In full Arabic transliteration his name is Usāmah bin Muḥammad bin`Awaḍ bin Lādin.
In the West, however, in English-language mass media, it’s simply Osama.
The original bad boy of modern times.

The US military has been fighting and killing thousands of people all over the globe in the past decade searching for the reported mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, among other dastardly deeds.

Or has Osama been used as a kind of poster child to reinforce the infamous Global War on Terror?

(Illustration found here).

Juan Cole in his daily-must-see blog Informed Comment makes note this morning of a forthcoming French documentary which says Decider George and his minions want Osama alive and at large in order to justify the horribly-failed GWOT.
What an ugly, disgusting thought, but nowhere shocking or disturbing.
According to Cole, “The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so.”
Cole displays the translated text.
Some snippets:

• Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood’s imagination.
  But it is not.
  The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form.
  The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa’idah terrorist network.
  George Bush, with his “war on terror” project, has transformed the middle east and Afghanistan into an inflamed bomb ready to explode, but has not found out anything about his beloved lost Usamah Bin-Ladin so far.
  What is seen, and the film also emphases this, is that all these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control.
  Apparently, it is a game of cat and mouse, just like “Tom and Jerry”, the famous cartoon.
  But it is a reality that the stubborn one from Texas does not want to catch the mouse — unlike credulous Tom — and that the long-bearded Wahhabi Arab does not want to hide — unlike the intelligent and roaming Jerry.
  Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood.

Decider George and his entire administration should be held accountable for the horror only he has not only created, but allowed to continue just to keep the blood flowing.
Osama, or Usamah, or whatever, can only be laughing his ass way, way off.