Bin Laden Buried at Sea? Stratfor Emails Cast Doubt on Official Tale

If you think only conspiracy theorists believe that the body of Osama Bin Laden was spirited away for God knows where instead of being tossed off a military ship into the drink, a new Wikileaks post might be of interest to you.

As the internet has become more common in our day-to-day information seeking lives, conspiracy theories have spread more easily- but so too has skepticism about anything other than the official story given. Words like “truthers” (the people who don’t believe the official version of September 11th) and “birthers” (people who think that President Obama was either born in Kenya or Hawaii when it wasn’t a state) are in and of themselves pretty strong epithets now, so marginalized has some forms of doubt become. (Which is not to say a strong level of skepticism isn’t warranted when handling internet rumors- check Snopes first, kids!)

But even the most skeptical skeptic of conspiracy theories knew the official account of the death of Osama Bin Laden would come under fire given that by the time the announcement of his death was made by the President late on a Sunday night, his corpse had already been spirited away into the ocean for a watery internment… or so they want you to believe. (Kidding, this is all speculation at this point.)

Complicating matters was the fact that many members of Seal Team 6, the elite group that went after Bin Laden once intelligence was received, died in August in Kabul when their helicopter was shot down. It is worth noting that none of the soldiers from the Bin Laden raid from Seal Team 6 died in the tragedy, internet rumors still went into overdrive.

But the doubt cast upon the story of Bin Laden’s burial-at-sea got its strongest boost this week when the leaked Stratfor emails revealed that the firm’s vice-president for intelligence Fred Burton believes that the assassinated Al Qaeda mastermind’s corpse was actually whisked away to several points in the US for undetermined reasons. Stratfor- nicknamed the “Shadow CIA” by some- suffered massive embarrassment when their email database was hacked by Anons, and emails like this one illustrate why that’s such a shameful blow to the firm.

RT excerpted the mails:

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland]… If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi’s ashes.”

The site adds:

Eichman was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and, tried in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean.

Stratfor CEO George Friedman then contrasts Nazi war criminal’s fate with that of Osama Bin Laden in a reply:

“Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No one wanted a monument to him so they cremated him. But i dont know anyone who claimed he wasnt eicjhman [sic]. No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him which i doubt happened [sic],” Stratfor CEO George Friedman replied.

You can read the full piece here- do you doubt the official account of the death and burial of Osama Bin Laden?