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>Meet the Falconer Trying to Convince Trump That Biden Killed Navy SEALs
Meet the Falconer Trying to Convince Trump That Biden Killed Navy SEALs
‘I AM RUTHLESS’
The story of the man behind the bin Laden conspiracy theory shared by Trump might just be more convoluted and outrageous than his claims of body doubles and blood sacrifice.
Will Sommer
Politics Reporter
Published Oct. 18, 2020 5:13AM ET
With less than three weeks before Election Day and the coronavirus pandemic still raging, Donald Trump wants voters to consider some very important things.
Like did Osama bin Laden survive the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on his compound by using a body double, and did former Vice President Joe Biden then order the murder of Navy SEALs to cover that fact up? Did Biden then order the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya to cover that up?
Trump boosted that convoluted conspiracy theory twice on Twitter this week, in one case retweeting a QAnon believer and in another retweeting a fictitious persona run by a militant group opposed to the Iranian government. Trump’s posts infuriated Robert O’Neill, the pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed bin Laden, who accused conspiracy theorists of “trampling on the graves” of soldiers. Pressed on those retweets at an NBC town hall Thursday, Trump said that he didn’t know if the claim that Biden murdered SEALs was true, but that he wanted to “put it out there” for people to consider.
“That was a retweet, and I do a lot of retweets,” Trump said.
The bin Laden conspiracy theory is the creation of falconer Alan Parrot, who claims he discovered the truth about bin Laden and the Navy SEAL murders through his work as a falconer for Middle Eastern monarchs. Now Parrot promises to release “terabytes” of evidence that Biden hid the 9/11 mastermind in Iran and murdered American soldiers, raising the prospect that his conspiracy theories will continue to percolate on the right-wing internet up to the election.
Thanks to a viral video of his claims about Biden, Parrot has risen in the course of just one week from being a controversial falconer little-known outside of ornithology circles to appearing on the president’s Twitter feed.
It’s a story that’s strange even by the standards of 2020 conspiracy theories: one about falcon smuggling, the violent “falcon mafia,” federal informants, and radio tracking devices. It’s also a story about how social media and the overheated politics of 2020 made it possible for a falconer with a history of making outlandish claims to find a mouthpiece in the president.
Parrot has been obsessed with falcons since he was a teenager. The son of a well-known Maine doctor, Parrot flew to Iran after graduating from high school to pursue his falconry sometime in the 1970s, without even owning a picture of a falcon.