The announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed touched off an explos­ion of conspiracy theory. The summary execution and swiftly disposed-of body, the seeming lack of evidence, and the changing account of events over the days that followed, fuelled speculat­ion – not just within conspiracy forums but across social media and traditional news outlets – that the raid was a hoax: bin Laden was still alive, or he was already dead, or had never really existed at all.

Even if the White House story was essentially true, then it still prompted questions about the motiv­ation behind the the raid. Was it a desperate attempt by Presid­ent Obama to shore up his failing popul­arity, an excuse to attack Pakistan, an internal al-Qaeda coup, or an Illuminati sacrifice? Whatever the truth, what’s certain is that the affair has propelled conspiratorial thinking even further into the mainstream.

The US arguments for its actions are not unconvincing: no country wanted to accept responsibility for the body; Islamic law demands burial within 24 hours; there was a risk of creating a shrine; bin Laden was identified at the scene and by DNA; releasing gruesome death photos would be morally wrong and provoke reprisals; plus, as House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers pointed out: “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway.”

But the White House’s handling of events has left it looking shifty and sinister. As FT’s conspiracy expert, Robin Ramsay, marvelled: “Given the enormous political trouble caused for President Obama by conspiracy theories about his birthplace, it is surprising that he has agreed to the secret disposal of the body, something guaranteed to give conspiracy theorists a field day.”

And then there’s the matter of the death photos. After three days of confusion, during which various senators announced that they would be released, and a fake did the rounds, Obama announced that they wouldn’t be, on the grounds of a moral squeamishness evidently new to the White House since the public parading of graphic photos of Sadaam’s dead sons Uday and Qusay, and of Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s chief military comm­ander. The decision deepened suspicions: as right-wing radio host Chuck Booms exclaimed: “We need the picture… Without the picture, it’s going to make people like me think maybe they actually did throw a bag over his head and get him down to Club Gitmo and let Jack Bauer have at him with some jumper cables.” Without this photo – and ignoring the DNA evidence which, as Fox News’s Steve Doocy pointed out, to those disinclined to believe is “just numbers on a piece of paper” – we were left having to rely on the President’s word.

And the President’s word was proved unreliable when the official account of the raid changed. Bin Laden was armed; then he wasn’t. He used his wife as a human shield; then he didn’t; and the only explanation we were offered was a cut-off in the live feed from the compound and the ‘fog of war’. Obama had, it seemed, wrested defeat from victory and with his ‘death hoax’ spawned a new breed, the ‘deathers’ or ‘proofers’, to swell the legions of ‘truthers’ and ‘birthers’ arrayed against him.

It’s not just swivel-eyed Republicans who doubted the official version of events. A YouGov-Cambridge university poll found that 66 per cent of Pakistanis believed the man killed was not bin Laden. In Abbottabad, residents were widely sceptical that he could have been living in their midst for six years, particularly without the Pakistani government knowing about it. Spiegel interviewed a local merchant, Maqbool Shah, who told them, “Our army and our intelli­gence service can’t be that stupid. No, it was clearly not bin Laden.” The LA Times reported that in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where anti-Western sentiment is particularly strong, many simply refused to believe he could have been killed.

So if he wasn’t dead, where was he? Perhaps the Navy SEALs made a mistake and the man they killed was a double; but then that doesn’t account for the DNA evidence, the testimony of his family, the convincing details. Or perhaps they kidnapped him and even now are torturing him into confessing his every secret; when they’re finished, they’ll just dump the body somewhere. “iamfrank”, a lone voice in an otherwise sober discussion on the FT message boards, insisted bin Laden “would have been given a knockout drug and covered in blood to make it look like he was dead to any one around with prying eyes, he would then have been taken to where else but the only place on the planet where you can’t get anywhere near – AREA 51.”
According to US conspiracist-in-chief Glenn Beck, bin Laden was captured in order to interrogate him about the whereabouts of al-Qaeda’s supposed nuclear bomb (or, alternatively, killed in order to stop the secret leaking out).

Even more imaginative, a hardcore of conspiracy heads speculated that bin Laden was in fact still among us cunningly disguised as… President Obama. Look how similar their names are! And if you type “Osama is Obama” into YouTube you’ll find plenty of people desperate to show you, with the aid of some basic photo editing software, that they look identical too.

These clips range from simple photoshopped pictures of Obama in a turban and beard, to short films which overlay photos of the two men and provide insightful commentary along the lines of “Have they not just given this man a shave?”

An opposing school of thought argued that bin Laden couldn’t have been killed in Abbottabad because he was in fact already dead. Bin Laden has suffered many deaths in the popular imagination: in 2001, from a lung complaint or kidney failure; in 2005, in the Pakistan earthquake; in 2007, at the hands of Pakistani militant Omar Sheikh; and on various occasions in firefights in the Tora Bora mountains. The White House, naturally, kept his death a secret in order to continue its war on terror. In an interview on the Alex Jones Show following Obama’s “got him” announcement, Steve Pieczenik, who served four administrations in international crisis management roles (and is a successful novelist), stated that bin Laden died in 2001 from marfan syndrome and that 9/11 was a ‘false flag’ operat­ion. Alex Jones, a truther and conspiracist, has also claimed that the White House has been keeping bin Laden’s corpse on ice for years, ready to produce at some politically opportune later date – a remarkably generous gift from Bush to his Democrat successor.

The al-Qaeda announcement, five days after the event, that bin Laden had indeed been killed largely saved Obama from the ‘death hoax’ accusations; for all but the most determinedly suspic­ious it was now proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Navy SEALs had got their man.

