Gareth Porter has a very interesting and largely persuasive piece on TruthOut arguing that by the time the Americans caught up to Bin Laden (with help from Pakistani intelligence) he had no operational role in Al Qaeda and in fact had been forced into exile by his underlings:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8866-finding-bin-laden-the-truth-behind-the-official-story
But Porter is misleading when he gives the impression the mainstream media fell hook, line and sinker for administration hype about Bin Laden's supposedly active role in Al Qaeda at the time he died. This was what I wrote in a column looking at the nature of the continuing threat days after Bin Laden was deep-sixed:
Unfortunately, those who follow the terrorist threat most closely
don’t think bin Laden’s death will have reduced it much, if at all.
“It’s good that we got him,” a senior law enforcement official told me
the morning the news broke. “Until we did this, we appeared weak and
anemic. But when it comes to terrorism, I don’t think it makes a
difference whether he’s alive or not. He wasn’t responsible for
Marrakesh. He wasn’t responsible for the guys picked up in Germany on
Friday,” the official said, referring to the bombing at a favorite
tourist destination in Morocco that killed 16 people last week and the
arrest of three men in Germany for allegedly plotting to bomb targets
there.
Whatever plans bin Laden laid in his Pakistani bedroom, so
many al Qaeda sub-groups have sprung up with vicious and ambitious
leaders out to prove that they can kill Westerners, too, that the man to
whom many supposedly pledged allegiance in fact exercised little or no
control over them. The wannabe bin Ladens have already shown they’ll
take any shot they can get. They’ve even claimed credit for close calls
that failed. As Robert Fisk wrote earlier this week in
The Independent,
the al Qaeda “movement has no ‘leadership’ as such, bin Laden being the
founder rather than the boss.” In the end, he had become no more nor
less than a symbol himself.
“Those inspired by bin Laden,” says
the senior law enforcement official, “don’t see a difference between
where he is now”—a corpse reportedly buried at sea—“and where he was a
few days ago” hidden away from the world in Pakistan.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/06/al-qaeda-terror-threat-to-new-york-city-and-us-trains-remains-high.html
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