The UK’s Daily Mail reported that the U.S. dropped charges against Bin Laden for the USS Cole and US Embassy bombings:
U.S. District Court judge Lewis Kaplan, who had been presiding over the bin Laden case in Manhattan federal court, issued an order called ‘nolle prosequi’, which means ‘do not prosecute’ in Latin, a typical legal move once a defendant is deceased.
Bin Laden was indicted back in 1998 in the Southern District of New York for his role in the al Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed more than 200 people, including a dozen Americans.
The indictment was later revised to charge bin Laden in the dual bombings of two American embassies in East Africa that killed 224 on August 7, 1998, and in the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000. None of the charges involved the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
It was 5 long years ago that author Ed Haas had noticed that the FBI web page for Bin Laden did not mention the attacks of 9/11. He called the FBI to find out more:
On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.
Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
Since that report, the FBI has not displayed bin Laden’s web-page with information connecting him to the 9/11 attacks. Even further, the FBI has acknowledged evidence of controlled demolitions as “backed by thorough research” when presented by Richard Gage. That letter from the FBI is downloadable here. Watch Richard Gage here.
Lack of evidence to connect Bin Laden to 9/11 aside, many are wondering why the death of Usama does not translate into the death of the ill-named “War of Terror.” Quite the opposite has become the case actually.
Within days of killing Bin Laden a NATO air-strike was launched on Tripoli, Libya killing one of Gaddafi’s sons. The death was not confirmed by NATO and there are questions as to the veracity of the report as Al Jazeera noted, however the article also pointed out the following:
Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said on Sunday.
Al-Arab’s compound in Tripoli’s Garghour neighbourhood was attacked “with full power” in a “direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country”, Ibrahim said, calling the strike a violation of international law.
“What we have now is the law of the jungle,” he told a news conference. “We think now it is clear to everyone that what is happening in Libya has nothing to do with the protection of civilians.”
Alongside the Libya campaign were drone strikes in Yemen; barely remembered at this point but not completely forgotten. Karen Greenburg reports at Salon:
According to an AP press release and a CNN blog update it is being reported that the body of Osama Bin Laden has been dumped at sea in accordance with Islamic tradition.
A U.S. official says Osama bin Laden has been buried at sea.
After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.
The official, who spoke Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters, did not immediately say where that occurred.
Osama bin Laden’s body was buried at sea according to Islamic law because no country was willing or able to take his body for burial on land, senior Defense officials said.
“When there is no land alternative, Islamic law dictates that the body be buried within 24 hours, and that was the basis,” one official said. “
A second senior Defense official said there was no country willing or able to accept the body for burial, and U.S. forces “took pains to observe Muslim law.”
“Today’s religious rites were conducted on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in the Arabian sea. The ceremony started at 1:10am and finished at 2:10am ET,” the second official said. “Procedures for Islamic body were followed. The body was washed and placed in a white sheet. A military official read prepared remarks, which were then translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body of Osama bin Laden was placed on a flat board, which was then tipped up, and allowed to slide into the sea.”
That report is from 2006. The FBI still has “no evidence” directly linking Bin Laden to 9/11 and that brings up the question, ” on what grounds was this operation ordered?”
Looking at the FBI webpage today I find that they have updated his profile to “deceased”, yet there is still NO mention of 9/11. (Disclaimer: this links to the FBI web-page for Bin Laden)
It is worth noting the 2010 story about the FBI using a Spanish lawmakers web-photo as a “Bin Laden 10 years later” photo. Worth noting so we remember the level of credibilty that officials have in regards to Usama Bin Laden and the war on terror in general.
The news of Bin Laden being killed is unlikely to help, or soothe these 9/11 family members:
As a preface to the “news” of Osama Bin Laden’s death I have gathered headlines carried here on Nor Cal Truth and other respected bogs over the last few years detailing the saga of Osama Bin Laden. Please review these articles and become familiar with more details of this very complex story.
In 2009, I published a little book entitled Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?1 Much evidence, I showed, suggested that Osama bin Laden had died on or about December 13, 2001. (Although this book was ignored by the US press, it received major reviews in British newspapers,2 and it even provided the basis for a BBC special.3) Pointing out that the only evidence to the contrary consists of “messages from bin Laden” in the form of audiotapes and videotapes that have appeared since 2001, I devoted one chapter to an examination of the most important of these tapes, showing that none are demonstrably authentic and that some are almost certainly fakes.
In the chapter preceding that examination, I discussed two videotapes containing purported interviews of Osama bin Laden in the fall of 2001, when the issue was whether he had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I suggested that both of these tapes, in which bin Laden allegedly admitted his responsibility, were fakes. If they were, I pointed out, this fact would increase the likelihood that all of the “Osama bin Laden tapes” appearing in the following years – when the question of whether he was still alive was added to that of his responsibility for 9/11 – were also fakes.
The clearest example, I argued, was the most famous of the so-called bin Laden confession videos. Having allegedly been found in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in late November 2001, it is sometimes called the “November 9 bin Laden video,” because this date was stamped on it, implying that this was when it was made. It is also called the “bin Laden video of December 13,” because that was the date on which it was released to the public by the Pentagon – which is perhaps significant, given the evidence that bin Laden may have died on that day. (If he had, he would have obviously, and perhaps conveniently, been unable to comment on whether the tape was authentic.) In any case, I provided several reasons for concluding that this video was almost certainly fabricated.
