Take a trip back to Tora Bora, Afhganistan, in late 2001 - the last time Osama bin Laden was certified to be seen alive.
By Pepe Escobar
Al-Jazeera
".....The problem is the man who was last seen alive on November 30, 2001 was reported dead, again, and again, and again. A Taliban leader said it happened in mid-December 2001, near Tora Bora (he claimed to have attended the funeral); Osama had not been able to survive a serious lung problem.
By late 2002, everyone from then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, Israeli intelligence and the FBI's Dale Watson was sure of it. Yet it took Saudi intelligence years to come up with a definitive date: August 23, 2006. Throughout the 2000s, all Osama videotapes were revealed to be crass fakes.
Beyond the fact that Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan insists that Pakistan was not in the loop about the target assassination; beyond the fact that Osama was sold out by the Pakistani ISI and the military; beyond the fact that "justice" means capturing and trying someone in a court of law - not a targeted killing; beyond the suspicious fact that Washington did not profit from exhibiting Osama's body, Che Guevara-style (after all, Osama reveled in selling his myth as a sort of Sheikh Guevara); beyond the fact that al-Qaeda had already been strategically defeated by the Great 2011 Arab Revolt, and thus Osama was already irrelevant – a nagging question remains.
That body now slowly disintegrating in the waters of the Arabian Sea – is it the real shaheed who chose, as promised, not to surrender and die in a "firefight" this past Monday? Or is it a replicate? "
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