By Randy A. Sprinkle

At the time I began writing this piece, though many news organizations and commentators have weighed in on several recent events that have caught the world’s attention lately, there is one commentator that has been quiet. His absence poses a question that is asked about him every now and then, but mostly every now: Just where is Osama bin Laden? No one can definitively answer that question - at least no one who is talking; but for me it is time to ask that question again.

One reason why I revisit the question is the recent revelation of a planned al Qeada attack on the New York City Subway system. A New York Times article citing author Ron Suskind, reported that in 2003, U.S. intelligence had discovered a design for a makeshift device that could produce deadly cyanide; furthermore, that there was a plan to use a series of such devices in a coordinated attack on the New York City subway system.

U.S. intelligence learned of the plot after an informant close to Al Qaeda leaders told U.S. officials that bin Laden Ayman al-Zawahiri (Osama’s #2) had canceled the plan in January 2003. (Hmmmm… Binny Boy out of the office at the time?)

Likewise, the recent death in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi again begs the question. We have a tape recording, from #2, praising Zarqawi, but it appears to have been pre-recorded (he’s probably still thinking about that dinner he missed in Pakistan a while back). According to the AP, there is yet another tape from a “major Iraqi insurgent figure” seeking to rally his troops. This tape bears the voice of Abu Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the head of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, which groups five Iraqi insurgent organizations including al-Qaida in Iraq. (Heard his name before? - I can’t place it.)

Yet where is the voice of the tall thin fearless figure that was constantly boasting and condemning the US on video until Toro Bora? All we have gotten since then are lousy audio cassette tapes with the sound quality equal to that of a hand held Radio Shack recorder under a pillow and one slightly fuzzy video in 2004 just days before the presidential election. Until that video there were several both conservative and liberal commentators who confidently asserted that he was dead.

The enormously witty and wise Mark Steyn repeatedly declared that Osama was dead and wrote the following less than a week before the video appeared:

As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he’s never written to complain. There’s no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as an indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he’s in no condition to get up.

I also believed with an amount of certainty that he had met his demise and was quite surprised when the video surfaced.

Indeed, there were a number of reasons to surmise he was dead:

“I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a … kidney patient,” Gen. Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with CNN in January of 2002 in which he also stated that Pakistan knew bin Laden took two dialysis machines into Afghanistan and that “One was specifically for his own personal use.”

A source within U.S. intelligence concurred saying that bin Laden needed dialysis every three days and “it is fairly obvious that that could be an issue when you are running from place to place, and facing the idea of needing to generate electricity in a mountain hideout.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai stated later that year he also believed that bin Laden was probably dead as did the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counter-terrorism chief, Dale Watson. There are many other credible sources and other facts of evidence available that would weigh on the post Bin Laden side of the scales which I will not go into here because it is all moot if the 2004 video is Osama bin Laden.

Ah, yes. That 2004 video which served great heaping helpings of egg, enough for the faces of scores upon scores scattered throughout the world of media and cyberspace. I am not going to try to deconstruct that video here other than to note that there are a number of inconsistencies such as a change from being left handed to right handed, conflicting syntax and speech patterns, and some still frames from the video looking more than a little fishy when placed in context next to known actual photos. I will leave it at that and if anyone cares they can search and come to their own conclusions on whether most of us were duped or not.

But so it was that Binny was born anew on that day and given a new lease on life, at least in news reports and op-ed columns. They began writing him into the script again and once you have someone in the script it becomes difficult without new information to write them out of the story. Maybe they should contact Hollywood to find out how that’s done. I also don’t believe the US government is in any great hurry to resolve the question.

I have my own thoughts and I can’t help but wonder if this is a little bit like the story of “The Emperors New Clothes,” only this time the emperor got a new life. I keep waiting for a worthy authority to come forward and declare him dead again still. Yet as long as radical Islam keeps him alive, if he is not, it will work against them for that tall lanky man is fading and getting a little bit shorter everyday.

And to those of you who boldly declared him dead up until October 30, 2004; I would only suggest you keep a wash cloth handy for all that egg — just in case.

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Related: United States, War Against Islamo-fascism, Pakistan, Terrorist Groups, Afghanistan

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