Confessions of a serial killer

FRANK MIELE

America has been waiting and waiting for a confession from a suspected killer.

Did he or didn't he do it? It appears that he is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, but a few people just don't believe it. They want more evidence, better evidence, a full confession.

No, I am not talking about Drew Peterson, the now-retired Chicago cop who is a suspect in the death of his third wife and the disappearance of his fourth.

Drew Peterson may or may not be a serial killer, but there is one man alive who is a far more successful killer than Peterson, O.J. Simpson or any other suspected or convicted murderer in the world.

Of course, I am talking about Osama bin Laden. Like another charismatic leader, Charles Manson, Osama prefers to get others to do his dirty work, but responsibility for murder can't be avoided by having someone else pull the trigger.

Still, by staying holed up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Third World countries for many years, bin Laden could make a case that he has "plausible deniability" when bombs explode in Baghdad or planes hit buildings in New York. It also certainly has helped his "mystique" that he got support from the United States many years ago when he was fighting the Soviet Union, leading some people to conclude that he was either a patsy or a stooge of the U.S. government on Sept. 11, 2001, when his soldiers killed nearly 3,000 people.

Thus, we have the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement," which automatically denies the truth of any theory that doesn't blame the U.S. government (or forces therein) for masterminding and executing the whole tragic scenario of 9/11. The near-endless variety of theories that have been proposed, and the casual acceptance of many patently absurd scenarios by the movement, raises the specter of a Rube Goldberg style conspiracy which is held in place by bubble gum and started into motion by burnt bread bouncing out of a defective toaster.

It doesn't matter to these people that bin Laden had pledged to go to war against the United States years before 9/11. It doesn't matter that study after study has looked into the claims of the "9/11 Truthers" and demonstrated that most of them are based on misunderstandings, coincidence, error, or lies. You can blame space aliens for 9/11 but that doesn't make it so - despite the entertaining conspiracy theories of David Icke, who supposes that the "Global Elite" rulers of earth are actually reptilians from the constellation Draco.

Truth of the matter is, nothing will satisfy the 9/11 Truthers. Probably even a full confession by George W. Bush that he ordered the attack on the World Trade Center would be met with skepticism. After all, Bush is a known liar, right?

But it may satisfy some of the mainstream Americans who have been persuaded by the 9/11 Truth Movement to know that there has been a full confession of responsibility for the terror attacks. On Nov. 29 of this year, Osama bin Laden issued an audiotape in which he took full responsibility for the attacks. The purpose of the tape was to convince America's European allies to abandon their efforts to assist the U.S. military in Afghanistan. His point was that the former Taliban government of Afghanistan did not attack anyone, so other governments should not have invaded Afghanistan. He said, in part:

"[Afghanistan was] invaded without right by your unjust governments, without stopping to think about or reflect on Bush's claim that this invasion was a response to the events of the 11th, although - as I mentioned previously - the events of Manhattan were a response to the American-Israeli coalition's murder of our people in Palestine and Lebanon.

"And it was I who was responsible for 9/11, and I stress that all Afghans - both government and people - had no knowledge of those events and America knows that, because some of the Taliban's ministers fell into its hands as captives, and they were interrogated and that became known."

He then concludes his statement by proclaiming that "the American tide is ebbing, by the grace of Allah, and … they shall soon depart for their homeland beyond the Atlantic and leave the neighbors to settle their accounts with each other."

Could it be any plainer that Osama bin Laden is an enemy of the United States? That he planned and plotted the Sept. 11 attacks? That as long as we support Israel's right to defend itself and to exist, he will think it appropriate to kill our civilians? That if we depart Afghanistan (or Iraq) there will be a bloodbath of monumental proportions?

But yet we dither and doubt. We worry about George Bush and let bin Laden off the hook. We plan for imminent withdrawal from Iraq and forget about the immediate past in Manhattan. We imagine there's "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" and walk like sheep among people who think there is something to kill and die for, and are willing to do it, too.

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com.