Writing with the Right Hand
Another problem mentioned in my book that Osseiran, as far as I know, has not addressed is the fact that, in the video in question, the bin Laden figure writes with his right hand, whereas the FBI’s webpage for “Usama bin Laden” as a “Most Wanted Terrorist” describes him as left-handed.48
This apparent anomaly cannot be explained, I pointed out, by supposing that his left arm was immobile – as it was in the post-November 16 video, which was released December 27 – because the bin Laden figure in this video easily raises his left hand above his head. This fact, of course, is not inconsistent with Osseiran’s thesis, according to which the video was taped on September 26, which may well have been before bin Laden suffered the stroke or whatever it was that caused the immobility of his left arm that is apparent in the post-November 16 video.
However, Osseiran and other defenders of the authenticity of this video could overcome this problem if they could provide convincing evidence that the FBI was wrong – that Osama bin Laden was, in fact, right-handed.
Evidence for this contention was provided in late 2009, in fact, in Growing Up Bin Laden, a book that Jean Sasson co-authored with Osama bin Laden’s first wife, Najwa bin Laden, and his fourth son, Omar bin Laden. According to Omar, his father was actually right-handed. Here is his statement:
“For the first time I will reveal a truth that my father and his family have carefully guarded for most of his life, for in our culture it is believed that any physical disability weakens a man. My father is right-handed, but he has to make use of his left eye for any task that requires perfect vision. The explanation is simple. When my father was only a young boy, he was happily hammering on some metal when a piece of the metal flew into his right eye. The injury was serious, resulting in a hushed-up trip to London to seek the care of a specialist.
“The diagnosis upset everyone. My father’s right eye would never again see clearly. Over the years my father taught himself to conceal the problem, thinking it better for people to believe him to be left-handed rather than allow them knowledge that his right eye barely functioned. The only reason my father aims his weapon from his left side is because he is virtually blind in his right eye. Perhaps my father will be angry that I have exposed this carefully guarded secret, but it is nothing more than a truth that should hold no shame.”49
If this claim is true, then the FBI was wrong to describe bin Laden as left-handed.
Certain facts about both Jean Sasson and Omar bin Laden, however, should lead us to be suspicious of this claim.
Jean Sasson: To put it bluntly, Jean Sasson is simply not a trustworthy author. John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, has called her “a propagandist for hire.”50 The occasion for this description was Sasson’s 1991 book, The **** of Kuwait, which rose to second place on the New York Times bestseller list in March of that year, thereby helping solidify American support for the plan of the George H. W. Bush administration, in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait the previous summer, to attack Iraq. And that – other than making a lot of money – was the book’s purpose.
Sasson had proposed the idea of such a book to the Kuwaiti government, which was aggressively trying to convince Washington to attack Iraq on Kuwait’s behalf. In pursuing this objective, Kuwait paid Hill and Knowlton (H&K), a well-connected public relations firm, close to $11,000,000 to sell the war.
At the center of the H&K campaign was the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, going only by the name “Nayirah,” who said that, after the Iraqis invaded her country, she worked as a volunteer in a hospital. “While I was there,” she testified tearfully to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990:
“I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left he babies on the cold floor to die.”51
This was pure fabrication. This girl, whose full name was Nayirah al-Sabah, was the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, who was a good friend of President George H. W. Bush. Rather than having observed these events, she had been given these lines by H&K, which thereby earned the millions it was paid: “
- f all the accusations made against [Saddam Hussein],” wrote MacArthur, “none had more impact on American public opinion” than this story of babies being ripped out of incubators.52
Evidently to garner still more support from the American public, Kuwait agreed not only to give Sasson a big advance on the book – which she reportedly wrote in nine days in order to get it published before the bombardment of Iraq began – but also to put up over $1 million to buy hundreds of thousands of copies of the book to get it on the New York Times list of bestselling books – a story that MacArthur told in “How Kuwait Duped The Times’ Bestseller List.”53
