It’s an urban — or in this case, rural — myth that refuses to die. Osama bin Laden is alive and living under the protection of our most dreaded enemy, or one of them anyway — Iran.

Neocon propaganda has Osama living in a mountainous town in northeastern Iran and Turkey.

“Osama bin Laden and his top aides are hiding in a mountainous town in northeastern Iran and Turkey knows it, intelligence sources said Tuesday,” reports UPI today. “Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is aware that bin Laden, his chief lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri and five other high-ranking al-Qaida leaders have been living under Tehran’s protection for the past five years, military intelligence Web site Debkafile reports.”

Ah, a sterling source — DEBKAfile, the Jerusalem-based English language Israeli “open source” military intelligence website. DEBKAfile is basically a propaganda outfit tailored to the demented worldview of American neocons, according to Yediot Achronot investigative reporter Ronen Bergman.

It also serves the hasbara, or propaganda agenda, of perpetually warmongering Likudites in Israel who are connected at the hip with American neocons. Both incessantly call for killing grandmothers and grade school kids in some fantastic bombing campaign against Iran.

It should be asked why United Press International would buy into this nonsense. Iran and the CIA created terror group are sworn enemies. Iran has arrested al-Qaeda members in its country and has thrown them in prison. In November, 2001, State Department officials wrote a paper suggesting that the U.S. had an opportunity to work with Iran to fight al-Qaeda but the idea was sent to the circular file by none other than Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

After Bush’s notorious “axis of evil” speech (written by neocon David Frum) listing Iran as a rogue nation supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction, Iran began rounding up al-Qaeda members and putting them under house arrest in a village near the Caspian Sea. “It’s been a status quo that leaves these people, some of whom are quite important, essentially on ice,” said one U.S. official at the time.

Iran apparently held al-Qaeda members rounded-up in its country in order to use them in part as bargaining chips. In May, 2003, Iran offered to hand over a group of al-Qaeda leaders being held in return for the U.S. handing over leaders of the Mujahedeen of Iran, known as Mujahadeen-e-Khalq or MEK (a CIA asset used to stage terrorist attacks inside Iran). The U.S. refused the offer.

In 2003, the Bush neocons accused Iran of helping al-Qaeda bomb three foreign worker compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As is the case with most allegations made by neocons, there was absolutely no evidence to support the claim. Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, insisted Iran was involved. It turns out the fanciful claim was made so Bush would close down informal backchannel discussions between Iranian and U.S. officials.

The supposedly prestigious Jamestown Foundation claims the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had ties with Iranian intelligence. This is a rather strange claim because in September 2005, Abu declared “all-out war” on the Shia of Iraq(Iran is a predominately Shi’ite country and many of Shia’s religious sites are located in southern Iraq). Like so many terrorists, al-Zarqawi was part of the CIA’s Arab network in Afghanistan.

Abu was — before his retirement or death — a prized Pentagon propaganda asset. He was nothing short of an Islamic terror superman— he single-handedly chopped off heads (the Nicholas Berg video), planned chemical, biological and radiological dirty bomb attacks, executed devious ricin attacks (remarkably the corporate media — with CIA propaganda in hand — said he had something to do with sending a white powder to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in early 2003), and was linked to a supposed chemical terror attack in Spain (it later turned out the “lethal chemicals” linked to al-Zarqawi were “harmless and some were household detergent”).

The U.S. has attempted on numerous occasions to link Shi’ite Iran to the Sunni terrorist group. For instance, the 9/11 Commission report claims Iran helped al-Qaeda operatives transit its country by not stamping their passports (this information was gleaned by 9/11 Commission staffer Lorry Fenner from NSA material). “We believe… that there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, [between al-Qaeda and] Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq,” stated Commission Chairman Thomas Kean in 2004. Predictably the lapdog corporate media immediately ran sensational and prominent stories on the Commission’s “evidence” regarding Iran and completely ignored evidence regarding Pakistan.

Does it make sense to have Osama bin Laden — presumably with his dialysis machine in tow — as a guest in your country when other al-Qaeda terrorist groups are attacking you, blowing up your mosques, and killing military officers (executing them on camera) and civilians?

Take for instance Abdul Malik Rigi, the leader of Jundullah, a terrorist group supported by the U.S. with ties to al-Qaeda. Jundullah was at one time headed up by none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mr. Rigi like so many others who hate us for our freedom got his chops fighting with the CIA groomed Taliban in Afghanistan.

Earlier this year Rigi was captured by Iran after his aircraft was forced down as he flew from Kyrgyzstan to Dubai. For some reason Rigi isn’t taking tea with Osama in the aforementioned mountainous town in northeastern Iran. He will probably be executed.

It is entirely possible DEBKAfile made up this latest round of propaganda, despite all the evidence that Osama is dead and buried.

It is also possible it came out of the Pentagon’s prolific psychological operations factory. In the not too distant past the Pentagon floated various stories to make Iran look bad, including a story that Iran’s ayatollahs encouraged “sex with animals and girls of only nine.” Another had Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. Of course, such nasty lies pale in comparison to the ongoing terrorist attacks sponsored by the U.S. inside Iran.

All of this nonsense makes perfect sense now that the U.S. has turned up the heat on Iran as The lapdog United Nations prepares a new round of futile sanctions against the country for its imaginary nuclear weapon program.

Earlier today Secretary of State Clinton said proposed new U.N. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear energy program will be the toughest ever adopted. Clinton told reporters in Ecuador’s capital Tuesday that there is strong support for a fourth resolution penalizing Iran for refusing to prove its nuclear program is peaceful and defying international demands to halt uranium enrichment, this short of an actual UN vote.

Sanctions and perfectly timed fairy tales about a dead CIA asset living in Iran with the consent of the country’s government are merely steps that will ultimately lead to an attack.

Infowars