Obviously, it is not so rugged as to not provide the ailing “terror leader” access to a kidney dialysis machine. But even if Osama is unable to cart a dialysis machine in by way of pack animal, he can always hike over to Pakistan and get his treatment, as he did on September 10, 2001, in Rawalpindi, as Dan Rather reported. Prior to this, in July, Osama was ushered into the American Hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for kidney dialysis treatment, as the French daily newspaper Le Figaro reported in October, 2001. “While he was hospitalized, bin Laden received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis. During the hospital stay, the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator of the hospital to go to bin Laden’s hospital room,” Alexandra Richard reported for Le Figaro. In the years since, this meeting with the CIA has been meticulously characterized as an urban myth—not that it matters, since most Americans are blissfully unaware of Osama’s long and sordid collaboration with Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA.

As well, most Americans are unaware of the fact Osama died from complications associated to his illness. “A Pakistani newspaper Ausaf published from Multan has reported that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died four months ago in a village near Kandahar of severe illness,” the South Asia Network reported. “According to the newspaper report, Bin Laden was campaigning at Bamiyan, fell very ill, returned to Kandahar where he died and was buried in the Shada graveyard in the shadow of a mountain…. Funeral prayers have been said for Osama bin Laden over these years with one reported now by the Ausaf, and another in an Egyptian newspaper Al Wafd as far back as December 2001.”

On December 26, 2001, the Egyptian newspaper al-Wafd reported:

A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qa’da organization, stating that bin Laden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, stated to The Observer of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora 10 days ago. He mentioned that 30 of al-Qa’da fighters attended the burial as well as members of his family and some friends from the Taleban. In the farewell ceremony to his final rest guns were fired in the air. The official stated that it is difficult to pinpoint the burial location of bin Laden because according to the Wahhabi tradition no mark is left by the grave. He stressed that it is unlikely that the American forces would ever uncover any traces of bin Laden.

Nor do they want to “uncover any traces of bin Laden,” who is a useful nemesis for never-ending invasions.

Moreover, the corporate media, wedded to the neocon vision of total war and interminable murder and terror, has likely dismissed the fact Bin Laden is dead and buried—after all, Arabs did the reporting, not careerists (or propagandists) at the Washington Post of the New York Times—and instead expend countless column inches expounding on the whereabouts of our Emmanuel Goldstein.

Ben Venzke, “chief executive at the IntelCenter, a government contractor that does support work for the intelligence community” (in other words, somebody who has a vested interest in rendering Osama into a scary character in a George Romero flick), “notes there could be a number of factors contributing to bin Laden’s public silence. He may have decided to change the messenger. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has been much more vocal, issuing seven messages this year. In years past, he and bin Laden have delivered roughly the same number of messages.” This is the same Ayman al-Zawahri who joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a British intelligence and CIA penetrated organization, and worked closely with the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the Services Office, in Afghanistan (eventually to become al-Qaeda), one of seven mujahedin factions “sponsored” by the CIA and paid for with gobs of Saudi money. The leader of MAK was a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood adherent named Abdullah Azzam, often called the “emir of the Arab mujaheddin.” According to Jane’s Intelligence Review, “Azzam is regarded as the historical leader of Hamas” and it is well-documented that Hamas is basically a creation of Israeli intelligence (see Richard Sale, Analysis: Hamas history tied to Israel; according to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organization). In short, the trail of al-Zawahri, Bin Laden, and other so-called terrorists invariably leads back to intelligence operations, as I have noted repeatedly on this site.

Instead of admitting Bin Laden is dead (as Pakistan’s dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, did in an interview with the Italian weekly magazine Panorama in January, 2003) and thus we have not heard much from the former CIA asset, Shrader tells us “the earthquake in Pakistan could have inhibited bin Laden’s ability to transmit messages. Or a tape could have been destroyed in the rubble.” I tend to believe Osama was abducted by aliens and was taken to a distant planet. No doubt Elvis suffered a likewise fate.

“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority,” said Bush on March 13, 2002. Indeed, Osama is no longer important and there are more scary bogeymen out there—for instance, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one-legged terrorist who kills hostages on videotape and eludes capture, as do all hobgoblins who serve the purpose of scaring little children and easily misled Americans. Even so, we are told “Bin Laden also could be plotting an attack on the United States and has made a strategic messaging decision to keep quiet in the lead-up to the attack.” However, as noted above, Osama is not all that relevant, so we shouldn’t expect an attack—not one, anyway, with his name attached. “President Bush rarely mentions bin Laden, who has eluded U.S. capture despite being the most-sought terrorist in the world. Bush did mention him by name in a series of speeches focused on the war on terror last month.”

Even so, “[h]alf of Americans think it’s likely that the United States will capture or kill bin Laden, a number that has moved little over the last three years, according to a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll.” In other words, a large percentage of Americans believe Osama is still alive, even with all the evidence to the contrary (evidence not reported by the corporate media, thus somewhere out beyond Pluto, since most Americans get their news from the corporate media, or the Bush Ministry of Disinformation). In fact, the vast majority of so-called “Muslim terrorism” is a creation of American, British, and Israeli intelligence operations. Osama, dead or alive, is irrelevant to the objectives of these terrorist operations—in fact, he is but one character in a cast of stand-ins, mostly patsies, dupes, crazies, and in the case of al-Zarqawi, almost entirely mythical.