But questions remain; chiefly, why was the raid launched? There’s a vocal contingent in the States which holds that the whole thing was simply a Machiavellian attempt to further the selfish interests of the President. Fox News’s political and legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, for example, claimed Obama killed bin Laden to save his “lousy presidency” and sneak another term, a view widely shared on conservative message boards. Birthers, meanwhile, argue it was a ruse to deflect attention from the ‘debate’ about Obama’s background. They point to the timing of the announcement’s broadcast, cutting into Celebrity Apprentice, and claim its intention was to humiliate Donald Trump, who had called repeatedly for the public­ation of Obama’s birth certificate; it also came a day before their case against Obama’s eligibility for the presidency was to be heard in the appeals court, a coincidence they view as deeply suspect.

The killing has also been seen as a means to further various policy aims, both at home and abroad. As with 9/11, posters on sites like Alex Jones’s InfoWars believe the raid was staged in order to justify a security crackdown; others cast it as a prelude to foreign aggression, most probably against Pakistan. Pieczenik claims Obama’s intent­ion was to isolate Pakistan as punishment for opposing the drone programme. David Icke, characteristically looking for the bigger picture, sees it as an excuse to invade Pakistan, followed by war with China, then Russia. Many Pakistanis also fear invasion: the Urdu daily Ausaf reported a former military source as saying “Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else… but since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military’s entry into the country, it has devised the [assassination] scenario.”

Rather than an excuse for invasion, some see the perceived attack on Pakistan as a face-saving mission, a way to shift the blame on to Pakistan for bin Laden’s long evasion of America’s finest while simultaneously ending the hunt and so justifying withdrawal from Afghanistan; Obama is, after all, under fire for the budget deficit. The Daily Telegraph quotes Shakil Ahmed, a pharmaceutical company worker who lived near bin Laden’s compound, as saying, “The US wants to quit Afghanistan. They are saying Osama is dead so they can have an excuse. They have tried to defame the Pakistani army by cooking up this story.” Paul Craig Roberts, however, writes on rense.com that although he initially suspected bin Laden was killed as an excuse to withdraw from Afghanistan, he now believes “[T]he agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm”.

Taliban sympathisers on the Islamic Awakening forum accuse the Pakistani military of being in cahoots with the US, keeping bin Laden prisoner as part of some secret deal. This line of theorising was given a boost by the recent revelation that the US had a long-standing, secret agreement with Pakistan: the US could conduct a unilateral mission inside Pakistan’s borders to get bin Laden; Pakistan would protest but not stop them.

Then there are the more extravagant conspiracies. It has long been maintained, for instance, among those who lurk in the darker corners of the Internet, that bin Laden was in fact trained up by the CIA for the Afghan fight against the Ruskies in the Eighties; since then he’s been a US puppet, or even a CIA agent dressed up as a bloodthirsty Islamic terrorist leader, an excuse for America’s war on terror. This kind of argument has particular traction in Iran, demonised by America’s attack on Islam but no fans of the Sunni bin Laden either. Ismail Kosari, a member of the Iranian Security and Foreign Policy Commission, called bin Laden “a puppet controlled by the Zionist regime in order to present a violent image of Islam after the 9/11 attacks”; another member of the commission, Javad Jahangirzadeh, claimed bin Laden helped the US fake terrorist attacks and was killed to stop him spilling this secret.

An alternative theory contends that the raid was in fact part of an Egyptian plot: an unnamed source allegedly told Saudi newspaper al-Watan that bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, turned him in so that Egyptians could seize control of Al-Qaeda.

Naïve, say those who look to the date for meaning: bin Laden died on 1 May, the same day as Hitler was declared dead (well, depending on which timezone you’re in). Clearly, both men were sacrificed to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Illuminati. Or Satan is at work; bin Laden’s death was apparently announced 66 years and 6 hours after the world learned of Hitler’s. Or there’s some significance (beyond irony) in the fact that it took place on the Catholic’s Divine Mercy Sunday, and the day Pope John Paul II was beatified, though there’s little agreement as to what that signifi­cance might be: a vial of Pope John Paul II’s blood was displayed for veneration at the ceremony, so it could be bad voodoo juju. It certainly doesn’t bode well for the Catholic Church, which is now as good as assured of being the target of the world’s next nuclear bomb, according to davidgrouchy on abovetopsecret.com.

And for the ultra-paranoid, bin Laden’s ‘death’ is a conspiracy to launch an attack on conspiracists themselves. Posters on abovetopsecret.com are agreed that it’s caused a suspicious increase in attacks by the mainstream media on ‘crazy’ conspiracists (rather than seeing the spike in attention as acknowledgement that their ideas are important enough to merit wider discussion). “Aeonflux” writes that the raid was staged by the powers that be through the mainstream media “to ‘out’ anyone who may have an alternative view just so they can create a list… we are being made into the enemy and it’s a conspiracy!”

Finally, and conjuring up a touching picture of Obama and the Queen sat together with diaries out, there have been suggestions that the operation was put back a few days so as not to clash with the royal wedding; or else it was the other way round and, as the University of Buckingham’s Professor Anthony Glees speculated in an interview with the Daily Express, the Palace was forewarned and so postponed the young couple’s honeymoon in order to keep them out of danger.

infowars.com, monstersandcritics.com, rawstory.com, LA Times, 2 May; Washington Post, mediamatters.org, rense.com, D.Telegraph, 3 May; International Business Times, Yahoo! News, Time, msnbc.com, 4 May; Spiegel, 5 May; Guardian, 3, 5+6 May 2011; prisonplanet.com; abovetopsecret.com