ISLAMABAD: Refuting President Obama’s claim that a US Navy SEALs team had killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, former US Assistant Secretary of Treasury Department, Paul Craig Roberts, has claimed that bin Laden had died due to renal failure a decade earlier in December 2001.

Paul Roberts had also been a former editor for The Wall Street Journal after retirement and has authored almost a dozen books including “How America was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Warfare State”, which was published in 2014.

Reacting to the much publicized coverage of some recent claims by members of the US Navy SEALs team that reportedly killed bin Laden in Pakistan, Paul Roberts has claimed on the website of Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy (http://www.paulcraigroberts.org) in a detailed article titled “Another Fake Bin Laden Story” that Osama’s alleged death at the hands of a SEALs team was a propaganda orchestration to give Obama a hero’s laurels and subvert any Democratic talk of challenging his nomination for a second term.

Paul Roberts writes: “This fake story together with the fake movie and the fake book by an alleged SEALs team member is the way the fake story of Osama bin Laden’s murder is perpetrated. Osama bin Laden had died in December 2001 of renal failure and other health problems, having denied in his last recorded video any responsibility for 9/11, instead directing Americans to look inside their own government.

“The FBI itself has stated that there is no evidence that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. Bin Laden’s obituary appeared in numerous foreign and Arabic media and also on Fox News. No one can survive renal failure for a decade, and no dialysis machine was found in the alleged Abbottabad compound of bin Laden, who allegedly was murdered by SEALs a decade after his obituary notices”.

The ex-US Assistant Secretary of US Treasury Department further writes in his article: “No one among the

crew of the ship from which the White House reported bin Laden was buried at sea saw any such burial, and the sailors sent messages home to that effect. Somehow a burial was held onboard a ship on which there are constant watches and crew on alert at all hours, and no one witnessed it. Additionally, the White House story of the alleged murder of bin Laden changed twice within the first 24 hours.

“The claim that Obama and his government watched the action transmitted live from cameras on the SEALs’ helmets was quickly abandoned, despite the release of a photo of the Obama regime intently focused on a TV set and alleged to be watching the live action. No video of the dead was ever released.

To date, there is no evidence whatsoever on behalf of the Obama regime’s claim. Not one tiny scrap. Just unsubstantiated self-serving claims”.

Paul Roberts further states that he has made available on his official website witnesses interviewed by [some] Pakistan TV [channels] saying that only one helicopter landed in Abbottabad and that when the occupants of the helicopter returned from the alleged bin Laden compound, the helicopter exploded on takeoff and there were no survivors.

“In other words, there was no bin Laden corpse to deliver to the ship that did not witness a burial and no SEALs hero to return who allegedly murdered an unarmed bin Laden. Moreover, the BBC interviewed residents in Abbottabad, including those next door to the alleged “bin Laden compound,” and all say that they knew the person who lived there and it was not bin Laden”.

Paul Roberts then makes a startling claim: “The reason the SEALs team was prevented from talking is that no member of the team was on the alleged mission. Just as the ship from which bin Laden was allegedly buried has no witnesses to the deed, the SEALs unit, whose members formed the team that allegedly dispatched an unarmed terrorist mastermind rather than to take him into custody for questioning, mysteriously died in a helicopter crash when they were loaded in violation of procedures in an unprotected 1960s vintage helicopter and sent into a combat zone in Afghanistan shortly after the alleged raid on bin Laden’s compound.”

It may be recalled that 30 US military personnel were killed in the eastern Afghanistan on August 6, 2011 when insurgents shot down an American military helicopter. The media reported at that time that the dead included 25 Navy SEALs from the same unit that carried out the May 2, 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden. They were being flown by a crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Going by the contents of Paul Craig Roberts’s article, there were news reports that the families of these dead SEALS do not believe one word of the government’s account. “Moreover, the families had reported receiving messages from the SEALs that suddenly they felt threatened and did not know why.

The SEALs had been asking one another: “Were you on the bin Laden mission?” Apparently, none were. To keep this a secret, the SEALs were sent to their deaths. Anyone who believes anything the US government says is gullible beyond the meaning of the word”.

Paul Roberts had earlier claimed in an article on the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks that the “corrupt” Bush and Obama regimes used 9/11 to kill, maim, dispossess and displace millions of Muslims in seven countries, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11.

“The tragedy of September 11, 2001, goes far beyond the deaths of those who had died in the towers. For thirteen years a new generation of Americans has been born into the 9/11 myth that has been used to create the American warfare/police state.

