By MICHAEL BURLEIGH 9th May 2011
The idealistic portrait of the guerilla leader secluded in his lair turns out to be an illusion. Footage of Osama Bin Laden’s life inside his shabby Abbottabad compound might have come from a care home in Hastings.
There he sits, in a woolly cap and brown blanket, silently rocking to and fro in front of a small TV.
He is not watching a shopping channel on daytime TV, but old footage of his younger self – waving an AK-47 assault rifle in the Afghani hills, or acting with faux presidential grandeur in one of his jihadist broadcasts.
That the Pakistanis subsequently found ‘herbal Viagra’ in Bin Laden’s medicine cabinet sheds further light on the super terrorist’s vanity. The new footage reveals that before taping his broadcasts, he used dye on his beard and hair to achieve the impression of virility.
The unkempt figure hunched before the TV seems much older than his 54 years. Occasionally, he can be seen forgetting his lines in otherwise well-crafted propaganda broadcasts.
The release of the videos – recovered from Bin Laden’s compound – by U.S. intelligence officials is clearly designed to expose the Bin Laden myth as a carefully manufactured fraud: the godfather of terror reduced to a doddery old man with nothing to do but watch videos of himself.
For years, Bin Laden’s grainy videos and audio broadcasts have been a sort of ominous counterpoint to the major speeches on global terrorism made by U.S. presidents from Clinton to Obama via Bush.
Now the boot is on the other foot. By showing this new footage, and humbling the supreme Al Qaeda leader, the Americans are directly contradicting the message he used to put out and trying to extract maximum gain from their coup in Abbottabad.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1384988/Osama-Bin-Laden-Mastermind-terror--doddery-old-fool.html#ixzz1Lx7Far6K
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