Home vids peel away Osama’s jihad facade

We know why the U.S. government yesterday released videos of a vain and image-obsessed Osama bin Laden — this supposed holy crusader who in fact dyed his beard and carefully stage-crafted all his taped messages to the world.
The point was to demean and belittle him in the eyes of the Muslim world and anyone else inclined to take up his treachery. It’s harder to make a martyr out of someone who appears so calculating and insincere, rehearsing and re-rehearsing his tirades against America.
What no one has explained is why someone within his own compound — a presumed friend, not foe — would videotape the startling and humiliating image and why bin Laden would allow it.
What we saw yesterday was one telling image of a frail, disheveled, almost pathetic-looking man in a wool cap, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the floor, or at least close to the floor. He rocks back and forth. He strokes his long, messy gray beard.
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He clicks the remote of an old, boxy, small TV that’s hooked up, it appears, to a satellite box. He looks at images of himself on what looks like Al Jazeera TV and he quickly clicks away when images of Barack Obama (in a tux) come into view.
No one has explained why someone within bin Laden’s own compound would want to portray al-Qaeda’s most feared terrorist as so petty, so into his own hype and yet at the same time, so vulnerable.
Plus, the video also reveals a room dirtier and more squalid than what you’d see in a fairly desperate crack house. You see peeling paint and rolled up rugs. The ancient TV bin Laden watches is propped atop a ramshackle desk. Electrical wires hang down from an outlet high up on the wall.
News reports originally described this home as a $1 million getaway. Now the price tag has been reduced to $250,000, according to some experts, but clearly no money was spent on the third-floor bedroom — which, according to Friday reports, bin Laden and his wife had barely left for five years. When the bedroom is this squalid, you wonder: What does the kitchen look like? The bathroom? Did everyone there live amidst garbage, or only the supposed evil mastermind? News reports said they burned their garbage. How long did they wait between bonfires?
The government yesterday reportedly disputed the widespread notion that bin Laden had become a marginal figure, a mere figurehead, in al-Qaeda. The new assertion: that his careful rehearsing and primping for his live shots indicated a man still deeply involved in al-Qaeda’s plotting, one who understood the symbolic importance of appearing younger, all-powerful, virile and ever in control.
We now know that the real bin Laden was not.
Source http://www.bostonherald.com/