Now, I don’t what to be picky but US supported politician Benazir Bhutto is dead. Supporters of Nawar Sharif have been shot with a high powered rifle just a couple of days ago and what’s up with Osama Bin Laden? Has there been any attempts on his life in the last week or so. How about the last month? I thought we wanted him dead or live?
Really? With Rush and his - Obama - Osama routine. The message has stunk with some folks. if there is an association which is all that the Republicans wanted. Barack Obama. Osama Bin Laden. They just wanted a hint of doubt in the minds of Americans. Once you start thinking that you aren’t sure who the Senator is and who is the terrorist then they have won.
So, did Romney really make a “mistake” yesterday when he said, “Actually, just look at what Osam _ Barack Obama _ said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. … It’s almost as if the Democratic contenders for president are living in fantasyland. Their idea for jihad is to retreat, and their idea for the economy is to also retreat. And in my view, both efforts are wrongheaded.”
His campaign said it was just a slip of the tongue. Really? So, is Romney the absent-minded politician or is he the business genius that his campaign is painting? It can’t be both.
Update: Video added
New article in Newsweek tries to figure out why we can’t find Bin Laden. I don’t think that you need a whole article. All you need is to look at the Bush administration’s behavior over the last 6 years and it is clear - they needed a boogie man. So the answer to the question is will. Bush learned from his daddy if you do a job very well, America forgets. So what Bush does is show resolve and determination when in fact he knows if he captured Bin Laden there would be no more War on Terror. The American people wouldn’t jump when he said Al Qaeda instead we would say, “Bin there and done that.” (pun intended)
Yesterday Obama said what I thought was a realistic goal of getting the terrorists where ever they are. If there are in Florida. Get them there. If they are in London, get them there. If they are in Pakistan, get them there.
The other thing that he said that was very interesting was that he mentioned an aborted opportunity to get top Al Qaeda leadership in 2005. I hadn’t heard of this. Here’s the deal - Osama and his gang were meeting in Pakistan and Bush administration officials didn’t go after him. Where are the hawks now? I would love to hear the pack of manure that William Krystol will lay on us over this one.
One thing is clear, Bush isn’t about protecting us.
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From NYT:
A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.
The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations. (more…)
There was a line in what I thought was a cool movie called the Zero Effect. The line went something like this - If you are looking for something in particular then that is hard. If instead you are looking for anything then that is easy to find. The new Director of National Intelligence is basically quoting that line here.
Tim Russert, finally asks some relevant questions but doesn’t follow up. Why has Osama Bin Laden been so hard to catch? He gave Russert the Zero Effect quote, basically. Then Tim could have followed with how did we let him out of Kabul? Why did we not bomb the caravan of trucks leaving Kabul? Why couldn’t we corner Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. When we sent in troops why didn’t we drop them behind the Taliban lines so that our troops could fight down the mountains and effectively close of any escape route for Bin Laden? How many men do we, not Pakistan, we have looking for Bin Laden right now? Okay, I don’t need the exact number is there a brigade or a division looking for him? Unfortunately, we didn’t get any of these questions.
No surprises here. The War in Iraq has produced more Al Qaeda. Experts have been saying this for a while now.
Boehner choked up with emotion on the Iraq funding bill. Either he’s a great actor or he really doesn’t understand the situation in the world. As far as I know Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11. The leadership of Al Qaeda is not in Iraq. The leadership is Pakistan or at least the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wouldn’t it make more sense to cry because 5 years after 9/11 Bin Laden is still alive and the CIA’s bin Laden unit has been disbanded. The thousands of soldiers that we had combing this area 5 years ago are now in Iraq. Maybe that’s what he was crying over. Yeah, maybe he realized that the President has lead us into a wild goose chase. Maybe he now understands that he need to look at Somalia, Indonesia and Yemen which are know safe heavens for Al Qaeda. Yeah, now he sees the light…maybe NOT.
“Why is he at large? Because we haven’t got him yet, Jim. That’s why. And he’s hiding, and we’re looking, and we will continue to look until we bring him to justice. We’ve brought a lot of his buddies to justice, but not him. That’s why he’s still at large. He’s not out there traipsing around, he’s not leading many parades, however. He’s not out feeding the hungry. He’s isolated, trying to kill people to achieve his objective.Those are his words — his objectives are his words, not mine. He has made it clear — he and Zawahiri, their number two, have made it clear what they want. And in a war against extremists and radicals like these, we ought to be listening carefully to what they say. We ought to take their words seriously. There have been moments in history where others haven’t taken the words of people seriously and they suffered. So I’m taking them seriously.” from today’s press conference.
Some common sense. Some stupid questions from Wolf Blitzer but John Edwards knocks these out of the park. Edwards does a very good job on articulating a strategy to win. His strategy to continue to send bills with funding and timetables is something that I agree with. He is 100% correct that if the American people don’t agree with him them they will not vote for him. Blitzer returns with Bush’s speech yesterday in which he talks about Osama bin Laden. First of all, why would the President bring up Osama? Wasn’t he supposed to get him dead or a alive? What happened? Why is Osama able to give orders to anyone outside of Lucifer? Edwards rightly points out that Osama should have been captured by now and there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we got there.
If you are on the run and hiding in caves do you have time to make recruitment videos?
It is kind of odd how some people are completely changed by events and others are not. Dennis Miller is one of those people who were completely changed by 9/11. He has stated that his revelation came when he noticed that people were trying to kill us. My question is-why didn’t you know that before? I know it. The information was out there. Did he just read the paper and skip over the bad parts?
He has been trying to find his niche ever since 9/11. he has lost his HBO gig. He had something on MSNBC, if I am not mistaken, but he lost that also. Then he was on some network like CNBC but that also fell through.
So, Dennis Miller tries to explain about the weapons of mass destruction and where’s bin Laden. he starts with the old standby that everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yes, that is correct. BUT, everybody did not invade Iraq. We did. Therefore, we have spent 3000 American lives and over $350 billion on a hoax. Saddam Hussein bluffed and we spent 3000 lives proving his bluff was wrong.
Dennis Miller then goes into his who cares where Osama bin Laden is? Basically, Dennis Miller tells us that we should just move on. We should move on to the rest of the war on terror and grow some gonads. Well, my gonads are fine. I guess, I should ask Dennis Miller, if somebody rolls a grenade into your house and blows up your living room, what do you do? You chased the guy down the street and around the corner and you go so far as to chase them out of town, do you then say just forget about him? No, of course not. Osama bin Laden is important because our enemy thinks he’s important. Our enemies continue to listen to his rants and draw inspiration from them. Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden will not end terrorism. It will, on the other hand, begin to close the book on 9/11. It is called Justice or has the right completely lost sight Justice.
Do you remember the guy who started all of this? Where is he?
This was an interesting exchange upon terrorism experts. Besides the emotions that are honestly visible in this video clip, this is an incredibly complex issue. Remember the atmosphere which President Bill Clinton was operating in. You have an incredibly divisive Congress. President Clinton could not go to the restroom without criticism from Republican leadership. Although Newt Gingrich praised President Clinton’s missile strikes on suspected Al Qaeda targets, many other Republicans were highly critical. Therefore, it’s hard to imagine how Clinton could have been more aggressive in going after bin Laden under such criticism. There was no way, let me repeat, there was no way that President Clinton could have sent in troops without a complete and total revolt in the Republican-led Congress. If a missile strike was “Wag the Dog,” then what would a commando raid have been called.
Remember, the 9/11 commission was designed to quell angst and the American public. It was not designed to enter questions. Although, they did answer some questions, others were left completely untouched. Recall, that the 9/11 commission did not have access to all of the information. The administration stonewalled some of the “highly sensitive” information was only seen by a couple of the 9/11 commissioners. The executive director of the 9/11 commission, somebody almost completely invisible to the public, was a Bush insider. He had a lot of say on what went into the final report.
I was not terribly critical of the Bush administration lack of focus on Al Qaeda until, they tried to convince the public that there were always on the ball. When President Bush began saying that we were always on top of terrorism, this when I began very critical. This is not true. When the Bush administration came into office they were focused on Iraq and missile defense.
Finally, Michael Sheuer, who led the bin Laden unit in the CIA for many years, he lived, breathed and slept bin Laden. He is about to come unglued during this interview. He mentions that there were 10 instances when we had an opportunity to take out bin Laden. I believe that he is a thoughtful man. I believe that he has a single-mindedness that unfortunately a president cannot have.
FNS - Is Clinton Correct? Part 1 [6:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download FNS - Is Clinton correct? [7:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadAnother thoughtful, intelligent president on the Daily Show! This is a great interview by John.
Oh, now he’s done done it. Keith Olbermann and the folks at Countdown has put together exactly what the Bush administration was given prior to 9/11. I had some specific examples listed on my website. But it’s a little bit different when they list the exact documents. The one thing that I was not aware of was that Osama bin Laden may have been offered to the Bush administration in February of 2001! This is major. Ari Fleischer was asked a question in February about an offer from Sudan brokered through Saudi Arabia to give up bin Laden. Ari Fleischer states that he’ll get back to the reporter and there is no record that he ever brought up the subject again. Interesting. (The first several minutes need to be edited off of this but, because of my own time constraints, I thought it’s best that I posted now.)
Now we get to play the old familiar game he should she said. President Clinton said on Fox News Sunday that the Bush administration was given a comprehensive anti-terror plan. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice fired back in an interview with the New York Post. She states that the Bush administration was not given a plan. So what are we to believe? On one hand we have President Clinton who is trying to set the record straight and trying to clear his name. On the other hand, we have the Bush administration which has only one in a row in its quiver. That arrow is terror. If the Bush administration is not fighting terror as vigorously as they would like us to believe they would be in a great deal of trouble with the midterm elections. Therefore, each party has a reason to bend the truth.
What data do we have to help us with this conundrum? Well, there’s the 9/11 commission report. The report seems to support President Clinton’s assertion that the Bush administration was given a plan and a report seems to be devoid of any actions that the Bush administration took prior to 9/11. Is there any other evidence? Well there is the book The Price of Loyalty which was about Paul O’Neill’s time in the Bush Cabinet. This book notes that there are no high level principals meeting on Osama bin Laden prior to September of 2001. This seems to support President Clinton’s assertions. There of course is Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, which conservatives like to attack but the bottom line is the data contained within the book, the actual facts, are not in dispute. The 9/11 Commission clearly supports Richard Clarke’s view of what happened in the Bush administration prior to 9/11. There’s even more evidence, the fact that the Bush administration does not point to any solid event or press conference or press release or meeting suggests that they had a completely and totally different agenda when they came into the White House.
Do you remember what Donald Rumsfeld was pushing prior to 9/11? The missile defense shield!
Former CIA director John McLaughlin chimes in. Basically, we still know nothing. Notice how we haven’t heard a peep from the White House.
Wow, this story came out of nowhere. So, is Bin Laden dead or alive? Would the Bush administration tell us? Can we trust the Bush Administration to tell us that their golden goose maybe dead?
From the WhiteHouse Web site:
President Bush said: “So I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.” He went on to say, “Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.”
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I guess from his speeches over the past week, he has changed his mind. He’s now worried again.
Let’s review the things that we know are true. For example, we know that we had an opportunity to capture Osama bin Laden in Kabul before the fall of Afghanistan. We did not capture him. We know, that we had an opportunity to kill or capture Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains. We did not. We had thousands of troops looking for the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for reasons that are unclear, we packed up everything and decided to invade Iraq.
In my opinion, Donald Rumsfeld should have been fired over the conduct of the Afghanistan war. The purpose of the war was to kill or capture those who are responsible for September 11. Anything less, has to be looked at as a failure.
Without destroying the Taliban and without destroying Al Qaeda, we picked up and moved on. If we know just a little bit of history, we would’ve remembered that the Soviet Union had invaded and controlled Afghanistan and subsequently lost control. One of the reasons they lost control was they did nothing to win the hearts and minds of the Afghanis. now, look at what we’ve done since we have had “control” of Afghanistan. We’ve allowed the poppy crop to flourish. We have absolutely no control over southern Afghanistan. We’ve not built the roads that we promised. Warlords continue to dominate the countryside. Yet, we declared victory.
I said once, and I’ll say it again, just for the conduct of the Afghanistan war Donald Rumsfeld should have been fired. Especially, when you remember that Les Aspin was fired over not giving the troops the proper equipment in Somalia.
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, fulltime sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
