Ulasan ini di petik dari akhbar The Star.
Thursday May 12, 2011
Osama may still have the last laugh
Midweek
By Bunn Nagara
After the initial jubilation, Osama bin Laden’s reported death is becoming less than solidly convincing.
THE Sept 11 terrorist attacks on US soil is not the only event whose 10th anniversary is approaching.
This week, US and Pakistani officials said a secret deal was struck between the two countries a decade ago for unilateral US military action within Pakistan.
The deal is said to have been made between Gen Pervez Musharraf and President George W. Bush. It supposedly resulted from Osama’s escape from US bombardment of eastern Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in late 2001.
The deal, quickly denied by Musharraf, allowed US forces to launch operations in Pakistan as and when it found fit. It would have the silent approval of the Pakistani authorities, who could then protest loudly for domestic consumption.
So far, events have gone according to script. Variables include the fate of the future billions in US aid for Pakistan and the precise nature of diplomatic relations between them.
Another event also approaching its 10th anniversary is the death of Osama himself. This is unlike the conspiracy theory that Osama is still alive and well somewhere.
There is a growing body of circumstantial evidence and belief around the world that the alleged head of al-Qaeda had died in the 2001 Tora Bora attack. Subsequent events including video releases are said to be devised to perpetuate his continued “existence” for US geopolitical interests.
In this scenario, the testimony of Osama’s supposed captive family and al-Qaeda itself are of questionable origin. Its very secretiveness allows it to be another covert false flag operation by US authorities.
No pictures of a dead Osama have been shown that can stand up to scrutiny. An initial mugshot has been exposed by Pakistan’s Geo TV as fake.
His body was swiftly dumped in the ocean, preventing verification by witnesses or forensic examination by experts. Despite the US Navy SEALs team that raided the Abbottabad hideout equipped with video cameras on their helmets, no graphic image of Osama, in close-up or from a distance, has been available.
Even senior members of the US government who watched the live feed from Abbottabad in “real time” from those helmet cameras had 25 minutes blacked out, CIA director Leon Panetta admitted this week.
President Obama said watching the raid live in the White House Situation Room was the longest 40 minutes of his life, but those 25 minutes must have been even longer.
Much of the testimony about Osama’s death in late 2001 or early 2002 has come from senior US and Pakistani officials over the past decade.
Gen (Rtd) Hameed Gul, former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, is among those saying that the US raid on the Abbottabad compound was a hoax.
In December 2001, Pakistan’s Observer newspaper reported that the Afghan Taliban had found Osama dead and buried him. In the same month, US forces ousted the Taliban from government.
The following month, Pakistani leader Gen Pervez Musharraf said he believed that Osama was already dead. He said Osama’s dialysis machines needed for his kidney condition had been destroyed at Tora Bora.
Later that year, Afghan president Hamid Karzai said much the same on CNN, with the belief shared by the FBI’s head of counterterrorism. An unnamed Republican Party source also confirmed to US radio host Alex Jones that Osama’s body had been kept “on ice” by the Bush administration until a politically favourable time.
Democrats then made an issue of that and the White House apparently retreated from that measure and relied on “Osama videos” instead.
In late 2001, another video of Osama appeared, showing a younger, chubbier image grinning untypically. The point of that video was to “take responsibility” for the Sept 11 attacks.
The following year, senior US government security official Dr Steve Pieczenik announced on US radio that Osama had been dead for several months. Pieczenik had served in various presidential administrations and aided Osama and the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Gen Tommy Franks, who led the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, then let slip in a news conference that Osama was already dead. Pieczenik believes that Osama had died not of renal failure but from Marfan Syndrome, which does not make US forces out as heroic for having hunted him successfully.
In early 2007, “new” videos of Osama looking quite unlike the gaunt and greying figure before Tora Bora’s onslaught were released. Prof Bruce Lawrence of Duke University said the videos were fake, and he believed that Osama had already died.
In November that year, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told David Frost on Aljazeera that Omar Sheikh was the man who had killed Osama. Omar, a British-born Pakistani militant, had earlier been recruited by the MI6 British intelligence agency and whom Musharraf suspected to be a double agent.
The following month, Benazir herself was killed soon after her return to Pakistan following a visit to the Bush White House. Not only did she say openly that Osama had died years ago, she had wanted the US and Britain to stop pretending he was still alive.
By 2009, Pakistani President Ali Asif Zardari, Benazir’s widower, said he did not believe Osama was still alive. In the US, others who refused to believe the standard version of Osama remaining alive until early this month were news veteran Walter Cronkite and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
Last week, the possibility of Osama being kept a virtual prisoner in the Abbottabad compound was floated. Former US Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend added to this view by saying a secret video of Osama there looked like he was a prisoner.
Meanwhile, establishment voices opposing sceptics of the official story dismissed all speculation as conspiracy theories. But so far the score is that the US government has scored some hits, plus a timely hike in public opinion, regardless of how or when Osama had died.
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