Osama funny business?

Well, of course there is. But who knows to what extent. At any rate, there's a discussion on the POAC forum about an August 2003 article in the India Times where a Fox News analyst tells of a deal that he believes Bush made with Musharaff to not arrest bin Laden.

The Pakistanis feared that to capture or kill Bin Laden so soon after a deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan would incite civil unrest in Pakistan and trigger a spate of revenge al-Qaida attacks on Western targets across the world.

"There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilising in the longer term. There would still be the ability to get him at a later date when it was more appropriate", Ijaz told The Guardian .

The Americans, according to Ijaz, accepted the argument, not least because of the shift in focus to the impending war in Iraq.

So the months that followed were centred on taking down not Bin Laden but the "retaliation infrastructure" of al-Qaeda.

It meant that Musharraf frequently put out conflicting accounts of the status of Bin Laden, while the US administration barely mentioned his name.  India Times article

Rev. Day-Bu on the forum offers this:

More on Ijaz. He's a lot more than a Fox foreign affairs analyst. He also has worked with CNN, he's in business with James Woolsey, and he was in informal envoy from the Clinton administration to the Middle East.

The Rev has published a story on this story at Re:Zine.

Last summer, Australian radio carried a report in which well-connected businessman and analyst Mansoor Ijaz stated that Pakistani authorities know where Osama bin Laden is . Ijaz said that Pakistan and the U.S. had agreed that "we would never be able to take him alive and he as a martyr would have a much more deleterious effect because the sleeper cells that were still in place, active, still funded and had the capacity to strike out, they would have been activated almost immediately."

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.