Al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden 'dead'. Again.

[Ed Jewett]

Ed,

What proof do you have that he was killed in this raid? You are committing a brazen example of begging the question by taking for granted that he was still alive to be killed. Try David Ray Griffin, OSAMA BIN LADEN: DEAD OR ALIVE? if you care about the truth.

Getting Access to the Secrets of the Osama Bin Ladin Kill

http://cryptome.org/0005/schmidle/schmidle-access.htm

Dr. Fetzer, you mis-read me. I posted the link because it's perhaps a pathway to follow the propaganda and the myth-making. I cawed in laughter when the news of his death and burial at sea washed across the bows of the media and the sheeple. I come from the world of para-medicine and for years typed (as my source of income) the acute care admissions, histories and final summaries of medical specialists including nephrologists, so I have a better handle on the life expectancy of someone needing dialysis than most. Chronic renal disease is, eventually and necessarily, a fatal disease, and the fact that this man lived in a cave in Afghanistan requiring periodic dialysis without the help of a major state-based entity is laughable on the surface; it requires care, high-end surgical cleanliness, and is frequented with complications, sequelae and co-morbidities and the need for vascular repair or alteration.

Behind that, also available through Cryptome, is the story of "John", the operative seen in White House photos who purportedly was involved in the "kill". As always, there are differing opinions on what really happened and who was involved, but I take a Salandrian approach and step back and look at the long view. Also at Cryptome is a survey of the extent of the publicity given by the current White House administration to the Situation Room.

OBL and the mujahadeen have been tools of the empire for a long time, and it was perfectly alright to kill a man already long dead in order to "bounce" the propaganda around 9/11 and the Global War of Terror.

[Ed Jewett]

To follow-up on the above (my curiosity having been triggered), I found three web entries that addressed bin Laden's health. Caveat lector.

The first is here: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread702774/pg1

The second is here: http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez/a_binladen.htm

Doctor Zebra is unidentified, says he is a real doctor, and some careful perusal of the entire site might warrant a good guess as to who he is.

A third is here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/224981.php

Here is the search at History Commons' 9/11 Timeline using the words "bin Laden health" (8 events found, one of which is irrelevant to the question, being a search glitch, the last noting Robert Baer in late 2009).

This photo seems obviously PhotoShopped. What I am looking for is a photo of the man with an obvious fistula. A fistula is something a dialysis pateint would go to great ends to protect from trauma, infection, etc.

Here's a short list of six complications during hemodialysis, one of which at least correlates with observations noted above as well as my own experience of having to lie down as a result of arrhythmias when I had untreated atrial fibrillation.

"Various problems are related to vascular access in patients on hemodialysis and to abdominal catheters in patients using continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD). These vascular access complications are similar to those seen in any patient with a vascular surgical procedure (eg, bleeding, local or disseminated intravascular infections [DIC], vessel [graft] occlusion). The native peripheral vascular system is also affected with higher rates of amputation and revascularization procedures, and a peritoneal dialysis catheter subjects patients to the risks of peritonitis and local infection, because the catheter acts as a foreign body and provides a portal of entry for pathogens from the external environment."

Here is a seven-page pdf on the complications of dialysis;pay attention to figure 7.5 and compare to credible photographs.

Here is another good article on complications.

Here are the 1, 2 and 5-year survival rates for someone on dialysis: 77.8%, 62.9% and 9%.

[Ed Jewett]

The Mysterious Death of Osama bin Laden: Creating Evidence Where There Is None

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.

There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government's crumbling 9/11 story?

The gullible Schmidle tells us: "There was never any question of detaining or capturing him--it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,' the special-operations officer told me." In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden, because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.

Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden's body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world?

No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: "All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the sea--a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth." But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, "Your plan sounds like a good one."

I mean, really.

After all of Sy Hersh's New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.

In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden's alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video. According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were 3 helicopters. Only 1 landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr. Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.

The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.

A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir's interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0vo-L3VACs

Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.

