Was Osama bin Laden’s Death Faked?

An article from DJHJ Media has gone viral on Facebook suggesting that SEAL Team Six may not have actually killed Osama bin Laden. The article is the latest in a series of pieces promoting a QAnon conspiracy theory that bin Laden is still alive and that the Obama administration covered up its failure to kill him by murdering members of SEAL Team Six to keep them silent. A previous article on this conspiracy theory by the same author was infamously retweeted by President Trump earlier this month. The story was widely debunked as being without evidence, with even one of the (still very much alive) members of the team that killed bin Laden taking to Twitter to set the record straight.

In this latest article, the DJHJ Media writer attempts to present out-of-context comments from a Navy SEAL as proof that bin Laden is still alive and that Obama covered up the truth. She writes: “According to a 60 Minutes program one of the men who shot and killed the target did not recognize him as Osama Bin Laden.”

The basis for this claim is a 2012 60 Minutes episode on the killing of bin Laden, which featured an interview with the SEAL, who went by the pseudonym Mark Owen. During the interview, Owen described securing the bin Laden compound, moving through the house and taking out members of the household. Owen told the CBS interviewer, Scott Pelley, that after his team dispatched two gunmen and bin Laden’s son Khalid, the lead SEAL shot someone he saw poke his head around the corner of a wall. The SEALs then moved into the room the man was in and found him still alive. The DJHJ Media article claims that at this point “The man lying on the ground is identified as Osama Bin Laden and was shot and killed.” It also quotes Owen as denying that he recognized bin Laden.

In fact, Owen told Pelley that they did not attempt to identify the man until after they finished clearing the house. The full exchange: