The Fox Hunt: Osama bin Laden, the 2002 Death Reports, and the Conspiracy That Never Went Away
I was there.
May 1–2, 2011
In 2011, when Barack Obama announced that the United States had "killed Osama bin Laden," I was at Ground Zero.
I went there to witness the reactions, listen to the conversations and take photographs. I wanted to hear what ordinary people were actually saying - not what television commentators were saying, and not what politicians wanted the moment to mean.
I was there.
And what I heard was a remarkable mixture of reactions.
There was relief. There was celebration. There was anger. There was patriotism.
But there was also skepticism.
People were questioning the story. They were questioning whether bin Laden had really been killed. They were talking about the lack of a publicly displayed body, the announcement that his remains had been buried at sea, and the decision not to release the photographs.
And underneath all of that was an even stranger question:
Had Osama bin Laden actually been alive all those years?
Because there was a piece of history sitting beneath Obama's announcement that deserved considerably more attention.
Bin Laden's death had already been reported years earlier.
Not simply by some anonymous blogger.
There had been reports and statements from political leaders, intelligence officials and news organizations suggesting that bin Laden might have died as early as 2001 or 2002.
And this raises a much bigger question about the machinery that grew around the hunt for him.
Because there was an enormous amount of money, political power and institutional momentum attached to the idea that Osama bin Laden was still out there.
Wars were being fought.
Intelligence agencies were expanding.
Surveillance programs were growing.
Military and intelligence contractors were making enormous amounts of money.
Governments were spending billions of dollars pursuing the world's most wanted man.
So from a purely cynical perspective, there was an obvious incentive to keep the fox hunt going.
A dead fox ends the hunt.
A living fox justifies another operation.
Another intelligence program.
Another surveillance system.
Another military budget.
Another counterterrorism initiative.
Another year of searching.
That doesn't prove that anyone deliberately fabricated bin Laden's survival. There is no solid evidence establishing that officials knowingly maintained a false story simply because it was profitable.
But it is a question worth asking.
What happens when an enormously expensive national-security enterprise becomes dependent on the continued existence of the person it's supposedly hunting?
If bin Laden really had died in 2001 or 2002, then the implications would be enormous.
It would mean that the world's most powerful governments spent years pursuing a man who was already dead.
And if authorities knew that - and nevertheless continued presenting him as a living, active threat - then the question becomes much darker:
Was the fox hunt actually about catching the fox, or had the hunt itself become the purpose?
That is where this story moves beyond one terrorist, one president or one raid.
It becomes a question about money, power, intelligence, institutional momentum and the human tendency to keep feeding a machine once the machine has become too enormous to shut down.
And then, in 2011, Obama stood before the world and announced:
We got him.
The fox was finally dead.
Or, at least, that was the story...
(I had more photos than this, but they were on my laptop hard drive and it died when it was crushed - and so was I - in my backpack during the Occupy Wall Street movement’s mass occupation of Times Square in October 2011.)
