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Where is Bin Laden?
by Washington's Blog via fleet - Washington's Blog Friday, Jul 3 2009, 9:49am
international / imperialism / other press

Story behind former CIA Head Michael Scheur's Wish for an Attack on US

Everyone is appropriately outraged that the former head of the CIA unit which hunted Bin Laden for almost a decade - Michael Scheur - told Glenn Beck:

The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States

Osama Bin Laden

But people aren't putting this in context. In fact, many Neocons have also stated a desperate yearning for another attack on America (and see this).

But there is another story here as well.

Remember:

• The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan

• A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:

  "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."

• French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them

In other words - as demonstrated above - the U.S. did not really try to capture Bin Laden.

And remember that the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And that a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And that the CIA may have helped most of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And that CIA agents allegedly met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already supposedly wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and when it was obvious to the intelligence services that he was supposedly planning 9/11.

Given that the government shielded top Al Qaeda members, and give that one of the top guys responsible for capturing Bin Laden now wishes OBL would attack America using weapons of mass destruction, the question must be asked whether people within the U.S. government wanted Bin Laden to attack the U.S. prior to 9/11.

This is an especially interesting question since a delay of a couple of minutes would have allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed.

© 2009 Washington's Blog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/bigger-story-behind-michael-scheurs-bin.html

COMMENTS

Iraq, a Failed Imperialist Venture
by Haroon Siddiqui via gan - Toronto Star Friday, Jul 3 2009, 10:26am

American troops were not welcomed with flowers in Iraq but their departure from cities and towns has been.

Iraqis celebrated National Sovereignty Day Tuesday as U.S. troops were yanked out of populated centres and put into remote bases.

In time, even that hidden presence will begin to grate on the Iraqis, just as a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia had spurred Osama bin Laden and others.

Yet this limited troop pullout is being hailed as a triumph. One is reminded of Richard Nixon's 1973 boast of "peace with honour" in Vietnam. The 1973 Paris treaty that led to the U.S. troop withdrawal was a face-saving formula.

In Iraq, too, the U.S. has little choice but to get out.

Not only did the Iraqi invasion and occupation prove the limits of military power, it also exposed how incapable America has become at nation-building. Its postwar incompetence was stunning.

America plunged Iraq into chaos, shattered the infrastructure and destroyed the society, reducing human beings to their basest instincts. They turned on each other and found safety only in family, tribe, clan and sect. Shiites and Sunnis, who had lived together for ages, ethnically cleansed each other's neighbourhoods, which to this day remain separated by barricades, walls and checkpoints.

Having unleashed the forces that put Iraq's three main communities at war with each other, the U.S. toyed with the idea of dividing the country into the Kurdish north, a Sunni centre and a Shiite south, much like the British had divided India in two in 1947.

Having created the chaos, violence and jihadism, the U.S. said, in colonial fashion, it had to stay to curb the chaos, violence and jihadism. Having crippled the state, it had no choice but to prolong the occupation until the natives were ready to govern themselves.

Iraq exhausted America more than the 1917-32 British invasion and occupation sapped the British. It also created killing fields on a vast scale.

Yet Iraqis have been brushed out of the American narrative – Iraq is free of Saddam Hussein, it is democratic, it is stabilized, it is this and it is that.

There's nary a mention of how many Iraqis are dead (between 100,000 and 1.2 million, depending on who's counting), how many maimed (not known), how many displaced (4 million), and how many tortured with Saddam-like methods in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere (not known).

Besides the damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in the Muslim world, the Iraq adventure empowered Iran far more than the U.S. would ever acknowledge.

Finally, the quest for oil may also turn out to be a mirage.

This week, Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, a U of T graduate, put development rights up for international bidding. No more no-bid contracts for U.S. firms, unlike under the Bush-Cheney domain.

Nor did George W. and Dick get what they wanted out of the Status of Forces Agreement. Passed by the Iraqi parliament last fall, it stipulates that all U.S. troops must be out by Dec. 31, 2011. No U.S. military operation can be carried out without Iraqi consent (a provision Hamid Karzai can only dream of). Iraqi soil cannot be used by the U.S. to launch a war on any neighbour (Iran).

Iraq is the imperial adventure that both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, one a neo-con hawk and the other a liberal hawk, fully backed. A monumental failure in judgment, their common stance was, and remains, an affront to the collective will of Canadians.

© 2009 The Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/659106