Was Osama Bin Laden responsible for 9/11?
The Bush Administration says yes, citing a grainy, badly-edited videotape that surfaced in December, 2001. In that tape, a fat guy who vaguely resembles Bin Laden chortles about the success of the 9/11 attacks. (In earlier interviews, Bin Laden had denied responsibility for 9/11, once even deploring the loss of civilian life in the attacks and calling them un-Islamic.)
Is the famous "confession video" genuine? Despite Bush's insistence that the tape is authentic, America's top academic Bin Laden expert has finally gone on the record, joining numerous other experts.
"It's bogus," says Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's Religious Studies program.
Lawrence, author of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, offered his historic debunking of the administration's lie in an interview with Kevin Barrett ("Dynamic Duo," gcnlive.com, 2/16/2007, first hour). The interview marked Lawrence's first major public statement since he made headlines last year by suggesting that recent Osama tapes are hoaxes and that the real Osama Bin Laden may be dead.
Why has the Bush Administration been lying for more than five years by telling us that this preposterously bad hoax is a genuine "confession video"? Lawrence, citing informants in the US intelligence apparatus's Bin Laden units, said that everyone knows the tape is fake, adding that the hoax has been kept alive because it is politically useful to those who wish to deflect attention from
"conspiracy theories" about 9/11.
If Professor Lawrence is right—and anyone with eyes can see that he is, simply by comparing the overweight impostor in the Fatty Bin Laden bogus confession video to other pictures of Osama Bin Laden—the Bush Administration, by repeatedly citing the tape as authentic, is clearly guilty of obstruction of justice at best, high treason and conspiracy to mass murder at worst. Since the FBI now tells us that Osama Bin Laden is "not wanted for 9/11" because there is "no hard evidence" connecting him to the 9/11 attacks, and since US intelligence personnel all know the "confession tape" is a Bush Administration hoax, it should not be difficult to nail the perpetrators of this outrageous cover-up of the crime of the century.
It is time for Congress or an appropriate judicial authority to mount an investigation of the Fatty Bin Laden bogus confession video.
Where did this tape come from? Who was responsible for the
administration's claim that it is authentic, despite widespread knowledge in relevant intelligence agencies that it is bogus? If Bruce Lawrence is correct in asserting that US intelligence personnel know the tape is fake, we need to put them, along with Bush and Cheney, under oath and find out why our government has been lying so outrageously for more than five years in order to obstruct justice by shielding the real perpetrators of 9/11.
Please email your congressional representatives with the subject header "investigate bogus Bin Laden 'confession video' NOW!" and include a copy of this article in the body of the message.
