MINITER: All the so-called ‘experts' really were wrong about bin Laden

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea, so are some of the biggest claims about the archterrorist. It seems that the “experts” didn’t know as much as they thought they did.

Perhaps the most popular myth was that bin Laden was holed up in a remote cliff face. Even President Obama, in January 2009, told reporters that bin Laden was “in a cave somewhere.” A related myth was that he was hiding in the lawless tribal lands that straddled the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In reality, he was living in a concrete castle of his own design in a leafy Pakistani suburb less than 800 yards from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. The Abbottabad branch of McDonald’s was less than a mile away.

Another persistent myth was that bin Laden had to undergo kidney dialysis every few days. This was initially a convenient myth for Pakistan’s intelligence services. Following bin Laden’s bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, by bin Laden, the Clinton administration put enormous pressure on Pakistan and its ally, Afghanistan’s Taliban government, to turn over the terror leader for trial. Soon, press reports surfaced saying that bin Laden needed dialysis. Who knows, he might die soon. This myth persisted even after the 2002 capture of bin Laden’s personal doctor, who later told the Associated Press that bin Laden had no kidney problems at all. An inventory of the contents of bin Laden’s Abbottabad’s hideout showed no medical devices at all.

Yet another handy myth about bin Laden was that he was only “a symbolic figurehead” or a spiritual leader with no day-to-day control over the operations of the global terror network.

Captured notebooks are filled with bin Laden’s spidery scrawl detailing plots to bomb American rail lines and advising against an operation to kill Vice President Joseph Biden on the grounds that he wasn’t constitutionally important enough to bother with. Thumb drives and hard drives seized in the SEAL raid show bin Laden obsessively tracked al-Qaida’s finances and sometimes quibbled about small expenses. While it may have served the purposes of some Bush-era critics of the war on terror to dismiss bin Laden’s role as “symbolic,” because they wanted to ramp down the global war on terror, the trash bags full of computer records and hand-written documents show this to be the rhetorical gambit that it was.

Remember the tale that Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s former bodyguard, told CBS news in 2006? Jandal said that the archterrorist was ringed by bodyguards prepared to die in Osama’s defense and that there was a special gun that was set aside to end bin Laden’s life before he could be captured.

The SEALS found no ninjas or James Bond-style bodyguards. Only one occupant of the house managed to get a shot off at the SEALS, according to the White House’s latest version of events. The Soviet-style rifle found near bin Laden, an AK-74-U, is a common assault rifle and seems a poor choice for administering bin Laden’s coup de grâce. Indeed, the only special weapon present may have been the experimental rifle used by the special-forces team that killed bin Laden.

How many times have you heard how religious or pious bin Laden was? Such a carefully crafted religious reputation certainly helped al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts, but it’s unclear why so many Western experts took this claim at face value. They certainly would not have used these adjectives about any Western leader without really compelling proof. Again, evidence from bin Laden’s lair shows how wrong the experts were.

An extensive library of pornographic videos, most of it of fairly recent vintage, was recovered in the electronic files of bin Laden’s computer, according to Reuters.

Since bin Laden’s fortress had, apparently, no Internet access, these files had to have been specifically requested from couriers who physically transported discs and other electronic media from Pakistan’s markets to bin Laden’s shabby bedroom.

Perhaps the myth with the longest staying power is the biggest one affecting U.S.-Pakistan relations: that the Pakistanis were doing their best to find bin Laden and would help us catch him if they could. After all, that’s the driving reason U.S. taxpayers send some $3.4 billion per year to that nation.

Since President Obama, the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department each declined to notify our Pakistani allies in advance, it’s pretty clear that no one in the U.S. government any longer believes this.

Reflecting back on each of these fables about bin Laden, a common thread emerges. Each of them first appeared in the Pakistani press before migrating onto America’s television screens. Can that be a coincidence?

Richard Miniter is the author of “Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9-11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammedj,” released May 2, 2011. His website is www.richardminter.com.