Bin Laden is Dead; Long Live “Bin Laden”
Who’s keeping the terror myth alive?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
August 16, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --- 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 a widely published writer based in Japan.
To read more of his writing, go to Maidhc Ó Cathail: Writing and Analysis.
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