Today's 'must read' at Washington's Blog, more links at site:
The top military commander in Afghanistan - Stanley McChrystal - says that getting Bin Laden is the key to defeating Al Qaeda.
Getting Bin Laden sounds fine to me. But apparently the Bush administration couldn't have cared less about him.
Oh, they cared about him, all right. He was indispensible to their efforts. More on that later.
The oldest - and second-largest - French newspaper claims that CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Sibel Edmonds (the former FBI translator, who Department of Justice's Inspector General and several senators have called extremely credible, and some of whose previous claims have been confirmed by the British press) makes similar allegations. Bear with me, the rest of this essay is less speculative. If true, then the CIA could have nabbed Bin Laden before 9/11 (my em).
On October 14, 2001, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted bombing gave the Taliban evidence of Bin Laden's involvement in 9/11. As the Guardian writes:
The Guardian subsequently points out:
A senior Taliban minister has offered a last-minute deal to hand over Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to Islamabad, senior sources in Pakistan told the Guardian last night.
For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden for trial in a country other than the US without asking to see evidence first in return for a halt to the bombing, a source close to Pakistan's military leadership said.
So the U.S. could have had Bin Laden led away in handcuffs in October 2001.
According to the U.S. Senate - Bin Laden was "within the grasp" of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December 2001, but that then-secretary of defense Rumsfeld refused to provide the soldiers necessary to capture him.
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In addition, French soldiers allegedly say that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but that the American commanders stopped them.
Yeah, letting yhe French get him simply wouldn't have done.
President Bush also shut down the CIA operation trying to capture Osama bin Laden. And let him escape in Tora Bora.
If they care about capturing the man who actually attacked us on 9/11 and killed nearly 3,000 Americans, they have a funny way of showing it.
A retired Colonel said that the U.S. could have killed Bin Laden again in 2007, but didn't:
We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ....Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden.
What did they know about bin Laden that they did not share with the public? Were they confident, for undisclosed reasons, that he posed no threat? Why are there no expressions of concern about his whereabouts?
If capturing or killing Bin Laden is so important, why didn't we do it in early 2001, or October 2001, or December 2001, or 2007?
Simple. Without bin Laden, al Qaeda would have been done and they would not have had an excuse to invade Iraq. They needed a boogieman on the loose to keep up the fearmongering that turned this nation into compliant pussies and let them get away with the crime of the century. The neocon PNAC and the Military Industrial Complex demanded it.
Oil, money, and world domination. That quest has cost us over 5000 American lives, 40,000 wounded, God knows how many walking time bombs and lives ruined, 100,000 plus dead Iraqis, a coupla $Trillion dollars, the nation is broke and in debt up to its ass.
We have no money left, we didn't get the oil, and we're in absolutely no danger any more of ruling the world.
It's what we get for letting warmongering capitalists and right-wing ideologues install a weakling as president who would do their bidding. Karzai is corrupt for sure, but he is small potatoes compared to the previous administration.
Thanks, Georgie. You pussy asshole.
It must never happen again again, but as memory fades it probably will until we get the money out of politics. Probably not in this lifetime.
As long as this post is, there is much more at the main link. Read it and stay pissed off. Complacency kills.
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