According to the chief of Japans Democratic Party who says that the 9/11 hijackers are alive and that 9/11 was a complete hoax. Dr. David Ray Griffin is a professor and author who wrote The New Pearl Harbor Revisited and he says that he agrees; the World Trade Center was a hoax.
During a round-table discussion at the French Senate January 29, 2010, on the topic of “Where are we at with Al Qaeda?”, Alain Chouet — former head of the Security Intelligence Service of the DGSE (Directorate-General for External Security: the French equivalent of the CIA or MI6) — demystified the concept of “Al Qaeda” and denounced the inappropriate responses and other instrumentalizations by the West, without however deflating the dangers of Islamic extremism.
The video below has been subtitled into English and edited to include the best parts of Alain Chouet’s passionate discourse containing no stonewalling or political doublespeak, placing itself light-years ahead of the official discourse about September 11th and “the nebulous Al Qaeda” that the mainstream media have been reporting for far too long.
Would you like to know what the French “spies” think of Al Qaeda? Hold-on tight, the masks are about to fall. Alain Chouet’s stance, which no one would dare qualify as conspiratorial, is in no way different than the information the French Association ReOpen911 modestly (but tenaciously) reports via our site.
In a patently absurd follow-up to the made-over Osama by the Justice Department (using the face of an Italian communist), the CIA and Defense Department linked propaganda unit IntelCenter has released yet another Osama audio tape. IntelCenter was caught adding its logo and that of As-Sahab to the same layer of a purported al-Qaeda video, according to Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant. The As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication is said to be al-Qaeda’s media production house.
“Osama bin Laden’s word choice in the latest audio message attributed to him is seen as a ‘possible indicator’ of an upcoming attack by his Al-Qaeda network, a US monitoring group warned Sunday,” reports AFP.
The phrase “Peace be upon those who follow guidance,” appears at the beginning and end of messages “released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda’s enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked,” said IntelCenter.
Audio releases were Osama bin Laden’s normal vehicle for statements, with video statements having been very rare since September 11, 2001, according to IntelCenter.
In 2002, scientists in Switzerland indicated that an audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden was a fake. Researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, in Lausanne, said the message was recorded by an impostor. The CIA and Pentagon stopped using video to propagate the al-Qaeda myth after the Fat Bin Laden video and the Grecian Formula video were widely criticized and easily debunked. Recent video tapes show images of Bin Laden before he died in late 2001.
You’ve heard that – according to the U.S. Senate – Bin Laden was “within the grasp” of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December 2001, but that then-secretary of defense Rumsfeld refused to provide the soldiers necessary to capture him.
This is not news: it was disclosed in 2005 by the CIA field commander for the area in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was holed up.
In addition, French soldiers allegedly say that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but that the American commanders stopped them.
And the oldest – and second-largest – French newspaper claims that CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Read the rest of this entry »
NEW YORK The U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan recently changed its media embed rules to ban pictures of troops killed in the war.
“Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action,” says a ground rules document issued Sept. 15 by Regional Command East at Bagram Air Field.
This language is new. A version of the same document dated July 23 says, “Media will not be prohibited from covering casualties” as long as a series of conditions are met. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Osama bin Laden still alive? I have dealt with this question in a recent little book entitled Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? The present essay summarizes the main points of this book.
Since the transference of power from the Bush administration to that of Barack Obama administration, the question of whether bin Laden is dead or alive has become more important.
In this well timed tape “Osama” says that Obama is powerless to stop the wars , and that we must stop supporting Israel. (Which we should!) But if you have been paying attention than you know that Obama has not been trying to stop any war. He has escalated troop numbers in Afghanistan, increased drone attacks in Pakistan, and cleverly repackaged the Iraq war into a private Army and contractor war against sovereignty. The war has hit an all time popularity low, August was a very bloody month in Afghanistan, and 9/11 was days before the release of this tape, making it a well timed piece of propaganda. -ed
In an 11-minute audio tape released on the internet, a voice purporting to be that of Osama bin Laden says Barack Obama, the US president, is “powerless” to stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The voice also says that the attacks of September 11, 2001, came about because of the US’s “support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine”.
There was no independent confirmation that the voice on the tape addressing the American people was that of Bin Laden.
In 1961, upon leaving office, President Eisenhower warned of the danger of a military-industrial takeover of information, power, and resources in a democracy[1] .
His dark vision has been steadily unfolding. Since September 11, 2001, world, and particularly US military budgets, have grown enormously[2], when the focus of the entire planet should have been on the ecological crisis.
There is no time to lose in mounting effective worldwide action against global warming, and it is now essential that we have the correct information about the events underpinning the war on terror: 9/11 and the role of Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? — David Ray Griffin Interview with David Ray Griffin about his new book, “Osama bin Laden Dead or Alive?”. We examine all the evidence, both that indicating bin Laden died, and that suggesting he is still alive; the important bin Laden videos and audio recordings, the significance, if any, in the timing of their release; statements by significant political and intelligence figures; and why the hunt for bin Laden must proceed.
Posted by Brian 