If the English translation of Mr. Bashir's interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.

Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs' weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as "unarmed" and undefended. The "startled" bin Laden didn't even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was "intense."

When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second and third hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn't someone qualified look into the story?

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25898

[Keith Millea]

Ed:

Yes,let's bury this dialysis myth once and for all.It was a stupid story and so many believed it.Anyone who knows anything about dialysis had a good laugh at that one.

:pointlaugh:
heep:

[James H. Fetzer]

Ed,

Thanks for that clarification. Some of what you have linked is obviously
planted, such as most of what is cited in the ATS piece (which cites none
of its sources nor their dates of publication). Here is a nice related piece
by Nicholas Kollerstrom, an historian of science from the UK, which I like:

"Osama bin Laden (1957-2001)
http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2011/05/...-2001.html

Not only do I agree with Paul Craig Roberts, but I posted about a dozen or
so articles about this at the time on my facebook page. Perhaps I've cited
most of them here, but they included that the "photo op" with Obama and
Hillary was staged, that there was no live coverage, that the figure in the
photo holding a clicker and watching TV was the owner of the home, not
Osama, that DNA identification so quickly would have been impossible, and
more. Burial at sea, by the way, is NOT an Islamic custom, because it is
disrespectful of the body, allowing it to be eaten by fish and crustaceans.

Jim

The Mysterious Death of Osama bin Laden: Creating Evidence Where There Is None

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.

There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government's crumbling 9/11 story?

The gullible Schmidle tells us: "There was never any question of detaining or capturing him--it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,' the special-operations officer told me." In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden, because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.

Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden's body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world?

No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: "All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the sea--a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth." But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, "Your plan sounds like a good one."

I mean, really.

After all of Sy Hersh's New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.

In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden's alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video. According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were 3 helicopters. Only 1 landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr. Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.

The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.

A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir's interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0vo-L3VACs

Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.

If the English translation of Mr. Bashir's interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.

Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs' weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as "unarmed" and undefended. The "startled" bin Laden didn't even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was "intense."

When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second and third hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn't someone qualified look into the story?

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25898

[Ed Jewett]

The operative (pardon the double pun) paragraph from Kollerstrom's piece:

"In July 2001 he was residing for a week in an American hospital in Dubai to treat his kidney trouble, as reported by the French paper Le Figaro. He had an operation on the 4th. This story was reported in Le Monde and the Guardian on 1st November but denied by the CIA and also reported by John Snow on Channel 4 News. Snow first confirmed the story with the British doctor in Dubai who treated Bin Laden: source Martin Summers, of the London 9/11 Sceptics and he there met CIA station chief Larry Mitchell on 12th July. Many members of the Bin Laden family came to visit him - There goes the story that he's a black sheep!' was Mike Ruppert's laconic comment. He flew off on the 14th in a private jet. We do not hear about Bin Laden him again until September 10th, when he reappears in a military hospital in Rawalpindi in Pakistan with some military protection - again for kidney dialysis (Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Freedom, How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001, 2002, p.223; Thierry Meyssian, 9/11 The big Lie, 2002, p. 107.)"

[Keith Millea]

Let's be clear.People on dialysis are at end stage kidney failure.Their kidneys no longer function to cleanse toxins from the body.This means 3 days per week hooked up to the machine.Now,not only does this require a totally sterile environment,but other considerations need to be taken into account.

An individual on dialysis also requires that blood lab tests are constant.It is absolutley necessary to monitor things such as,potassium and phosphorus levels,red blood cell counts,etc.There is so much more involved,can anyone really believe the dialysis story?Only if your eyes are wide shut.............

I can't tell you when OBL died,but I can assure you,that he was not hooking up to a dialysis machine in that hellhole part of the world.Just ain't happening............

[Ed Jewett]

We'd have to ask several questions.

