Obama aide: Seems no one knows bin Laden’s status
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s national security adviser says he isn’t sure if Osama bin Laden is dead or alive.
Retired Marine Gen. James Jones said Sunday that U.S. intelligence agencies are looking at data and watching for confirmed appearances by the al-Qaida leader.
Jones said, “The truth is, I don’t think anybody knows.”
For quite a while after rumors of his death in Afghanistan in 2002, I thought he was probably dead. Then I seem to recall that we got a video tape or two in which he made reference to current events, and various US agencies confirmed that it was him doing the video.
Do they now believe their ID was in error, and it was a double or something?
I don’t trust Obama as far as I can spit, so I wonder if he thought bin Laden was dead even as he was promising to hunt him down. That certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
Anyway, here is a sort of rundown on the various reports of bin Laden’s demise.
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I have always believed - and contended, whenever the subject arose in conversations - that bin Laden died ca. 2001-2 during the U.S. incursion and campaign in Afghanistan, most likely somewhere in the Tora Bora caves that were the last refuge (at that juncture) of the Taliban before their remnants were driven into the Pakistan highlands.
Yes, the video tapes were fakes - skillful fakes, but fakes nonethetheless - and were motivated by the desire (quite understandable) to keep the legend alive as long as possible.
Of course, there are many (including in the U.S., even among the current administration) who will never agree with that - there are some, to this day, who (despite his remains being later disinterred) maintain that Che Guevara escaped his last misadventures in Bolivia, and lived on for many years elsewhere.
Exactly how and where bin Laden died should not, in my view, be considered terribly important.
Sorry, but, although I do think The Won probably thought bin Laden was already dead, that doesn’t seem too important either - our Fearless Leader, as I have stated before, is a practiced and skilled prevaricator, even smoother at it than Slick Willie Clintoon. Either way, his statement was simply more campaign rhetoric.
What JSB said. I figured the old camel humper’s been dead for about seven years. If he isn’t, it would be easy enough for a clear video to be made, one which almost certainly shows the genuine ObL, rather than the blurry amateur vids which might have ObL and might have a look-not-especially-alike.
I suppose it’s possible that ObL is still alive but badly banged up. Maybe the masterminds of al Qaeda figure that if they show him in all his nose-missing glory the brainless followers won’t be so quick to support aQ.
But all this is pointless blathering. We plebs were warned back in 2001 or 2002 that al Qaeda is a non-centralised collection of independent groups generally sharing philosophy and goals. That’s why it’ll be so hard to stop them and so hard to know when they really have been stopped. And that’s why we plebs would have to put up with a bit of inconvenience and curtailment of liberties. It’s just for the duration of the war, you know, but the war is going to be a long one. Given this decentralization, ObL is at most a figurehead, the driving force behind a successful attack. Whether he’s around or not, aQ will keep going forever.