The Curious Bush/Bin Laden Symbiosis

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1 The Curious Bush/Bin Laden Symbiosis Special Report: George W. Bush engaged in a feckless eight-year pursuit of Osama bin Laden while using him for a political edge, says Robert Parry. May 7, 2011 By Robert Parry Since Osama bin Laden s killing on May 1, it has become shockingly clear that the terrorist leader did not spend most of the last decade on the run or hiding in caves. He was holed up in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad enjoying the comforts of family life with his twenty-something-year-old latest wife. And, while criticism has fallen on Pakistani authorities for being either complicit or incompetent, almost no attention has focused on the curious symbiotic relationship that has existed since 9/11 between Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush and even longer between the bin Laden family and the Bush family. At nearly every turn, President George W. Bush acted presumably with incompetence, not complicity in ways that enabled bin Laden to remain free, and the terrorist leader repaid the favor by surfacing at key political moments to scare the American people back into Bush s arms. Although Bush talked tough about getting bin Laden dead or alive, he consistently failed to follow through. In November 2001, when bin Laden and his top lieutenants were cornered at the Tora Bora mountain range in eastern Afghanistan, Bush ordered the U.S. military to prematurely pivot toward planning the next war with Iraq. According to a later Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Bush s order to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to freshen up the plans for an Iraq invasion literally pulled Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the Central Command, away from planning the assault on Tora Bora. The White House also rebuffed CIA appeals for the dispatch of 1,000 Marines to cut off bin Laden s escape routes, the report said. Denied the extra troops to catch bin Laden, U.S. Special Forces couldn t nab the terrorist leader before he made his getaway to Pakistan. [See Consortiumnews.com s Finishing a Job: Obama Gets Osama. ] The hunt for bin Laden was soon put on the back burner. As the Washington Post reported on Friday, A few months after Tora Bora, as part of the preparation for war in Iraq, the Bush administration pulled out many of the Special Operations and CIA forces that had been searching for bin Laden in Afghanistan, according to several U.S officials who served at the time.

2 Just six months after 9/11 and three months after bin Laden evaded capture at Tora Bora, Bush personally began downplaying the importance of capturing al- Qaeda s leader. I don t know where he is, Bush told a news conference. I really just don t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you. Using Osama Yet, with bin Laden at large, Bush enjoyed an advantage. He could use the specter of bin Laden as an all-purpose bogeyman to scare the American people. A living bin Laden allowed Bush to create a plausible scenario for additional al- Qaeda attacks inside the United States and thus the justification for Bush to assert unprecedented powers as Commander in Chief. Bush also cited the continued threat from bin Laden to stampede the American people and Congress into allowing the invasion of Iraq. One of Bush s key arguments was that Iraq s Saddam Hussein might share weapons of mass destruction with bin Laden s operatives, even though Hussein, a secularist, and bin Laden, a fundamentalist, were mortal enemies in the Islamic world. But the American people didn t know such details. Many fell in line behind Bush s claims, trusting him in the face of periodic panics over heightened, level-orange terrorist threats. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Hussein further enhanced Bush s reputation as the heroic, self-proclaimed war president. As Bush declared a premature mission accomplished in Iraq, he also consolidated his extraordinary claims of presidential powers. But bin Laden was another winner. His escape from Tora Bora in 2001 not only burnished his reputation as an Islamic folk hero who had defied the Americans, but Bush s invasion of Iraq allowed bin Laden to recruit new terrorist cadre over resentments about the Iraq War. By bogging down U.S. military and intelligence assets far from bin Laden s Pakistani hideouts, the Iraq War helped bin Laden in another way. His life-style improved. His growing sense of security led him to leave the rough tribal areas and begin to settle down in more civilized environs of Pakistan. Returning this favor, bin Laden gave Bush a big assist in the tense final days of Campaign With no WMD found in Iraq and the war going badly, Bush was struggling and Democrat John Kerry was within reach of victory. It was then that bin Laden

