Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.