The Skinny on Osama

So is it him? Maybe. Maybe not. But really - since when has it mattered?

He isn't as fat as the last Osama who claimed he brought down the towers, but the nose and cheekbones still look broader than that of the bin Laden we saw in 2001, seen below. And in Friday's tape, I didn't see the long, narrow face symptomatic of Marfan's Syndrome, with which bin Laden reputedly suffers.



Whomever it was, Walter Cronkite saw something fishy. From a Larry King interview last evening:

CRONKITE: So now the question is basically, right now, how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of, as a principal subject of the campaigns right now, get rid of the whole problem of the al Qaqaa explosive dump.

Now I must say, I'm not the conspiracy theorist Walter Cronkite turns out to be. The only thing Rovian I'm seeing is the dizzifyin' spin, which makes the Lewis Carroll-like argument that a healthy and trim bin Laden at large three years after 9/11 means George Bush is the best choice on national security. Rove would have put other words his mouth - maybe call John Kerry "a man I could do business with" - and blunted the zingers. ("If we hate freedom, why didn't we attack Sweden?" would never have made the second draft.)

If this is a hoax tape, I don't expect it's psyops from the Bush Crime Family. It would more likely be a "fuck you very much" from the CIA, or rather the faction therein that means to turn the knife as payback for the White House's imprudent alienation of the agency. ("Say it was our fault, will ya? Well let's see how you like Osama 2.0 raggin' you about the goat story!")

Assuming for a moment it is Osama, could he be found by tracking Amazon's shipments of Fahrenheit 911 DVDs to North Waziristan? Because whomever it was, this is his most important remark:

We had agreed with the general emir Mohammed Atta, God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed. It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American armed forces will leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone.

It appeared to him that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God.

His astonishment at the lack of response, and gratitude for it, is noted.