1) Precisely what kind of dialysis was he on if he were on it? There are multiple types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialysis Yes, we share a bias about Western medicine and Western technologies and Western standards for surgical cleanliness. Certainly a consistent lack of attention to the process can increase morbidity and mortality. But, as ntoed in the Wikipedia entry, the process was invented by jury-rigging: "Due to the scarcity of available resources, Kolff had to improvise and build the initial machine using sausage casings, beverage cans, a washing machine and various other items which were available at the time."

2) What is the level of sophistication in terms of nursing, para-medicine and medicine available to the mujahadeen or others in remote rugged parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan (or in urban settings)? What is known about the cadre of people who traveled with bin Laden? Any combatant worth his salt has to have a system/knowledge of medical care/health maintenance or he won't maintain a viable unit for long.

3) What would the purpose be, from the perspective of the US intelligence community and its allies, in floating a false story about OBL's need for dialysis if it weren't true? Was it, instead, a way of perhaps flushing out (pardon the pun) information and/or informants about his whereabouts? And if it was a false story, did the correspondents noted in the article posted by Fetzer participate? Are they known to be fronts for floating disinformation?

There is much disinformation circulating; that is a given. But it can't all be disinformation; otherwise there would be no credibility; the known formulae for mixing truth and disinformation are in the magnitude of the 80/20 rule, not at the low end of the spectrum.

4) Did the purpose of the propaganda/intelligence approach change over the years? What served and worked pre-9/911, circa 9/11, post 9/11 and circa "OBL death raid" may be entirely different packages.

Everything about Ossama bin Laden is shrouded, but perhaps we should be careful in buying into the notion that the Muslim world is incapable of understanding methods of treatment for disease.

[David Butler]

Apparently the SEALS killed in the Chinook shot down today were from Seal Team Six - The unit that killed Osama Bin Laden....Something about dead men telling no tales perhaps ?

[Peter Lemkin]

We'd have to ask several questions.

1) Precisely what kind of dialysis was he on if he were on it? There are multiple types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialysis Yes, we share a bias about Western medicine and Western technologies and Western standards for surgical cleanliness. Certainly a consistent lack of attention to the process can increase morbidity and mortality. But, as ntoed in the Wikipedia entry, the process was invented by jury-rigging: "Due to the scarcity of available resources, Kolff had to improvise and build the initial machine using sausage casings, beverage cans, a washing machine and various other items which were available at the time."

2) What is the level of sophistication in terms of nursing, para-medicine and medicine available to the mujahadeen or others in remote rugged parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan (or in urban settings)? What is known about the cadre of people who traveled with bin Laden? Any combatant worth his salt has to have a system/knowledge of medical care/health maintenance or he won't maintain a viable unit for long.

3) What would the purpose be, from the perspective of the US intelligence community and its allies, in floating a false story about OBL's need for dialysis if it weren't true? Was it, instead, a way of perhaps flushing out (pardon the pun) information and/or informants about his whereabouts? And if it was a false story, did the correspondents noted in the article posted by Fetzer participate? Are they known to be fronts for floating disinformation?

There is much disinformation circulating; that is a given. But it can't all be disinformation; otherwise there would be no credibility; the known formulae for mixing truth and disinformation are in the magnitude of the 80/20 rule, not at the low end of the spectrum.

4) Did the purpose of the propaganda/intelligence approach change over the years? What served and worked pre-9/911, circa 9/11, post 9/11 and circa "OBL death raid" may be entirely different packages.

Everything about Ossama bin Laden is shrouded, but perhaps we should be careful in buying into the notion that the Muslim world is incapable of understanding methods of treatment for disease.

Forget it Ed. On Al Jazeera they have a very good interview in their program 'I knew Bin Laden' - one by a physician who met and lived for a week [week!] with Bin Laden in the middle of the period he was supposed [supposed!] to be on dialysis and he said he never saw any such equipment, nor was the man anything but hail and hardy - drinking very sugared tea~ He said it was bullshit. It obviously is. It might [might] have been the excuse used to get Bin Ladin into a US Military hospital once for debriefing...just sayin'