have been harbouring al Qaeda�s remnants from the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and if they sell everyone on the idea that bin Laden is dead, then they face no pressure to do so!
And while some of the messages to and from from Zarqawi in Iraq were pretty clearly psy ops, many of the other messages didn�t ring that kind of false tone. As to their timing to assist the Bush administration, many of us also noted that keeping Bush/Cheney and their band of heavily hated reprobates in power greatly assisted al Qaeda�s recruitment drives, so it is no real surprise that they timed their releases in such a manner.
Finally, while the threat of al Qaeda and terrorism have been used to justify the AfPak campaign, when was the last time you heard those in charge personify the threat in the person of bin Laden? Or even Zawahiri, who I haven�t heard anybody thinks is dead? Personify the threat and you run the risk of actually eliminating it. Keep it diffuse and focused on things like ideology, and you can keep it going and going. The hawks have long since moved to the second option. Bin Laden hasn�t been the focus of US propaganda efforts for quite some time. Whether or not he�s actually stopped breathing would be highly unlikely to have the slightest effect on US policy in the region.
To me, this sounds more like somebody making a spectacular claim in the hopes of generating publicity and therefore sales. And looking at Griffen�s wikipedia page, he is also apparently one of those who thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy by the White House, not exactly someone I�d be looking to for balanced research.
Well BJ, I have been convinced that bin Laden was dead for several years quite possibly of natural causes. I don't really believe that a man who was a foot taller than the locals and had serious medical problems could have remained hidden for 8 years. Griffen was much more convincing in the radio interview.
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