Bin Laden, Been Dead? The media were abuzz today with reports that Usama bin Laden might have died on August 23rd of this year from typhoid, in Pakistan. Various commentators tried to throw doubt upon that premise and assert that he was almost certainly still alive. I don't believe it. Any of it. I have long believed he died years ago, in mid- or late 2004 at latest.
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One of the less convincing rationales for believing him still alive was uttered on CNN (I think; I watch so much news from so many sources that unless I write something down or see connected to an item a person I know to be affiliated with a particular news source, I remember only the facts, not the source). An Arab observer suggested that in order to function, al-Qaeda needs to communicate news of events affecting the organization to all members and potential members, and websites are quick to update events because it is important that followers have faith in leaders.
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But if communication among members is so important, why hasn't bin Laden been communicating to his followers regularly all these years? It's nonsense.
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The suggestion is made that he might have been rendered incommunicado by some problem with communications technology, or it might have been too dangerous for him to communicate with the outside world with any regularity. I don't buy it.
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Almost all of us have seen movies of World War II Resistance fighters taking their lives in their hands to send radio messages to London on equipment they had to move from one location to another and/or by sending transmissions so short that German triangulation devices could not home in on the transmission location. Spies find ways to get their messages out from behind enemy lines all the time. Al-Qaeda is supposed to be enormously sophisticated and well-funded. If Usama bin Laden had been alive all this time, he would have been in frequent communication, thumbing his nose at the stupidity, incompetence, and fecklessness of his "Crusader" enemies.
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Instead, all we've had is occasional stiff video performances with questionable sound quality that required days of evaluation to determine their authenticity.
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We have all seen the ease with which fotografs can be falsified, for artistic or satiric effect. There was a huge controversy over the doctoring of fotos of the destruction that this year's Israeli airstrikes produced in Beirut.
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What can be done with fotos can be done with videos and voice.
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Synthesized voices can be made to say anything, and prerecorded bits of actual speech can be put together in natural-sounding phrases that were never uttered by the speaker. Many of us can hear that over the fone when inquiring about our bank or other account balance.
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We've come a long way, technologically speaking, from the day of the 18-minute gap in a Nixon tape that forensic technicians could not restore.
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Bin Laden was said to have had very serious kidney problems as required dialysis. There are no dialysis machines in caves in remote corners of Pakistan. Nor are there operating theaters in caves in which to give bin Laden a kidney transplanted from an eager donor. Men with failing kidneys don't last long in medically backward areas of the Third World, and coaches don't stay silent while their team is being beaten and bloodied into defeat.
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Thus it is that I have believed that bin Laden has been dead for a long time. The world is strange, and thus might be so strange that despite all the reasons there are to believe bin Laden has been dead a long time, he might still be alive. So I'm not betting my life that he's dead. But I would put a fiver on it. One fiver.
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Speaking of sick Moslem extremists, Louis Farrakhan, the present-day voice of Elijah Muhammed's Black Muslim movement, the Nation of Islam, is very ill, and possibly dying. So sad.
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If I were a superstitious Moslem, I might think God is trying to tell us something.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,700 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:27 PM