3 ended nearly a year of silence by taking the risky step of releasing a new video on Oct. 29, Bin Laden s rant attacking Bush was immediately spun by Bush s supporters as bin Laden s endorsement of Kerry. According to two polls taken during and after the videotape s release, Bush experienced a bump of several percentage points, from a virtual tie with Kerry to a five or six percentage point lead. Tracking polls by TIPP and Newsweek detected a surge in Bush support from a statistically insignificant two-point lead to five and six points, respectively. On Election Day, Nov. 2, the official results showed Bush winning by a margin of less than three percentage points. So, arguably the intervention by bin Laden urging Americans to reject Bush and thus having the predictable effect of boosting Bush may have tipped the election and given Bush a second term. A CIA Assessment Immediately after bin Laden s videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts reached just that conclusion about bin Laden s intent. Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President, said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret strategic analysis of the videotape, according to Ron Suskind s The One Percent Doctrine, which drew heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years parsing each expressed word of the al-qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. Today s conclusion: bin Laden s message was clearly designed to assist the President s reelection. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush s heavy-handed policies such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the war in Iraq were serving al-qaeda s strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists. Certainly, Miscik said, he would want Bush to keep doing what he s doing for a few more years, according to Suskind s account. As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. An ocean of hard truths before them such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected

4 remained untouched, Suskind wrote. Bush enthusiasts, however, took bin Laden s videotape at face value, calling it proof the terrorist leader feared Bush and favored Kerry. In a pro-bush book, Strategery, right-wing journalist Bill Sammon portrayed bin Laden s videotape as an attempt by the terrorist leader to persuade Americans to vote for Kerry. But Bush himself recognized the real impact of bin Laden s rant. I thought it was going to help, Bush told Sammon after the election. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn t want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush. In Strategery, Sammon also quoted Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman as agreeing that bin Laden s videotape helped Bush. It reminded people of the stakes, Mehlman said. It reinforced an issue on which Bush had a big lead over Kerry. So how hard is it to figure out that bin Laden a longtime student of American politics would have understood exactly the same point? Getting Comfortable We now know that Bush s second term meant a continuation of bin Laden s relative safety. In 2005, Bush closed down a special CIA unit that had been tracking bin Laden s whereabouts for almost a decade, with its responsibilities merged with a broader counter-terrorism office. In 2006, more information also surfaced about how Bush s pivot to Iraq had protected bin Laden. Lt. Gen. John Vines told the Washington Post that his troops were within a half-hour of catching bin Laden but needed three drones to cover the escape routes. The general said only one drone was available because the others had been reassigned for service in Iraq. According to new evidence that has surfaced since bin Laden s death, it appears that early in Bush s second term, bin Laden moved into the compound in Abbottabad, an hour-or-so drive from Pakistan s capital of Islamabad, where he set up house with family members, including his young wife. By late 2005, bin Laden s inner circle also understood that their safety and success were tied to dragging out the U.S. military debacle in Iraq, which Bush called the central front in the war on terror, even though bin Laden was about 1,500 miles away in Pakistan. In a letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, a senior al-qaeda operative known as Atiyah

5 lectured the then-leader of al-qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, on the necessity of taking a long view on the Iraq conflict rather than rushing things. Prolonging the war is in our interest, Atiyah told Zarqawi. The Atiyah letter was discovered by U.S. authorities at the time of Zarqawi s death on June 7, 2006, and was translated by the U.S. military s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. [To view the prolonging the war excerpt, click here. To read the entire Atiyah letter, click here. ] The hard truth is that Bush and bin Laden shared a common goal in Iraq. They both wanted U.S. forces to stay the course. Meanwhile, back in the United States, the Republicans continued using the specter of bin Laden to undermine Democrats, sometimes juxtaposing a photo of bin Laden next to the image of a Democratic candidate who was being smeared as soft on terror. Even during Campaign 2006, when the American voters were finally catching on to this ruse, the Republican National Committee released a campaign ad to rally voters to the GOP banner by showing threatening quotes from bin Laden followed by the pitch: These are the stakes. Desperate to hold onto a Republican congressional majority, President Bush flogged the same theme in lashing Democrats who favored a military withdrawal from Iraq. If we were to follow the Democrats prescriptions and withdraw from Iraq, we would be fulfilling Osama bin Laden s highest aspirations, Bush said at an Oct. 19 campaign speech in Pennsylvania. We should at least be able to agree that the path to victory is not to do precisely what the terrorists want. But we now know that what al-qaeda s leaders really wanted was for the United States to stay stuck in Iraq, all the better not to have the resources to track down bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad and not to have enough troops in Afghanistan to thwart a comeback by the Taliban. The Historic Ties Perhaps even more curious about this Bush/bin Laden symbiosis is that it predated the 9/11 attacks and involved other family members and friends. In 1979, Bush s former National Guard buddy James Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, scion of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family and Osama s half-brother. While fronting for Salem bin Laden, Bath

