Top U.S. Bin Laden Expert: Confession Video “Bogus”

by Kevin Barrett,
http://mujca.com 

2/17/06 

Was Osama Bin Laden responsible for 9/11?

The Bush Administration says yes, citing a grainy, badly-edited videotape that surfaced in December, 2001. In that tape, a fat guy who vaguely resembles Bin Laden chortles about the success of the 9/11 attacks. (In earlier interviews, Bin Laden had denied responsibility for 9/11, once even deploring the loss of civilian life in the attacks and calling them un-Islamic.) 

Is the famous “confession video” genuine? Despite Bush’s insistence that the tape is authentic, America’s top academic Bin Laden expert has finally gone on the record, joining numerous other experts. “It’s bogus,” says Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s Religious Studies program.  

Lawrence, author of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, offered his historic debunking of the administration’s lie in an interview with Kevin Barrett (“Dynamic Duo,”gcnlive.com, 2/16/2007, first hour). The interview marked Lawrence’s first major public statement sincehe made headlines last year by suggesting that recent Osama tapes are hoaxes and that the real Osama Bin Laden may be dead. 

Why has the Bush Administration been lying for more than five years by telling us that this preposterously bad hoax is a genuine “confession video”?  Lawrence, citing informants in the US intelligence apparatus’s Bin Laden units, said they all know the tape is fake, adding that the hoax has been kept alive because it is politically useful to those who wish to deflect attention from “conspiracy theories” about 9/11.  

continued →