The death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, gave rise to various conspiracy theories, hoaxes and rumors. These include the ideas that he had died earlier, or that he lived beyond the reported date. Doubts about bin Laden's death were fueled by the U.S. military's supposed disposal of his body at sea, the decision to not release any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden's death to the public, the contradicting accounts of the incident (with the official story on the raid appearing to change or directly contradict previous assertions), and the 25-minute blackout during the raid on bin Laden's compound during which a live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the U.S. special forces was cut off.
Within hours, an image purporting to show a dead bin Laden was broadcast on Pakistani television. Although the story was picked up by much of the British press, as well the Associated Press, it was swiftly removed from websites after it was exposed as a fake on Twitter.
On May 4, the Obama administration announced it would not release any images of bin Laden's dead body.Montopoli, Brian (2011-05-04). "Obama: I won't release bin Laden death photos ." CBS News. Retrieved 2011-05-04. The administration said it had considered releasing the photos to dispel rumors of a hoax, at the risks of perhaps prompting another attack by al-Qaeda and of releasing very graphic images to people who might find them disturbing. Several photos of the aftermath of the raid were given to Reuters by an anonymous Pakistani security official, but though all appeared to be authentic, they were taken after the U.S. forces had left and none of them included evidence regarding bin Laden's fate.
On May 6, it was reported that an al-Qaeda website acknowledged bin Laden's death. On May 11, Republican senator and Senate Armed Services Committee member Jim Inhofe stated he had viewed "gruesome" photographs of bin Laden's corpse, and later confirmed that the body "was him", adding, "He's history".Members of Congress see bin Laden photos, CNN.com, May 11, 2011
On May 21, 2015, journalist Seymour Hersh published a report claiming that Pakistan had kept bin Laden under house arrest since 2006, that the U.S. had learned of bin Laden's location through a Pakistani intelligence official and not through tracking a courier, and that elements of the Pakistani military aided the U.S. in killing bin Laden. The White House denied Hersh's report.
Previous lack of physical evidence The primary source of skepticism about the U.S. government's story has been its own refusal to provide any physical evidence to substantiate its claim. Although the Abbottabad raid has been described in great detail by U.S. officials, no physical evidence constituting actual proof of his death has been offered to the public, neither to journalists nor to independent third parties who have requested this information through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Numerous organizations filed FOIA requests seeking at least a partial release of photographs, videos, and/or DNA test results, including The Associated Press, Reuters, CBS News, Judicial Watch, Politico, Fox News, Citizens United, and NPR. At the time of filing their FOIA request, The Associated Press said:
On April 26, 2012, a US federal judge decided in the case Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Defense, et al that the DoD did not need to release any evidence to the public.
On 20 May 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a sizeable number of documents recovered from the compound in Abbottabad where bin Laden was hiding. On 1 March 2016, the ODNI released a second tranche of material gleaned from the Abbottabad raid. On January 19, 2017, the ODNI released the final tranche of documents. ODNI said of the releases "[these releases] which followed a rigorous interagency review, align with the President’s call for increased transparency–consistent with national security prerogatives–and the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required the ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release." The documents can be accessed publicly on the ODNI website.
On November 1, 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released nearly 470,000 files that included draft versions of items previously reviewed as well as other correspondence and materials outside the scope of previous declassification reviews. These files are available online as part of the CIA library. One of those files was bin Laden's diary.
Burial at sea
Doubts about bin Laden's death were fueled by the U.S. military's disposal of his body at sea, though U.S. officials maintained that the burial was necessary because arrangements could not be made with any country to bury bin Laden within 24 hours, as dictated by Muslim practice. The Muslim practice has not always been followed by the U.S. For example, the bodies of Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein, sons of Saddam Hussein, were held for eleven days before release for burial. In that instance, several Iraqi cities refused to receive them.
The decision to bury bin Laden at sea was questioned by terrorists, Islamic clerics, and by some 9/11 survivors and the relatives of the victims. Professor Peter Romaniuk of John Jay College described the burial at sea as a way to forestall further questions. He stated: "Obviously they're going to be under pressure to show a body or produce further evidence, but this was a way of taking that issue off the table." A stated advantage of a burial at sea is that the site is not readily identified or accessed, thus preventing it from becoming a focus of attention or "terrorist shrine".
