Commentary: Elvis bin Laden (and editorial response from VT)
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE FOR UPI AND GORDON DUFF FOR VETERANS TODAY
“WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — The “VT” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously. CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.”
Arnaud,
Thank you for you semi-kind words though only roughly accurate in some ways and less accurate in others. Please note that I have never considered the “Bin Laden Studios” forgeries as “clever.” Considering the thousands who have died because of them, terms like “tragic” apply but, from a technical standpoint, “inane” or “amateurish” is more accurate.
Arnaud, yes, you are right. I killed Osama bin Laden. Too many Americans had died hunting a ghost. It had to stop, the Bush era “Where’s Waldo” game, branding a phony terrorist mastermind for the lazy media hacks had destroyed too many American families. As Wiki-Leaks has pointed out, those drone attacks, some supposedly chasing bin Laden, are responsible for more than a bit of “collateral damage,” the term we now apply to children we kill out of carelessness and intolerance.
I am hardly the founder of VT. Our editorial staff includes Jeff Gates, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, Colonel Eugene Khruschev, Major Bobby Hanifin, Khalil Nouri, Colonel James Hanke, Raja Mujtaba, Jim W. Dean, Carol Duff and John Allen. We have over 30 active staff writers and over a dozen guest writers including your good friends Lt. General Hamid Gul, Admiral Sirohey, General Beg and all those other Pakistanis you write about.
(Editor’s note: VT is 10 times larger today (2011) and has a circulation approaching the upper half of the top 10 newspapers in the US.)
We provide a home for those willing to answer to the truth only and not spend their lives as lapdogs to the corporations that now control 95% of the major media outlets, dictating fact into fiction and myth into disinformation for public consumption.
I am far from our most popular writer. I am surrounded by people with genuine talent, something I lack.
The idea that you dismiss Israel’s role in everything on a regular basis is an indication of how ill informed you are. I am certain that you, of all people, have a detailed and accurate knowlege of Israeli history but I am equally certain that you are unfamiliar with much of the subtext.
We would gladly help you in this area.
You are talking to people here, many of whom have fought in the wars you write about. When I sit and talk to my friend Hamid Gul, among others, we share some things in common you may not. We are patriots and nationalists, hardly neutral. Gul sides with Pakistan. I support the United States.
Some on our staff, particularly those from Afghanistan, are deeply suspicious of Gul. I appreciate his intelligence and enjoy his company. History will tell, if we live long enough to have a history.
You are certainly right to, finally, so many years later, catch on that bin Laden has gone the way of Elvis. You could also start catching on about the Indo-Israeli nexus in Afghanistan, the role of the CIA in drug running there or the long history of false flag operations our Israeli friends have been involved in and still are.
Jeff Gates will gladly brief you on Israel and get you a copy of his book. Col. Khrushchev will glady brief you on CIA drug running in Afghanistan. I can arrange for you to discuss Hamid Gul’s personal proclivities with him if you wish.
Alan Sabrosky can tell you why he believes Israel is responsible for 9/11. Not everyone is terrified of AIPAC and the ADL or having their tea poisoned.
Phillip Tourney can tell you what it was like to be on the USS Liberty, napalmed and strafed by Israelis and spending years hearing it lied about. He is one of my friends also.
Ken O’Keefe can tell you about the attack on the Mavi Marmara. First person accounts are so much more “journalistic” than press releases. Ken is a friend also.
Khalil Nouri can tell you about Afghanistan and the reality of Karzai’s rule. I hope you are following his work.
Admiral Sirohey can tell you about America’s rendition program and Dr. Aafia, kidnapped, tortured and then convicted in at a rigged trial in an American court.
I am simply glad to see someone begin catching on. It would be better were you to examine what your own article means. If bin Laden is dead and Israel is keeping him alive, what does it mean?
I think you understand what it is like working on the “dark side” of journalism. As Oliver Stone recently mentioned, well, can we even discuss that. Mentioning that the media is controlled by Israeli’s with a proclivity for obfuscation can be dangerous to one’s career? Is this why you keep quiet on such things?
As for our readership, yes, we have 310,000 daily subscribers, thousand more each week at VT. As with your work, we have a few mirror sites. A quick scan of Google will reveal the numbers. Our mirror subscribers take the numbers a bit further, so much so it is clear why I am being addressed today. It is a reasonable guess that your article will receive much more readership here than elsewhere. We are glad to include your voice with our own.
What we need to ask ourselves is why we do what we do? Is it worth turning down the free vacations to Israel, the fat jobs with defense contractors or suffering continual threats simply to tell a truth so many others choose to ignore for a paycheck? Why would so many writers choose to work for free? Is it possible that the only real “free press” left is the one that doesn’t have to dance with the devil for pay? Can you think of a commercial news outlet that isn’t stained by something much worse than bias, we aren’t just talking Fox News here?
