Osama Bin Lyin?

Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 on videotape.

Admittedly, German experts say (rough English translation here) that the Bin Laden confession tape was mistranslated. But what do the Germans know, other than how to make beer?

Sure, an American computer expert says that a Bin Laden video released in 2007 was spliced together from earlier footage, and that:

There are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video....

But he's just a pencil-neck computer geek, so why should we listen to him?

Yeah, Swiss scientists are 95% certain that an early post-9/11 Bin Laden tape was a fake. They conclude that all of the later Bin Laden tapes are probably fakes as well. But what do the Swiss know, besides banking and milk chocolate?

Okay, one of the world's top experts on Bin Laden - Bruce Lawrence of Duke University - says that recent Bin Laden tapes are fake. He also says that the tape in which Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 is a fake, and that the top Bin Laden experts in the Department of Homeland Security agree. But he must be a communist or something.

And it is interesting that - as confirmed by the Washington Post's Spy Talk columnist - the CIA admitted to faking a Bin Laden videotape using CIA personnel:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

But that is obviously just an isolated incident which doesn't mean that any other Bin Laden tapes are fake.

Because everyone knows that America doesn't engage in propaganda.

Note: This essay does not have anything to do with 9/11 itself or Bin Laden's role in 9/11. It doesn't have to do with the war in Afghanistan. It focuses solely on the question of whether or not America ever engages in propaganda and disinformation.