6 helped bankroll Bush s first company, Arbusto Energy, by investing $50,000 for a five percent stake. [For details, see Neck Deep.] In the 1980s, the fortunes of the Bush and bin Laden families crossed paths again. George H.W. Bush as vice president and president supported a CIA program to aid Islamic mujahedeen in their anti-soviet jihad in Afghanistan. It was during that conflict against the Soviet army that Osama bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan and established himself as a legendary Islamic fighter. In early 1989, President George H.W. Bush spurned Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev s proposal for a political settlement in Afghanistan and chose to continue the CIA war, even after the Soviets withdrew. That decision contributed to the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s and the formation of al-qaeda out of veterans of the anti-soviet jihad. [See Consortiumnews.com s Why Afghanistan Really Fell Apart. ] By the late 1990s, the Clinton administration recognized Osama bin Laden and his new al-qaeda organization as a major terrorist threat to the United States. However, once in the White House, President George W. Bush let down the nation s guard. When the CIA warned him on Aug. 6, 2001, that bin-laden was determined to strike inside the U.S., Bush brushed off the warning and went fishing. Rather than rallying the government to examine available clues and tighten security, he continued a month-long vacation. A little more than a month after the CIA warning, on the morning of Sept. 11, George H.W. Bush and members of the bin Laden family were participating in a Carlyle Group investment meeting in Washington. It was disrupted by the machinations of another branch of the bin Laden family, when Osama s al-qaeda operatives hijacked planes and crashed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. According to one source, a bin Laden family member at the Carlyle meeting immediately sensed who was behind the terror attacks and removed his name tag. In the following days, as the Justice Department was jailing hundreds of Arab cab drivers and other usual suspects, George W. Bush cleared the bin Ladens to fly out of the United States, after only cursory interrogations by the FBI, by letting them board some of the first planes that were allowed back into U.S. air space. [For details, see Craig Unger s House of Bush, House of Saud.] Going After Osama It was not until George W. Bush finally was out of office in 2009 that the U.S.

7 government refocused its attention on getting bin Laden. President Barack Obama said he ordered CIA Director Leon Panetta to make the killing or capturing of bin Laden the agency s top priority. Obama also drew down U.S. forces in Iraq and bolstered the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Further, the new president authorized more aggressive use of Predator drones to attack suspected Taliban militants and al-qaeda operatives inside Pakistan. The pressure was building on bin Laden. However, the terrorist leader apparently had grown accustomed to his relative security at his compound in Abbottabad. He was careful not to use electronic communications or to step outside into the open, but the 54-year-old Saudi exile stayed put with his family and young wife. When CIA analysts concluded that the preponderance of evidence indicated that bin Laden was in the compound, President Obama ordered the May 1 nighttime raid by U.S. Special Forces without telling the Pakistani government. Members of SEAL Team-6 and other personnel quickly secured bin Laden s compound, killing four of his associates, apparently including one son. Upon spotting bin Laden on the third floor, the commandos shot and killed him. They then carried bin Laden s corpse to a helicopter and spirited the body away. It was later taken to a U.S. aircraft carrier and buried at sea. One might have thought that given the strange history of the Bush/bin Laden symbiosis, the American Right would have simply given Obama credit for the successful operation and tried not to mention Bush. But that isn t how the Right and its media machinery work. Almost immediately, Republicans and right-wing media figures began claiming that George W. Bush deserved substantial credit for bin Laden s death because one or two shards of information about the identity of bin Laden s top courier, Abu Ahmed al-kuwaiti, had been extracted from al-qaeda operatives subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques at CIA black sites. Ironically, however, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who was waterboarded 183 times, continued to lie about al- Kuwaiti s significance as did another al-qaeda leader, Abu Faraj al-libi who also was subjected to harsh treatment. Bush defenders have spun those facts to claim that the failure to elicit the truth from these individuals also reveals the value of the torture techniques because supposedly the continued lying by the two men after being tortured indicated how important al-kuwaiti must have been.

8 However, as CIA Director Panetta and FBI interrogators have noted, it s impossible to say whether the captives would have revealed as much or more information if they had been subjected to professional questioning using traditional interrogation methods. The Scourge of Torture There s also the legal and moral issue of whether torture is ever justified. The Inquisition extracted many confessions some of them surely valid but most civilized people thought those methods had been consigned to the shameful trash heap of the Dark Ages and more modern barbaric regimes. Yet, what is perhaps most audacious about the Right s demand that Bush be given substantial credit for the elimination of bin Laden is that Bush had nearly eight years to make good on his dead or alive threat and failed. Now, more than two years after Bush left office, Obama s administration finished the job and Bush s acolytes can t bring themselves to admit Bush s failure or Obama s success. Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks, the Right tried to palm off blame on President Bill Clinton, although Bush had been in office almost eight months and had ignored the CIA s terror warnings. Protecting Bush s legacy was the main point of the 2006 docu-drama The Path to 9/11, produced by Disney s ABC-TV which assigned pro-bush operatives as directors. The program, which ABC touted as a public service shown with no commercial interruptions, mixed real and fabricated events to put Democrats in the worst possible light and portray Bush as the hero who finally set things right. In other words, when Bush failed to take action as president to prevent 9/11, the blame had to be shifted to his predecessor, and now when his successor succeeds at getting bin Laden, the credit must accrue to Bush. Then, the power of the right-wing news media and the influence of the neoconservatives ensure that many gullible Americans accept this narrative. But the real history presents a more troubling picture, one in which Bush failed to protect the nation from al-qaeda s 9/11 attacks and then exploited the public s fear to justify an expansion of his own powers and an aggressive war against Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11. All the while, Bush pursued at best a feckless strategy for tracking down al- Qaeda s top leader and even chuckled about how bin Laden had helped assure his

9 election victory in The end result of this strange symbiosis appears to have been that bin Laden grew increasingly confident of his own security. Perhaps, Bush s apologists will next claim that Bush deserves credit for getting bin Laden because he gave the terrorist leader what turned out to be a false sense of security. [For more on these topics, see Robert Parry s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.] Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraqand Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth are also available there. Liberating Iraq, Now Libya After devastating Iraq, the U.S. and it allies are now bombing Libya in another drive for regime change, observes William Blum. By William Blum May 3, 2011 Editor s Note: Muammar Gaddafi s government in Libya has offered repeatedly to negotiate a political settlement of the worsening civil war, but the NATO-backed rebels have refused, setting Gaddafi s removal as a precondition for any talks. Now, NATO seems intent on killing Gaddafi and his family via aerial strikes, despite claims to the contrary. In this guest essay, author William Blum recalls what a humanitarian intervention did to Iraq and explains why Libya is next in line: On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience

10 of war criminal and torturer. (For which we can thank Code Pink and World Can t Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: Aren t you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion? Rice also threw in another line that s become de rigueur since the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that s used when all other arguments fail: The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God. [Video of Rice talk] My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God. The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem. Unfortunately, they ve lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium the most awful birth defects unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris through a country that may never be put back together again. In 2006, the United Nations special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein. Another U.N. report of the same time disclosed a rise in honor killings of women. [Associated Press, Sept. 21, 2006 ] It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, reported the Washington Post on May 5, I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had

11 electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college, Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al- Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything, electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein. [Common Dreams, Aug. 20, 2010] And this from two months ago: Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-maliki has responded to Iraq s demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten. [Washington Post, March 4, 2011] So can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they re doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they re doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they re conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya? Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are, despite the Libyan rebels brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them. [For more, see Washington Times, Feb. 24, 2011; The Telegraph (London), March 25, 2011; Alexander Cockburn, Libya, Oh What a Stupid War; Fukushima, Cover-Up Amid Catastrophe ; Al Qa ida s Foreign Fighters in Iraq (PDF), Combating

12 Terrorism Center, US Military Academy, West Point, NY, December 2007] The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels, mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia. So why is only Libya the target for U.S./NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 U.N. Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: Allahu Akbar.) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be, in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition. [Associated Press, April 20, 2011] Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period. It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on Feb. 28: As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body s Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya s human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a priority and for bettering its constitutional framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens, who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal. Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated He s killing his own people. It s true, but that s what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people. Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the U.S. longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when

13 he closed down a U.S. Air Force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and 80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support, with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc, a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany s Baader-Meinhof gang. It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers. [See Gaddafi s history of supporting terrorism, real and alleged: William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 48.] In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice. Gaddafi s principal crime in the eyes of President Ronald Reagan ( ) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the U.S. military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. And if all this wasn t enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the mad dog of the Middle East ), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy, a serious anti-zionist, pan- Africanist, and pan-arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.

14 It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the U.S. Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: We ve got a big image problem down there. Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the U.S. They just don t trust the U.S. [The Guardian(London), June 25, 2007] Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There s only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It ll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice, an American base or a NATO base. And remember, in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it. Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007, interview on al-jazeera TV: Leezza, Leezza, Leezza I love her very much. I admire her, and I m proud of her, because she s a black woman of African origin. Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women s clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi s forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape. [Reuters news agency, April 29, 2011] Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?

15 As I write this, U.S./NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi s call for negotiations, another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi. William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2; Rogue State: A Guide to the World s Only Superpower; West- Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir; Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire. Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at This article was originally published in Blum s Anti- Empire Report. Finishing a Job: Obama Gets Osama President Obama finished the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but neocon mistakes prolonged the pursuit, reports Robert Parry. May 2, 2011 By Robert Parry President Barack Obama touched off American celebrations with his Sunday night announcement that U.S. forces finally had killed al-qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but that long frustrating hunt might not have been necessary if George W. Bush had rejected neoconservative advice to pivot prematurely from Afghanistan to Iraq in late In his memoir Decision Points, Bush recalled how he began making that turn shortly after the 9/11 attacks at the advice of arch-neocon Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who suggested that we consider confronting Iraq as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush wrote that he was initially reluctant to go in that direction: Unless I received definitive evidence tying Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 plot, I would work to resolve the Iraq problem diplomatically. I hoped unified pressure by the world might compel Saddam to meet his international obligations. The best way to show him we were serious was to succeed in Afghanistan. But Bush did not fully succeed in Afghanistan. Though the U.S. invasion quickly toppled bin Laden s Taliban allies, Bush let his ego and impatience get the

16 better of him as he left unfinished the task of getting bin Laden dead or alive, as Bush had vowed. Instead, Bush heeded his neocon advisers who were itching to take out Iraq s dictator Saddam Hussein, a longtime enemy of Israel whose nation was at the strategic center of the Middle East and happened to sit on the world s secondlargest petroleum reserves. In his memoir, Bush noted the crucial moment of his decision-making only in passing and without explaining the full significance of the timing. By November 2001, bin Laden and other al-qaeda s leaders were holed up at their mountain base in Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. Special Forces units, working with Afghan militia, were on the trail but lacked the necessary forces and firepower. It was at that moment when Bush made his fateful decision to pivot. He wrote: Two months after 9/11, I asked Don Rumsfeld to review the existing battle plans for Iraq. We needed to develop the coercive half of coercive diplomacy. Don tasked General Tommy Franks [then in charge of the Central Command covering the Middle East and Central Asia] with updating the plans. Just after Christmas 2001, Tommy came to Crawford to brief me on Iraq. A Counter-Narrative What Bush left out of that narrative was later revealed by a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation that Franks was overseeing the military operation aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden when Rumsfeld relayed Bush s order to freshen up the invasion plan for Iraq. According to the committee s analysis of the Tora Bora battle, the small team of American pursuers believed they had bin Laden trapped at Tora Bora and called for reinforcements to seal off possible escape routes to Pakistan. But Bush was instead heeding his neocon advisers and turning his attention to Iraq. The Senate report said: On November 21, 2001, President Bush put his arm on Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld as they were leaving a National Security Council meeting at the White House. I need to see you, the president said. It was 72 days after the 9/11 attacks and just a week after the fall of Kabul. But Bush already had new plans, an invasion of Iraq. Gen. Franks in his memoir, American General recalled that he got a phone call from Rumsfeld that same day, on Nov. 21. The Defense Secretary had just met with

