The Last Months of Osama bin Laden: Isolated, Delusional, Ridiculed by His Men
May 07, 2012
Isolated, Delusional, Ridiculed by His Men
The Last Months of Osama bin Laden
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Immediately after the killing, administration officials portrayed Bin Laden as a spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web, the well-hidden but operationally active commander in chief of al-Qa’ida. They later retreated from these claims that were obviously at odds with his demonstrably limited contacts with the outside world outside his compound in Abbottabad. This picture is confirmed by the release of 16 of his letters covering 200 pages last week showing him vainly urging new plots and policies on the organization he once controlled.
A striking feature of these letters is that there is no evidence that their recipients made any effort to carry out their leader’s instructions. Bin Laden had become delusional about his organization’s capacity, suggesting shooting down the plane of President Obama.
The best-informed account of Bin Laden’s last 10 years, and the way in which he was found, comes from the investigative journalist Gareth Porter working in concert with retired Pakistani Brigadier General Shaukat Qadir, a 30-year veteran of the Pakistan army, who spoke to three different couriers in contact with Bin Laden between 2001 and 2003. They explain how and why he had been marginalized within al-Qa’ida in the two years after he escaped from the Tora Bora mountains at the time of the fall of Afghan Taliban in 2001.
By the account of these couriers, who had worked for Baitullah Mehsud, head of the al-Qa’da-linked Tehrik-e-Taliban in south Waziristan, Bin Laden played no active role in the leadership of his organization after 2003. The couriers no longer felt bound by oaths of secrecy after Mehsud was killed by a drone in 2009. They say that the al-Qa’ida leader’s physical and mental health had deteriorated after Tora Bora and he had to be moved from house to house in South Waziristan. He was becoming increasingly unrealistic and delusional, obsessed with a desire to attack Pakistan’s nuclear reactor at Kahuta (though no bombs were stored there). “He had become a physical liability and was going mad,” one courier told General Qadir, adding “he had become an object of ridicule” among militants in South Waziristan. Another courier said: “Nobody listened to his rantings any more.”
Read the full article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/07/the-last-months-of-osama-bin-laden/
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