Osama Expert: the Bin Laden I Know Doesn’t Groove Like That

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Say it ain’t so! Peter Bergen, a leading Western expert on Osama bin Laden, says that the recent portrait of the terror kingpin as a Whitney Houston-obsessed, Van Halen-loving schizo pothead doesn’t hold up. (Who saw that coming?)

“The worst book of the year, is surely Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof,” Bergen writes on his personal Web site. “The book is rife with howlers large and small,” he says:

. . . there is one vividly recounted scene in which Boof performs sex acts on a group that included bin Laden; Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two; Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian jihadist theoretician. Boof says this happened in Morocco in 1996. However, in 1996 bin Laden was living in Sudan, Ayman al Zawahiri was imprisoned in Dagestan, Azzam had been assassinated in Pakistan thirteen years earlier, and Qutb had been lying in his grave for three decades.

Well, cross that guy off your party “A” list. (Bin Laden, I mean. I hear Bergen can really cut a rug — even to “Rock Lobster.”)

Latest Muckraker
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: