This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Bin Laden: Everyone Is Missing the Big Picture
Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com
Obama and Romney Are Both Ignoring the Real Issue with Killing Bin Laden
The anniversary of Bin Laden's death is big news.
Obama is bragging about how he whacked Bin Laden, accusing Romney of being too soft to take out bad guys.
Romney supporters accuse Obama of "spiking the football" and inappropriately showing off to score political points.
Both sides are missing the big picture. Specifically, we noted last year:
I’m as happy as the next red-blooded American that Bin Laden is dead.
For more than a decade, the government has said that Bin Laden is the world’s worst terrorist, a terrorist kingpin, the head of the worst terrorist group in the world.
But if we captured and interrogated him, he could have spilled a lot of beans which would help prevent future terrorist attacks.
Right?
But as the Atlantic reports today:
There’s one option the administration appears to have never seriously considered: taking bin Laden alive.
***
The administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive. ***
And Gareth Porter reported yesterday that the U.S. didn’t even consider capturing Bin Laden as part of its Afghanistan war strategy:
The absence of any military planning to catch bin Laden was a function of Bush’s national security team, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, which had firmly opposed any military operation in Afghanistan that would have had any possibility of catching bin Laden and his lieutenants.Rumsfeld and the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, had dismissed CIA warnings of an al Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States in the summer of 2001, and even after 9/11 had continued to question the CIA’s conclusion that bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to allow a focus on bin Laden to interfere with their plan for a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime.
Even after Bush decided in favour of an Afghan campaign, CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, was not directed to have a plan for bin Laden’s capture or to block his escape to Pakistan. [Background.]
We tortured a bunch of innocent farmers, children, grandparents and reporters … supposedly to get information about Bin Laden. But it doesn’t seem like the government was very interested in actually interrogating Bin Laden himself.
We pointed out the next day:
The Christian Science Monitor reports today:
Some US military intelligence officials also lament that bin Laden was not taken alive – and privately wonder whether concerns about the political “headaches” involved in trying detainees may have led the Obama administration to favor killing rather than capturing the architect of 9/11.
The opportunity to glean valuable intelligence from the leader of a powerful terrorist organization was lost, says retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo.
It is a misconception that ideologues don’t talk, he says. “The opinion that, ‘Oh, he’s such a fanatic, he won’t tell us anything' – that’s uninformed blathering by people who don’t understand the business,” Herrington adds.
The Christian Science Monitor article also confirms that torture doesn’t work to produce actionable intelligence, and points out that even Bin Laden could have been made to talk if other interrogation techniques were used.
***
The ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. – Senator Chambliss – says that the executive order stated that Bin Laden should be killed ....
As we noted in 2008, Bin Laden was useful to the U.S. as a prop in the so-called war on terror:
Former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats, a 23-year senior CIA analyst, who “drafted or was involved in many of the government’s most senior assessments of the threats facing our country [and who] devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat”, writes today in the Washington Post that the neocons have whipped us into an irrational fear of the terrorism. In reality, “Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears” and our leaders.
This is no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. The BBC produced a documentary called The Power of Nightmares in 2005 that showed that politicians were greatly exaggerating the terrorist threat for political ends.
Indeed, we noted in 2009:
A United States Congressman claims that the Bush administration intentionally let Bin Laden escape in order to justify the Iraq war.
***
Many people claim that Bin Laden died a long time ago. According to Israeli intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, and other sources, Bin Laden is dead.
According to video experts and and top Bin Laden experts, recent Bin Laden videos are fake.
So if Bin Laden is alive, American leaders have to explain why they have repeatedly chosen not to pull the trigger.
And if he is dead, they have to explain why they are claiming that he’s alive and authenticating his videos.
»
- advertisements -
There are so many lies, its just a matter of whose propaganda you choose to believe.
I choose not to choose.
Que Rush: '... you still have made a choice'
Osama died in 2001 before Sept 11th. There is no evidence linking him to the attack - he and some of his terrorist comrads wanted to do a 9/11, but it never left the drawing board. On the morning of 9/11/01, GHW Bush was sitting down with the Bin Laden family in a hotel watching the towers fall on TV. He was doing consulting for Carlyle Group at the time. Evidence regarding a missing $2.3 trillion from the Pentagon budget was conveniently destroyed when Tower 7 fell on 9/11. OBL had an accute disorder that would have prevented him from living past 2005. OBL had wanted to provoke the US to invade Afghanistan in order to break the US's bank. Mission Accomplished. Before the Afghanistan invasion by US forces, the Taliban was going around burning down the poppy fields of local farmers and disrupting the heroine trade in the area. The Taliban was created by the CIA to fight the Russians in the 1970s and 1980s.
A 9/11 2.0 is in the workings as we speak. Who will be blamed? Does it matter? The projected date is between July 2012 and September 2012. The projected location is a densely populated area not inside the US. The attack is supposedly going to be much larger than 9/11 in order to fully galvanize the public and put Arab nations on the defensive. The chances that it will lead to a hot war are very strong at this point. Although the advantage clearly lies with Westernized nations, the threat of nuclear contamination is very high for everyone. Further conventional warfare will be completely absolete at this point.
Up until this point, WW3 has been fought completely under the radar, using proxy wars and complex devices that cause havoc but leave no trace of the perpetrator. After the next terrorist attack, it is safe to assume that the public will call for hot war
"Who will be blamed? Does it matter?" - great quote
evidence or substantiation?
I'd say the 2012 Olympic Games in London is the leading candidate.
Werner Von Braun always said the last card they would play would be an alien 9/11. There have been an increasing number of documentaries conditioning us to this over the past year. Even "respectable" channels like National Geographic and the BBC are talking about what we could do in case of an alien attack.
One particular show was "Alien invasion: Are we ready?" on the Discovery Channel. The message was that we will have to rely on governments, experts, and the military. We will have to unite. Michio Kaku (world government promoter) was in on it.
Lynn Rothschild (astrobiologist) came on and said that the aliens would be attracted by the unique biosphere that we are destroying. They would want to wipe us out without harming the biosphere. She also argued that the aliens would be much like us. WTF? An astrobiologist is saying this? Are the Rothschilds so broke that they will have to rely on nose putty as in Star Trek? Guess they will work in the Annunaki for gold confiscation. They will try to work in divine right of kings too. They were always pissed about losing that.
The alien weapons were EMP, engineered bird flu, and tsunamis. Killer micro-drones were conspicuously absent- probably because we can't create them (yet). We hit back at the aliens by putting a nuke at the bottom of a mine elevator shaft and turning it into a giant shotgun to take out the mothership. Anyone want to bet the puppetmasters' inflatable "mothership" will go down in the uninhabited South Pacific? Mullah Cthulu's watery grave will never be found.
Let's hope this epic UFO hoax ends with a Scooby-Doo-style unmasking on the White House lawn... or real aliens setting the record straight. Going to be an interesting year.
This is right on. If I was TPTB, I would play this card. I noticed this as well with the " 'respectable' channels "
History Channel has been a joke for years. I expect it from them. They even earned themselves an entire South Park episode. Discovery has been in slow decline. Nat Geo is the biggest worry. The whole documentary lineup is now part of the Matrix.
WTF is up with all the cop shows? They teach everyone that the cops are everywhere, omnicient, and invincible. They have completely overrun Animal Planet, of all places. I think it's to humanize the cops. Think they will ever show one of those wrong-address weed raids in which a coked up SWAT team shoots a golden retriever in front of terrified kids? Even the ads for Animal Cops are enough to plant seeds of doubt in people's minds. That split second in which you think "maybe this cop isn't a monster" is long enough for him to get a headshot.
Bear Grylls's show is designed to get enemies of the State killed without cops firing a shot. Couch potato rebels think when TSHTF, they'll be able to bug out and do all the nutso stuff that Bear does. They'll be dead within a week. "Man-Woman-Wild" makes them think they can take their ladies along and they won't be worse than useless.
Excellent. However, you have miraculously managed to make Bush look less dim. Not brighter, just less dim.
Timmah will still look goofy long after his flesh has turned to dust.
LMAO! +1000 WB...your best work to date!
I was looking for "AlJon Corzswipe".....he must be the douche of spades
I am not certain that I have ever seen anything funnier in my life ...
.
This is a work of pure, unmitigated brilliance. I salute you, William Banzai.
Interesting that the top 2 Al Qaeda are now Zawahiri(Egyptian) and Libi(Libyan)who 'escaped' in 2005 from high security detention at Bagram(?). Suddenly we have accurate drone targets on OBL's Capo's and OBL himself is exposed by wife who was in Zawahiri camp just prior to her return to OBL. Current Al Qaeda fighters tossed Kaddafi and Zawahiri has now deployed these fighters to Syria to depose Assad. Al Qaeda is no longer a threat because they are back in the fold,imo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvHJywCBNQg
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor often considered the real brains behind al-Qaida, "got fed up and decided to sideline" bin Laden when the leader started losing his mental faculties after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Qadir says bin Laden moved frequently between hiding places in northwest Pakistan before al-Qaida decided Abbottabad was the perfect spot and built a home shielded by a towering wall for him, two of his wives and their children.
Bin Laden moved into a bedroom on the third floor with his youngest and reputedly favourite wife, Amal Abdulfattah, the Yemeni he married in 1999 and who gave birth to two children in Abbottabad.
For years, Qadir believes, the family got on well, but things changed in March 2011 when bin Laden's older Saudi wife, Khairia, suddenly turned up for the first time since the family was separated in late 2001.
At that time, she had fled Afghanistan into Iran, rather than into Pakistan with the rest of the family.
Qadir says the Iranians released her in late 2010 and she returned to her husband, but first, spent several months in an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan.
Two months after she arrived, the Americans raided the house. Qadir is convinced that Khairia betrayed her husband.
"Everything began to happen when Khairia arrived," he said. "Everybody had a problem with her. Before, the two other wives were living comfortably."
Bin Laden's grown-up son, Khalid, born to another Saudi wife, was also suspicious, Qadir said.
"He kept on asking her 'why have you come? What do you want from him?' She just responded 'I have one more duty to perform for my husband'.
"Khalid told his dad: 'I suspect she's going to betray you.' Bin Laden answered 'so be it'."
Bin Laden tried to persuade the other wives to leave for their own safety, but they refused, Qadir said.
The United States says it was tipped off much earlier by an al-Qaida courier. But Qadir contradicts that, stating that Zawahiri may have used Khairia as bait for the Americans.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/senile+Osama+Laden+betrayed+jealous+wife+deputy/6278004/story.html#ixzz1tc4haWxx Abu Yahya al-Libi, Religious ScholarNationality: Libyan
Believed to be in his late 30s, Libi has emerged as a public face of for al-Qaeda, appearing in more than a dozen lengthy Internet videos since last year.
His claim to fame is his successful escape from a high-security U.S. military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, in July 2005, along with three other al-Qaeda members. A year later, he appeared in a 54-minute videotape dedicated to his account of his capture by Pakistani forces in 2002, his subsequent time in U.S. custody and his prison breakout.
Al-Qaeda has named Libi as a field commander in Afghanistan, though he styles himself as a theologian and has offered lengthy commentaries on a variety of political events, including the Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy in Denmark and the criminal trials of Bulgarian nurses in Libya.
"The Libyan regime wants to cajole the West and please its masters ... by dropping the case of this heinous crime," he said in February before the Libyan government released the nurses under international pressure. They had been convicted of infecting Libyan children with the AIDS virus.
"As time has gone on, we've seen him begin to address global issues of importance to al- Qaeda," said Ben Venzke, chief executive of IntelCenter a terrorism research group. "He's become their most visible face on video, surpassing Ayman al-Zawahiri in the past year and a half, as well as their most prolific writer."
Little is known about Libi's origins. He was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a now defunct network that tried to topple Libyan ruler Col. Moammar al Gaddafi in the 1990s.
He spent five years as a religious student in Mauritania in the 1990s and is considered a theological scholar, although he lacks the authority to issue fatwas, or religious judgments, according to Noman Benotman, a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who lives in London.
Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said Libi is seen as a "theological hardliner" who may be taking controversial stances on bin Laden's behalf.
"Abu Yahya al-Libi has been speaking directly to the hardcore faction of the Sunni Islamist movement in a way that might well be counter-productive if used by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri," Scheuer wrote last month in a paper for the Jamestown Foundation.
You shoulda seen the fucking Tiffany's bill.
Betcha nobody else remembers that.....
:)
ah there's the real terrorsists
Bin Hiding topped 3,000 murdered on 9/11... Bush murdered 300,000 civilians in the false and illegal war in Iraq
LOL Yeah, I'm so glad Obama is our president now so we no longer kill innocent civilians.
Just a move on the big chessboard..
Sad...
But that doesn't count - we're a democracy!
It's so much nicer to be slaughtered by one of the sons of The Home of Freedom than by a 'camel jockey'.
Obama Debt Laden ... that is just fricken hilarious!
can you make these into a set a playing cards?
you'd have 52 jokers
if jokers = targets, we have a winner!
"The Architect of 9/11"
What a fucking joke, with such a lousy punchline
Ignorance is Strength
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98&feature=player_embedded
Bin Laden was living on borrowed time...a figurehead.
His flip flops floating in the sea his tombstone...his rotting corpse being eaten by crabs a fitting epitaph...here lies the SOB that would kill any of the unclean who would not follow him...now being eaten by unclean shellfish
You gotta love the irony.
The irony is that anyone with a functioning brainstem would believe this fairy tale.
The SEALS are talking...he is very much dead and they're not very happy about being used as campaign props.
He's dead...and crab food, probably a skeleton by now, just as it should be.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138054/Osama-bin-Laden-death-anniversary-President-Obama-address-US-Afghanistan.html#ixzz1tetLeYxK
Justice is served. What's for dessert ?
drop an "s" and you'll taste the next course
We all know that the obvious answer to dealing with the greatest terrorist mastermind in the world who had all sorts of plans to get us again is to let him move next to a Pakistani intelligence base, let him live there for a few years, then one day kill him while we watch (and photograph ourselves watching just in case anyone doubts it), and then bury him at sea with no witnesses the next day. Duh.
Ridiculous that anyone believes this fable. Watching obomber crow about whacking a CIA puppet who had already been dead a decade while Romney complains that the already dead guy should have been kept alive for intelligence ( what, we don't know already that the CIA and Mossad did 911?) is just a bit more than I can stomach.
yea - it must have been quite a feat to drag a dialysis machine thru the mountains of afganistan and pakistan for a decade!
cia plant dead since late 2001 or 2002 -
with NO PROOF osama actually ordered the deed(9-11) done....
no proof the one killed last year was who they say he was -
body dumped before any independent verification.....
and all the idiot democrats gleefully cry out Beloved Leader We got him! believing every word uttered by the War Criminal in Chief - after spending the last 8 years saying EVERYTHING Bush said was a Lie -
Now we get the repubs saying Every Word Obama says is a LIE after 8 years of believing Every WORD the last Criminal In Chief Bush said.....
anyone who believes EITHER party is braindead.
Read Berlin Diary. William Shirer couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent germans would spout the most absurd nazi propaganda as if it was the patently obvious truth. Sheep will always buy a good fairy tale if it feels better than looking too closely. The implications of 911 are just too difficult to accept, but as others have pointed out, it makes a good litmus test. Is this an apple or an orange?
everyone is missing the big picture...and the body. Well said. It's utterly ridiculous that anyone believes their version of events. It's fascinating psychological stuff that we easily believe "our leaders" are robbing our children literally killing their future but have a hard time swallowing the fact that they would kill us for economic gain, energy access and geographical control. It's pretty much how history reads
I hear you.
Bravisimo! This is the only post that needed to be written.
We live in a fairy tale world. The shadows that we see are themselves the projections of shadows. Truth is the illusion and falsehoods our sustenance, thus we starve with bellies full.
Laughing, I weep.
Fairy tale? Tell that to all the SEAL Team 6 guys who died in a mysterious helicopter crash weeks after completing their mission to kill a guy who was already dead.
The fairy tale had a bad ending for those brave men. Illusion is paid for in blood.
Schrödinger's Bin Laden?
This time GW has really outdone himself. The article is like a freaking hall of mirrors!
So we were wrong to kill Osama. If we did. Although we might have let him go. But then again he could have been dead all along. So yeah, really bad to kill him.
OBL is alive and well and posting on ZH as AnAnonymous...
Bin Laden is Dead
Long Live Bin Laden