osama dies and a conspiracy theory is born

Unsurprisingly, bin Ladens death immediately spawned a raft of conspiracy theories around what really happened in Abbottabad.





Admit it. You saw it coming the minute the official announcement was made. If a decade of successful hiding from special ops teams and carefully avoiding informants who could’ve been tempted by the sky high bounty on his head shows us anything, is that Osama was a very crafty and resourceful man. But without a body and with countless conspiracy sites and blogs saturating the web already accepting that 9/11 was orchestrated by anyone other than al-Qaeda as gospel, is it any wonder that the newest craze in conspiracy circles is a pair of theories which say that bin Laden is either still alive or was dead long ago, and the announcement of his long desired demise was nothing more than an elaborate ruse by the aliens, or the Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or the Jewish cabal ripped from the pages of The Protocols? And since describing the same raid does get a little stale, even considering the raid’s target, the news are eagerly recapping the conspiracies so much so, a new moniker was recently coined for those who believe bin Laden is still alive or was never killed: deathers. I suppose it’s kind of a misnomer but hey, we were just buzzing about the birthers and editors like rhymes…

Well folks, time to play Six Degrees of Illuminati and we have several rather notable players joining the act. It seems almost redundant to mention that Alex Jones, who is basically Glenn Beck but without the libertarian political backing close to arch-Republicans and with the dial turned to eleven, is all over this, just like he was over the still ongoing birther craze. Too easy, right? I mean the man believes every conspiracy theory just as long as there some grand New World Order elements to it. But then we also have Andrew Breitbart, who we best know for lying through creative video editing, joining the ranks of the deathers, as well as reports from Politico, a speculative piece picked up by Sky News, and indignant fuming from Cindy Sheehan, who you’ve probably heard of during the national debates about the war in Iraq. There’s even a web conspiracy roundup to keep track of all the conspiratorial permutations, complete with rehash after rehash of 9/11 Truther buzz which is one of the main sources of support for the deather theory. As noted last week, nothing will weaken a conspiracy theory so it seems like no matter what we do, we’ll be stuck with most of the birthers, truthers, and deathers for the foreseeable future, and David Icke along with Jim Marrs just got enough material to tear up a few keyboards with at least six new sensationalistic potboilers about Trilateralists and Reptoids.

Granted, the burial at sea and the claim of DNA evidence is certainly not as definitive as an official image of a body and whoever rushed to put a fake image of bin Laden’s supposed corpse online didn’t help matters. But one can see why that happened. According to the government, nobody wanted to take custody of bin Laden’s body, not Saudi Arabia, not Dubai, not Jordan, and certainly not Pakistan which will have its hands full trying to explain why the world’s most wanted terrorist was down the block from their vaunted military academy for over a year at least. Makes sense. No one wants a bin Laden shrine to spring up on their soil and according to the proper Muslim custom, he should be buried as soon as possible. The sea works and it does keep with most of the Islamic provisions regarding emergency burials. However, why not release the pictures and video of the event? Just show the body and get it all over with, right? Not so much. Place yourself in a general’s shoes for just a second to consider what an image of a dead bin Laden will do. He was shot in the head twice. His face is likely a bloody mess and considering that we saw rageful demonstrations and killings over cartoons a few Muslim extremists found unflattering, and murders after a random fundamentalist hack, who is a friend of the degenerates in the Westboro Baptist Church, threatened to burn Qu’rans, well… You fill in the rest.

Still, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run since those who already had their minds set on the idea that a terrorist attack can never be responsible for 9/11 and it must be the Jews, or the Builderbergs, or the Reptoid leadership of the New World Order behind it all, will find a way to discard whatever evidence they’re given. It’s really a pointless exercise in giving them any evidence to the contrary because following the cardinal rule of a proper conspiracy, everything is proof of their conspiracy theory being right. If another bin Laden sermon was played on Al Jazeera, that’s definitive proof that he’s still alive and since a cousin of a friend of a classmate of some random blogger on InfoWars or Prison Planet has a fifty-fifth degree black belt in audio engineering, he can verify the tape’s authenticity to cut through the government’s lies. If we never hear anything from bin Laden ever again, that’s just proof that he was an invention of the New World Order and when it suited the Powers In Charge, he was removed from the narrative. If the government indeed does a 180 and produces pictures that were taken during bin Laden’s autopsy along with a video of his burial, it’s proof that it was all faked and one more random conspiracy blogger’s sister’s boyfriend’s coworker’s friend is the world’s most experienced CSI technician, she can verify that every frame and photo is a ruse. Just like the Moon landing. Ugh.

Why even bother trying to prove anything to conspiracy theorists if we know that they’re dedicated to rejecting every piece of evidence we give them as fraudulent? They’ll scour every image artifact for the slightest issue, measure every angle to figure out how they can assail whatever is before their eyes, and then quickly move a crucial goalpost and declare that you’ve proved nothing to them. Conspiracy theories are like a religion and in the conspiratorial theology, just like in many other dogmatic faiths, obstinacy to outside evidence is held to be the highest and most praiseworthy form of dedication. Just like an evangelical fundamentalist is fighting the relentless forces of Satan when rejecting the theory of evolution, so does a conspiracy theorist battle the evils of nefarious governments and its shadow cabal of secret overlords by rejecting anything that doesn’t fit in his worldview as a hoax meant to get him off track. Want the denizens of conspiracy sites to think that bin Laden was really shot and killed in Pakistan? Get them to agree that there’s no almighty New World Order and that the events of 9/11 were not an inside job first. We haven’t been able to do that for almost a decade and these notions are still as strong as they were since they first emerged. We’ll always have birthers, truthers, and now deathers, and again, like many faiths, they’ll look back at how long they’ve been perpetuating their ideas with near pathological obstinacy and declare that they must be right because they’re still around.