Why Christopher Hitchens thinks bin Laden is dead

WHY I THINK BIN LADEN IS DEAD
By Christopher Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair
9/16/03

I HAVE believed for more than a year that Osama bin Laden is dead and yesterday's pathetic home movie from al Jazeera via al Qaeda (or do I mean the other way around?) has reinforced this conviction.

It would be easy enough for his fellow-gangsters to prove me wrong. All they need to do, next time they point a video at their heroic guru, is to put in his hands a recent edition of an Arabic or Pakistani or Afghan newspaper. The date needn't be visible - the headline would do.

Or, if they don't have any cameramen who can also read, they could induce the Great One to say a few words about recent developments in, say, Iraq.

Until two years ago, you could hardly shut Osama bin Laden up. He had a great fondness for the sermon, the proclamation, the taped fatwah. And all of these, like the captured video from Kabul showing his gloating over the World Trade Center, were extremely easy to authenticate. Indeed, they were too genuine for my taste. How likely is it that such a loquacious character would manage to sit out the whole Iraq war without feeling any need to orate?

The last time we supposedly heard from bin Laden was just before the beginning of hostilities, where he appeared to be saying (down a hissing telephone line onto a lousy tape recorder) that his forces were ready to swallow their differences with Saddam Hussein.

No big surprise there: bin Laden has been pro-Saddam for years: Saddam had been saying the same thing for some time - and now the holy alliance between the two groups is plainly visible. Yet none of bin Laden's words could be attached with any certainty to any recent event, so there was disagreement among voice-print analysts as to whether the tape was a splice-job or not. (The CIA thought it might be for real: a lab in Switzerland disagreed.)

WHY the mystery? Only because bin Laden was unable to resolve it by speaking plainly in his own voice about actual events, as he was once so eager to do.

The same conundrum recurs with additional force in the case of the latest video.

The voice-over seems to be that of Ayman al Zawahiri, one of the few uncaptured lieutenants. It is he who intones the usual jihad rant while his boss walks silently over some landscape. Why so shy, big guy? Cat got your tongue? Figure it out for yourself: it's a lot less risky for bin Laden to pose for an authentic picture, whether still or video, than it is for him to make even a local telephone call. (His deputy Hambali, recently grabbed in Thailand, was caught by using a phone-card.)

Yet this simple piece of photographic propaganda seems beyond him. Even the dullest and cruellest kidnappers know that, in order for their extortions to be taken seriously, they must produce what is known in the trade as "proof of life" before they can blackmail the relatives.

Bin Laden is only being asked to give proof of his own life and he can't even manage that.

In summary: his people badly want to prove that he is still with us. What they want to prove is easy enough to demonstrate. And they can't do it. Whether by induction or deduction, we can infer for now that there's a good case for saying "Hasta La Vista, Binnie".

One by one they go: Khalid Muhammed picked up in Pakistan, Hambali in Thailand and Suleiman abu Gheith detained in Iran. It seems quite likely that someone in the ranks has been babbling.

COUNTLESS others have been taken off the map in other ways we don't know about, or are buried under the rock at Tora Bora - the last place bin Laden was known to be alive.

And even supposing him to have survived, he can't possibly be where he wanted to be, or thought he would be, two years ago. I sometimes get accused of insensitivity for saying this, but the forces of jihad did us a favour by acting so barbarously on that occasion. Up until that point, they stood a reasonable chance of taking over Pakistan from within, including its nuclear plants.

They had a good deal of secret sympathy in powerful circles in Saudi Arabia. But they blew the plot, and they aroused a giant, as well as isolating themselves within the Muslim world. The most recent of their shoot-outs has been with the police of Saudi Arabia, who used to turn a blind eye...

It's wrong, then, for the mass media to keep on acting as uncritical ventriloquist for the supposedly "terrifying" messages of this mad group. All the evidence is that THEY are the ones who live with fear every day, and that's the way it ought to be.