This is a retitled re-post: Osama bin Laden: Have Reports Of His Death Been Greatly Minimized? By: libbyliberal Wednesday October 21, 2009 10:56 am

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/10504

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Apparently David Ray Griffin has written a little book that asks a big question, “Is Osama bin Laden dead or alive?”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23691.htm

In March of 2009, former Foreign Service officer Angelo Codevilla published an essay in the American Spectator entitled “Osama bin Elvis.” Explaining his title, Codevilla wrote: “Seven years after Osama bin Laden’s last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis’s presence among us than for his.”

Now before engaging in Mr. Griffin’s compelling case that bin Laden very well may be dead, I need to take a second to process the freeing but startling experience of putting down the rather rancid by now national kool-aid, and question the authority that is my government. My and our dysfunctional government.

The profound realization for me, personally, upon being posed such a question by Mr. Griffin, is that I had not entertained it myself before now. I blithely trusted the idea that bin Laden was alive because my government did not tell me otherwise. In fact, President Obama is still using the call to hunt bin Laden as primary lynchpin of the rationale for this nation’s wreaking so much destruction within its borders, via bankrupting its citizenry, gutting societal infrastructure, dooming the accessibility of quality health care, etc., and beyond its borders (crossing many borders) bombing, killing, maiming, displacing, and/or traumatizing millions of human beings, whether our own soldier children or foreign citizens in the name (or more accurately hypocritical and surreal political “game”) of righteous self defense and justice.

National Intelligence Estimates have Osama bin Laden somewhere along the border of Pakistan we are told. And even now, one of President Obama’s main talking points for continuing the wars include capturing or killing Osama bin Laden to prevent him from conducting another attack on U.S. soil. His death would certainly put an end to that particular rhetorical mandate.

Griffin quotes President Obama in a White House address March 27, 2009:

“[A]l Qaeda and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe-haven in Pakistan. . . . [A]l Qaeda and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier. This almost certainly includes al Qaeda’s leadership: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.”

Griffin cites a Washington Post story from November 2008 which declared:

“President-elect Barack Obama . . . intends to renew the U.S. commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. . . . ‘This is our enemy,’ one adviser said of bin Laden, ‘and he should be our principal target.’”

Thia violent manhunt for the alleged mastermind of 9/11, begun in 2001, has wrought so much devastation, without an end in sight. George W. Bush, the most corrupt and incompetent president in the history of America very likely, has set in motion a perpetual Middle Eastern war that may completely destroy the planet even before amoral corporations do via climate change.

What is wrong with ME? With us? Why had I – we — not entertained the possibility that our dysfunctional, patriarchal, amoral government would lie to us?

Even after the WMD whopper.

Why wouldn’t our government, even now with the post-honeymoon, not so transparent and changes-not-so-much-to-be-believed-in President Obama lie about bin Laden as a tool for propaganda? Why would he and the military, corporate and political elites not readily conjure the specter of bin Laden as international bogeyman to justify, protect and promote vile anti-human rights behaviors that, upon such reflection as now, one knows must be bringing a big addictive payoff in terms of power and control and/or money and/or simply a release from accountability to a small group of self-aggrandizing human vultures, present government entities not excepted?

As for Mr. Griffin’s compelling, primarily circumstantial but strong common sense case for the probable death of bin Laden, it is well worth a read. Griffin’s summary of his book is at the following link (as posted earlier):

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23691.htm

Before relating his case in this article, Griffin presumes to launch an even more provocative speculation, as to whether or not bin Laden was even responsible for engineering 9/11. He points out that the FBI has admitted to lacking hard evidence of the connection. But Griffin confesses that this would not be palatable for the vast majority of the U.S. public, and points to the recent uproar over the Van Jones 9/11-truth-petition-signing of years ago. In his book Griffin claims to keep his analysis confined to the possibility of bin Laden’s death.

