October 04, 2008	Saturday	Shawwal 04, 1429

NEW YORK, Oct 3: President Asif Ali Zardari has been faulted for giving credence to a long debunked hoax about Osama bin Laden perpetrated by a former US President’s aide.

The New York Times in it’s Thursday edition said that the president apparently believed an Internet hoax alleging that Oliver L. North warned of the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden 20 years ago.In an interview with the Fox News Channel, Mr Zardari claimed that Mr North installed a security system for his home in the late 1980s “because he was scared of Osama bin Laden”.

The Times points out that that rumour emerged on the Internet soon after the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has been thoroughly debunked by a number of reliable sources, including the United States Senate’s Web site and Mr North himself.

Nonetheless, the hoax continues to be perpetuated through a widely emailed document that claims to be a transcript of Mr North’s testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.

In the forgery, Mr North is quoted as saying that Bin Laden is a grave threat to the United States. But in his actual testimony, he never mentioned Bin Laden and referred only to the terrorist Abu Nidal. In November 2001, after receiving copies of the email hoax, Mr North wrote a response that said the claims were “simply inaccurate”, the newspaper said.

“Though I would like to claim the gift of prophesy, I don’t have it,” he wrote.

Mr Zardari’s repetition of the hoax came during a conversation about terrorist threats with the Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren. In the interview, which was recorded in New York, Mr Zardari said that his wife, Benazir Bhutto, called President Bush in 1988 to complain about Bin Laden, who had reportedly bankrolled a no-confidence vote against Ms Bhutto.

Mr Zardari told Fox News, the phone call occurred on a secure line at the American embassy. He said Ms Bhutto “complained that, why is an operator who is supposed to be an American destabilising my government?”

Mr Bush “hadn’t even heard of the name Osama bin Laden”, Mr Zardari added, before repeating the claim about Mr North’s testimony.

In the 1980s Bin Laden travelled to Pakistan and backed the mujahideen insurgents who used the country as a base to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The newspaper said that Ms Farahnaz Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Pakistan People’s Party, responded to a query from The New York Times about Mr Zardari’s statements in an email message.

“The point President Zardari sought to make was more about how the US ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden and less about the Oliver North comment or hoax,” it read. “As President Zardari has said elsewhere Bin Laden funded opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1989. Her complaints about Bin Laden to American officials drew the response that they did not know much about him or his movement, which at that time operated under the name of Services Bureau.”