Theories
In Pakistan Senior Pakistani officials disseminated the theory that no firefight ever took place, and that whomever the U.S. forces captured, they executed him outside the compound, and took his body away on a helicopter.Yusufzai, Mushtaq (2011-05-04). Bin Laden's daughter confirms her father shot dead by US Special Forces in Pakistan. Al-Arabiya. Retrieved 2011-05-04.
Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), stated in an interview with CNN that he believed bin Laden had died many years ago, and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. Furthermore, he thinks the American government knew about bin Laden's death for years, "They must have known that he had died some years ago so they were waiting. They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment and it couldn't be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year's election as he runs for the presidential and for the White House and I think it is a very appropriate time to come out, bring this out of the closet."
Yet another scenario was reported in an article in the Urdu newspaper Ausaf, which quoted military sources as saying, "Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else. But since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military's entry into the country, it has devised the [assassination] scenario."
Bashir Qureshi, who lives close to the compound where bin Laden was shot and whose windows were blown out in the raid, was dismissive. "Nobody believes it. We've never seen any Arabs around here, he was not here."
In Iran A number of Iranians said they believed that bin Laden was working with the U.S. during the entire war on terror. Ismail Kosari, an Iranian MP, said that bin Laden "was just a puppet controlled by the Zionist regime in order to present a violent image of Islam after the September 11 attacks", and that his death "reflects the passing of a temporary US pawn, and symbolizes the end of one era and the beginning of another in American policy in the region". Another MP, Javad Jahangirzadeh, said that it was the U.S. that had carried out the terrorist attacks, and bin Laden was the main source of help. He stated, "The West has been very pleased with bin Laden's operations in recent years. Now the West was forced to kill him in order to prevent a possible leak of information he had, information more precious than gold."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "I have exact information that bin Laden was held by the American military for sometime... until the day they killed him he was a prisoner held by them," in a live interview on Iranian state television.
Seymour Hersh On May 21, 2015, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh published a 10,000 word report (later a book - The Killing of Osama bin Laden) challenging most aspects of the official account of Osama's death.The story was later released as a book. Among other things, the report claims that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had kept bin Laden under house arrest at Abbottabad since 2006, and that when the US discovered this, Pakistani Army chief Pervez Kayani and ISI director Ahmad Shuja Pasha helped the U.S. in killing, not capturing bin Laden. Hersh's U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources stated that the U.S. had learned of bin Laden's location through a "walk-in", a former ISI officer who came to the US embassy in Islamabad in 2010 seeking the $25 million reward, and not through tracking a courier. This claim had been previously reported by R.J. Hillhouse and was confirmed afterwards by NBC news. The White House denied Hersh's report.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books finds the cooperation between the CIA and ISI that Hersh describes "inconceivable", in part because 2011 was "the worst year in US-Pakistan relations since the late 1980s" and "hatred and mistrust" between the CIA and ISI was "acute"—something Hersh does not mention in his article/book. Among the incidents that occurred in Pakistan in the months before the killing of bin Laden were the killing of two Pakistanis by Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, numerous death threats against the Islamabad CIA station chief after his name was leaked (purportedly by the ISI), the cessation of the issuing of visas for US officials, following which the entire US consulate in Lahore was shut down and moved to Islamabad over concerns about security; increased US anger over the refusal of Pakistan to exert pressure on the Taliban and Haqqani group; the death of 40 Pakistanis including many civilians and later 24 Pakistani soldiers from US drone strikes, the cut off of US supplies to Afghanistan by Pakistan. Further adding to the implausibility of Hersh's theory, according to Rashid, is the unlikeliness that either the US would have "calmly accepted" Pakistan's hiding and protecting bin Laden, or that the dozens of Pakistani military, police, fire and bureaucrats—whose silence/complicity would have been required for a successful conspiracy—would have cooperated with the American incursion. While there was little or no disapproval by the Pakistan public over bin Laden's long residency in Pakistan, the US attack on the compound of bin Laden was so unpopular that just the failure of the military to detect and go after the US helicopters ignited outrage among the media, the public and the civilian government.