He presents both factual and testimonial evidence. Some of his factual evidence:

(1) Up until mid-December 13, 2001, the CIA had regularly been intercepting messages between bin Laden and his people, but after that time no messages were ever intercepted again.

(2) On December 26, 2001, a leading Pakistani newspaper published a story reporting that bin Laden had died in mid-December:

“A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement . . . stated . . . that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial.”

(3) Bin Laden had kidney disease. He had been treated for it in the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, at which time he reportedly ordered two dialysis machines to take home. According to CBS News, the night before the 9/11 attaches bin Laden was in Pakistan being given kidney dialysis treatment. In January of 2001, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said upon viewing a video of bin Laden from November or December of 2001 that bin Laden appeared to be in the last stages of kidney failure.

(4) CNN reported in July 2002 that bin Laden’s bodyguards had been captured in February and sources believed since they were captured, the chances were likely he was dead.

5) Since 2001, no one has stepped forward to respond to the $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or killing, despite the desperate poverty in Pakistan, and the fact that at least half of the population would be unsympathetic to him.

Griffin cites testimonials made by those who assert bin Laden has died, either from their own first hand account or from trusted hearsay. They include such people as President Musharraf of Pakistan, Dale Watson, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism unit, Oliver North, President Karzai of Afghanistan, an Israeli intelligence source that maintained video and audio messages from bin Laden were fabricated, Pakistani intelligence sources that accused the U.S. of exploiting the manhunt to invade Iraq.

Griffin writes:

For this reason, perhaps, the stories about the demise of bin Laden largely came to an end in the latter part of 2002, when the United States was gearing up for its attack on Iraq. From then until now, there have been few such stories.

Recently, however, two former intelligence officers have spoken out. In October 2008, former CIA case officer Robert Baer suggested in passing during an interview on National Public Radio that bin Laden was no longer among the living. When Baer was asked about this, he said: “Of course he’s dead.”

Griffin regards the audio and video tapes of bin Laden post 2002 as fakes. He contends that intelligence agency experts can be fooled. Maybe even encouraged to be fooled, Mr. Griffin?

Griffin writes:

Also obviously fabricated was the “October Surprise” video, which appeared on October 29, 2004, just in time to help George W. Bush get reelected. One clue that it was a fake, aside from its timing, is provided by its language. Bin Laden’s own messages were saturated with references to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed. But in this October Surprise video, Allah was mentioned rarely and the only “Mohammad” mentioned was Mohamed Atta. Also, whereas undoubtedly authentic bin Laden messages portrayed worldly events as cause or at least permitted by Allah, the speaker on this October Surprise video gave a purely secular account of events, even telling the American people: “Your security is in your own hands.”

He goes on:

The most obviously faked video is one that, appearing in 2007, was identical to the October Surprise video of 2004, except that the bin Laden figure now had a completely black beard, leading me to call it the video from “Blackbeard the Terrorist.” Although pundits tried, with straight faces, to explain why bin Laden might have dyed his beard, or put on a fake one, this video was best treated with the respect it deserved by a YouTube video featuring a actor wearing a very long, very black, beard, and saying:

Hello, long time no see. It is me, Osama bin Laden. And no, this not to be confused with just-for-men hair color commercial. . . . I make this video to prove to world that me still alive and kicking.

This video is very funny. But there is, of course, nothing funny about the fact that obviously fake bin Laden videos have been used, and are still being used, to justify the AfPak war …

Once again, the search for Osama bin Laden is the rationale used to a war-weary and skeptical U.S. population to stir up strong emotional residue from the admittedly horrifying attacks of 9/11 in order to justify U.S. military escalation in the not insignificantly oil-rich regions of the Middle East.

Griffin suggests that those in the United States speaking against the extension of war should look to the probable death of Osama bin Laden as a further argument to desist the debilitating and violent (seemingly genocide-wide) manhunt.

Color me cynical, but my skepticism locked in when I read Codevilla’s coinage, “Osama bin Elvis.” Point made, Mr. Griffin.