OSAMA bin Laden has been dead for nine years, but the West and especially the US keep flogging him and use his name for pressurizing Pakistan. Some US experts report his presence in North Waziristan, while others find him in Quetta. Osama in all probability died on December 13, 2001 in the Tora Bora mountains, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Yet his video messages keep appearing continually, which are obviously fakes. The American government goes to a lot of efforts to prove to its own people that Osama is alive so that the hype of the threat al-Qaeda poses to the US citizens continues. Simultaneously, the ghost or apparition of Osama is used in video messages to keep Pakistan on its toes and also whip up the demands of “do More”. A CNN poll conducted in September of this year reveals that 67% of Americans believe it is unlikely the U.S. will ever capture or kill Osama bin Laden. That’s a dramatic increase since 2001, when only 20% believed that it would be unlikely that the government would catch him. One thing this poll does not address is why the American people believe it is unlikely that the U.S. will capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The reason is obvious—he is dead! By the time this poll was conducted, the American people had already grown tired of the ad nauseam attempts by the US government to breathe life into this long dead villain. Each new audio and videotape purporting to be that of Osama bin Laden failed to stand up to scrutiny.
One of the more prominent critics of these tapes is Former U.S. foreign intelligence officer Angelo M. Codevilla, who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University. In March of 2009, Codevilla wrote a damning critique of the countless recordings in an article for American Spectator Magazine. According to Codevilla, some videos show him [bin Laden] with a Semitic aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. He also determined that none of the audio recordings match up either. Not only has voice recognition software found them to be not authentic, but even the secular language used by the “fake Osama” is inconsistent with the real bin Laden’s strict Islamic Wahhabism. Codevilla also points out some of the finer discrepancies found in the videos. Like the fact that Bin Laden is left-handed, but uses his right hand to write with. He’s also seen wearing gold rings that are decidedly un-Wahabi. Despite these criticisms, vested interests continued releasing even more fake recordings. However, they were obviously persuaded to play it safe by exclusively sticking to an audio format.
They managed to keep him alive for a while longer, but then on January 29, 2010, they did something incredible. They produced an Osama bin Laden, who scolded the U.S. for its failure to address climate change. It was a cracking failure and quite possibly what drove that final nail into OBL’s coffin once and for all. We didn’t hear much from Osama bin Laden after that. Then, less than a month after the CNN poll was conducted, three more audiotapes were released during the month of October. But these recordings generated little excitement as by the now the public has grown weary of these feeble attempts to keep OBL alive. Last week, former White House aide Robert Weiner and national security analyst James Lewis in an op-ed piece for the Washington Times, floated the idea that Osama bin Laden is most likely dead. It’s high time that the spectre of Osama bin Laden is laid to rest and his fake videos stop terrorizing the American public as well as the government of Pakistan – Dailymailnews
