Rather Alive Than Dead?

Had he been dead for a long time? Was he killed, but not by the Americans? The operation led by U.S. SEALs, aimed to destroy Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, aroused a great number of questions and became a hot discussion point for conspirators. Shortly after President Obama announced the death of America’s number one wanted terrorist, the Internet was flooded with various versions of the event that refuted the official story.

Perhaps the most widely discussed aspect of the event, at least in Abbottabad, was the physical elimination of bin Laden, the official details of which are not considered accurate in Pakistan or in Abbottabad itself. A neighbor of “a man resembling Osama bin Laden” said in an interview with the BBC that the person captured on the “home video” was not bin Laden, as claimed by Americans, but the house owner, Akbar Khan.

Of 50 Abbottabad locals interviewed by the BBC, only one person believed that the founder of al-Qaida was killed in their town. The rest believed that the video and photographs were falsifications.

Was There a Boy?

General Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, said to CNN that bin Laden has been dead for several years. Iran’s Intelligence Minister, Heydar Moslehi, agreed with him. However, according to Moslehi, bin Laden has been dead not for several years, but for several months. It is also possible that he died several days prior to the American operation.

Over the past 10 years, bin Laden has been presumed dead on more than one occasion. Fox News, for example, claimed that he died in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 of complications following a bout of pneumonia.

David Griffin, a professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California, even names the exact date of his death. He claims that bin Laden died on December 13, 2001 due to kidney failure. According to Griffin, the American government perpetuated the idea that bin Laden remained alive in order to preserve the enthusiasm of tens of millions of Americans for the wars against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Benazir Bhutto claimed that he had been killed in 2007 by the warlord Omar Sheikh.

It is most likely that Osama bin Laden is dead. Were this not the case, President Obama would certainly have been more cautious about taking on the risk of announcing the death of a possibly living person to the global community.

Bin Laden’s funeral at sea has also generated new rumors and led to some strange interpretations. The official explanation that bin Laden’s hasty funeral was due to a desire not to create a place of worship for future generations of Islamic fanatics was certainly aimed at the naïve American citizens.

The explanation suggested by conspirators appears to have more logic to it. They claim that it was due to a reluctance to conduct post-mortem examinations and identification procedures that the corpse of an unidentified person was thrown into the sea. Fans of conspiracy theories claim that the article “Islamic Funeral” on Wikipedia was amended 18 times 24 hours before bin Laden’s death, receiving more edits than had been posted during the previous six months. One of the changes made is the addition of the segment regarding the funeral at sea, which didn’t exist before.

Theater of the Absurd

The website InfoWars, owned by Alex Jones, a well-known talk show host on American radio, says that the so-called home video of bin Laden made public by the White House a week after his death is a forgery. The site claims that the U.S. administration took such a step out of desperation and a desire to give the official version more credibility as it was repeatedly changed by American authorities and began to fall apart.

The video has few differences from a video provided by the Pentagon in 2007. The new video captured bin Laden in the same gown with gold embroidery and a white headdress. The only detail that differs is the color of the background. Another noteworthy detail is that bin Laden never turns his face completely to the camera.

The man on the tape holds a remote control in his right hand. Meanwhile, according to information provided by the FBI, bin Laden was left-handed. Conspirators say that this is not the first time that the CIA has attempted to pass off old recordings of bin Laden as new videos.

Conspirators also believe that the recording showing President Obama and the members of his cabinet intently monitoring the live operation is a fake. The website PrisonPlanet openly states that it’s a montage.

A renowned psychologist and thriller writer, Steve Pechenik, also calls this video “complete nonsense.” The whole planet, he says, watched this theater of the absurd with sinking hearts. Pechenik is convinced that bin Laden died of Marfan syndrome in July of 2002 and that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were, in fact, initiated by the U.S. government.

Javad Jahangirzadeh, a member of the Iranian Parliament, and James Corbett, editor of The Corbett Report podcast, agreed with Pechenik. In their opinion, bin Laden helped the American government to conduct terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in order to create an image of Islam as a violent and militant religion. Eventually, when the need for bin Laden weakened, the government decided to eliminate him due to his position as a dangerous witness.

Victim of the Illuminati

Any science fiction writer would envy the imagination of conspirators. Fans of conspiracy theories, for example, noticed that both bin Laden and Hitler died around May 1. The Mystery of the Iniquity website inferred that both men were sacrificed in order to honor the secret order of the Illuminati.

Compared to this story of the Illuminati, and others of Prince William postponing his honeymoon not due to his urgency to return to work but the U.S. operation in Abbottabad, the claim that American troops killed bin Laden in order to create a pretext for an invasion of Pakistan seems quite plausible. It is no secret that bin Laden managed to stay alive for so long thanks to backers in the Pakistani Intelligence Services.

Ausaf, a Pakistani daily newspaper, reported that bin Laden was killed elsewhere and that his body was brought to Pakistan to justify the invasion of the country.

Another version, which has its supporters as well, claims that the founder of al-Qaida was betrayed by his own people. Proponents of this version believe that al-Qaida’s number two man, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, informed the U.S. government about bin Laden’s whereabouts. After having eliminated bin Laden, Egypt supposedly hopes to take control over al-Qaida, a goal that it has hoped to accomplish from the early days of al-Qaida’s creation, according to the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. The paper claims that it was al-Zawahiri and other secondary al-Qaida leaders who persuaded bin Laden to move to Abbottabad.

Al-Zawahiri could also have had a personal motive for taking over the leadership of al-Qaida. Tom Donilon, American National Security Advisor, has already named him the successive leader of al-Qaida.

Who Would Want It and Why?

According to conspirators, it is easy to understand the motives for which the White House created this hoax. President Obama, of course, hopes that killing the most wanted terrorist in the world will give impetus to his 2012 presidential campaign and distract Americans from questions about his citizenship.

Al-Qaida's acknowledgment of the death of its leader can, of course, be just as easily explained if he is still alive. It will be harder now for America to chase after a “dead" terrorist with taxpayer money. On the other hand, with bin Laden’s death seen to make him a “martyr,” it will certainly cause a surge of hatred toward the U.S., and new fanatics will soon join the ranks of terrorists.