October 30, 2020
President Trump has retweeted a bizarre claim that the CIA kept Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden alive in Iran, which then moved him to Pakistan so that President Obama could score a “trophy kill” of the terrorist leader just before the 2012 election.
The Trump re-tweet was transmitted October 13. Trump made no comment about it—but the fact that the president promoted it immediately made it a major highlight among right-wing conspiracy theorists.
Saeed Khatibzadeh, spokes-man at the Iran Foreign Ministry, called the tweet “a new low” for Trump. He said the original tweet came from an account run by the Mojahedin-e Khalq. But the Daily Beast said the account actually belonged to a QAnon believer on the far, far right of the US political spectrum.
The re-tweet further links Trump to QAnon, which is viewed by almost all mainstream politicians in the United States, Republicans as well as Democrats, as extremely flakey.
The re-tweet includes a video of an interview with Alan Howell Parrot, who claims he has “terabytes” of proof that then-Vice President Joe Biden cut a deal with Iran more than a decade ago to arrange bin Laden’s death. But he says Iran double-crossed the United States and sent a bin Laden body double to Pakistan, who was then killed.
Bin Laden (or his body double) was killed May 2, 2011, 18 months before Obama’s re-election.
The US military appeared concerned that Al-Qaeda might have planted a body double in Pakistan. So, it said it obtained samples of bin Laden family DNA and checked the corpse of the man killed to make certain he was Osama bin Laden.
Parrot has not released any of the “terabytes” of data he says he has as proof.