Our primary job is to speak for 27 million veteran families in the United States and 1.4 million members of our military. We have a relatively large readership overseas, with most readers in Israel and India for some reason. Don’t ask me why. Much of our expertise in these areas and others comes from our readers who communicate with us constantly. This is the great advantage of the internet. The email trails between our writers and editors include top members of our government and defense establishment on a daily basis.
What is “guff” to you is “gold” to them. Even the Pentagon “Earlybird” is crippled by its dependence on the “useless news.”
Take our recent stories about missing nuclear weapons. You really think we aren’t well informed? I am certain you have wonderful contacts in the UK. Why would “people” want to make sure we knew that North Korea had exploded a nuclear weapon identical to the September 22, 1979 Indian Ocean test by South Africa and Israel?
What does this mean?
What does it have to do with the murder of Dr. David Kelly? How can a story this big be buried?
Why do Alan Hart and I see things the same way and you see them so differently? Do we have different agendas? Do we have different beliefs? Is one of us delusional? I am certainly less polite. You are, if anything, polite.
Are you too polite to the wrong people?
What I advocate is that you take a new look at people who see things differently than you do. You have already gone out on a limb over Osama bin Laden, though your story has failed to deal with the fallout of 9 years of lies.
If Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, then why is the United States in Afghanistan at all? Why is nothing written of the $65 billion dollar drug industry? When Sibel Edmonds testified that the US was shipping narcotics on rendition flights, why was that not widely reported or investigated? She is on this email also. It seems my “one man show” has alot of co-conspirators.
If you want to look at something today, take a look at the Wiki-Leaks story. Why were the documents leaked? Who does it serve? What does the timing mean? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pick up an agenda, one the MSM has missed. Wiki-Leaks got a ton of “chicken-feed” and some carefully crafted disinformation or this is what my “conspiratorial-self” is telling me.
Check.
It is also what members of the intelligence community will tell you. Why isn’t it being reported or even being suggested? I can’t imagine why the question isn’t even mentioned? Why has that kind of power? Is everyone that stupid? Consider the last question less than rhetorical.
Thus we head back to common ground, the death of Osama bin Laden, something I have discussed with many as you have. If you hear what I hear, and I suspect we talk to the same people, they have long been telling you they “suspect” bin Laden has been dead since 2001.
Carry this further to “dead in 2001” and “not involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.” Then I suggest you review the testimony before the 9/11 Commission, in particular that of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Most of the press missed it. We didn’t.
You won’t need to ask about nano-thermite, mysterious WTC7 or the dancing Israelis. You won’t have to recheck those long supposedly “debunked” stories about how many Israeli passport holders missed work that day. Check the edits on Wikipedia last week. When Wikipedia showed no Israeli passport holders among the 9/11 dead, why was it altered? If you aren’t aware, a staggering number of Israeli passport holders worked in the WTC. Conspiracy theory or statistical anomaly? I don’t know anything of people being warned of 9/11, I only know that those who claimed there was no warning lied about the numbers. We caught them. As for the truth, we may never know the truth. And so it goes.
Oh, sorry, this crosses the line into areas members of the press are destroyed over.
When John McCain ran for president, were you aware of his connections to organized crime or his presidential pardon? The recent exchange in Tempe (on video) between Jeff Gates and McCain is quite amusing. I would ask why it is never reported but I suggest you know. The last journalist who carried the story had his car blown up with him in it.
Again we return to Osama bin Laden. If he was dead and we knew, and I have been assured by “trusted sources” that we knew, why did we lie? Look at Afghanistan today and guess.
When America found it lost nearly $300 billion in Iraq, why was nothing done? When Iraq found their oil revenues more than a bit shy, ships loaded from the Ceyhan pipeline but nothing paid, why wasn’t it reported? There was a conference on this in Iraq. If you attended, did you note where I was sitting?
I assume we are all good people, or believe we are. Many of the finest people I have met in my life are on this email. We don’t always agree but all are friends.
Gordon Duff
Senior Editor
www.veteranstoday.com
Commentary: Elvis bin Laden
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) — The “VT” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.
This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise seriously.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.
Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept “alive” to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.
Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden.
By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.
The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden’s voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she believes “elements” of the Pakistani government know bin Laden’s whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the “bowels” of the bureaucracy, not the “top levels of government.” She was clearly referring to some members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden’s no. 2, the Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan’s politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United States.
There are “retired” ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the “Pakistani people,” on Al Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after 9/11, in which he said:
— “I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.
— “Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
— “All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.”
Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.
“God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin towers,” he said then, “but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind.”
While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11 generation that doesn’t read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their “naive” elders.
Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.
Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent “Top 10 Stories of the Week”: “The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated”; “Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?”; “Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups.”
Duff’s “Corporate Profile” says, “We are a full service Network of 63 Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans’ Community,” which claims “over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month” and recently grew 39 percent in one month.
On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.
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Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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