17 President Bush who was interested in an updated Iraq war plan. At the time, Franks said he was in his office at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida working with one of his aides on arranging air support for the Afghan militia who were under the guidance of the U.S. Special Forces in charge of the assault on bin Laden s Tora Bora stronghold. Franks told Rumsfeld that the Iraq war plan was out of date, prompting the Defense Secretary to instruct Franks to dust it off and get back to me in a week. For critics of the Bush administration s commitment to Afghanistan, the Senate report noted, the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers. Almost immediately, intelligence and military planning resources were transferred to begin planning the next war in Iraq. The CIA and Special Forces teams, calling for reinforcements to finish off bin Laden and al-qaeda, did not know what was happening back at CentCom, the drain in resources and shift in attention would affect them and the future course of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, the report said. Pleading with the President Henry Crumpton, who was in charge of the CIA s Afghan strategy, made direct appeals to Franks to move more than 1,000 Marines to Tora Bora to block escape routes to Pakistan. But the CentCom commander rebuffed the request, citing logistical and time problems, the report said. At the end of November, Crumpton went to the White House to brief President Bush and Vice President [Dick] Cheney and repeated the message that he had delivered to Franks, the report said. Crumpton warned the president that the Afghan campaign s primary goal of capturing bin Laden was in jeopardy because of the military s reliance on Afghan militias at Tora Bora. Crumpton questioned whether the Pakistani forces would be able to seal off the escape routes and pointed out that the promised Pakistani troops had not arrived yet. Crumpton also told Bush that the Afghan militia were not up to the job of assaulting al-qaeda s bases at Tora Bora and warned the President, we re going to lose our prey if we re not careful, the report said, citing journalist Ron

18 Suskind s The One Percent Doctrine. But the Iraq-obsessed Bush still didn t act. Finally, in mid-december 2001, the small U.S. Special Forces team convinced the Afghan militia fighters to undertake a sweep of the mountainous terrain, but they found it largely deserted. The Senate report said bin Laden and his bodyguards apparently departed Tora Bora on Dec. 16, 2001, adding: With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance. The Special Operations Command history (of the Afghan invasion) noted that there were not enough U.S. troops to prevent the escape, acknowledging that the failure to capture or kill bin Laden made Tora Bora a controversial battle. Though excluding those details from his memoir, Bush challenged criticism that he bungled the battle of Tora Bora. He wrote: Years later, critics charged that we allowed bin Laden to slip the noose at Tora Bora. I sure didn t see it that way. I asked our commanders and CIA officials about bin Laden frequently. They were working around the clock to locate him, and they assured me they had the troop levels and resources they needed. If we had ever known for sure where he was, we would have moved heaven and earth to bring him to justice. The reality, however, was that the neocons, who saw Iraq as a more serious threat to Israel, and the oil men of the Bush administration, who lusted after Iraq s petroleum reserves, persuaded Bush to concentrate more on getting rid of Saddam Hussein than Osama bin Laden. Bush s team told the American people that Hussein had WMD which he might give to al-qaeda. Macho Talk Some of Bush s advisers also played on his macho self-image. In his memoir, Bush recalled one of his weekly lunches with Vice President Cheney (the former head of the Halliburton oil-drilling company), who was urging him to get on with the business of eliminating Hussein. Dick asked me directly, Are you going to take care of this guy, or not? That was his way of saying he thought we had given diplomacy enough time. I appreciated Dick s blunt advice. I told him I wasn t ready to move yet. Okay, Mr. President, it s your call, he said. However, even as he was being prodded by Cheney and the neocons to act, Bush was

19 using similar macho rhetoric about having the balls to go to war to ensure that Prime Minister Blair would commit British forces when the time came. In one melodramatic passage in Decision Points, Bush recounted a discussion with Blair: Once we laid out our position at the UN, we had to be willing to follow through with the consequences. If diplomacy failed, there would be only one option left. I don t want to go to war, I told Tony, but I will do it. Tony agreed. After the meeting, I told Alastair Campbell, one of Tony s top aides, Your man has got cojones. I m not sure how that translated to the refined ears of 10 Downing Street. But to anyone from Texas, its meaning was clear. In late 2002 and early 2003, the Iraqi government tried to convince the world that it had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and had no relations with al-qaeda. Nevertheless, in March 2003, President Bush forced U.N. weapons inspectors to leave Iraq and ordered the shock and awe invasion of the nearly defenseless nation. Within three weeks, the invasion had ousted Saddam Hussein s government, but failed to discover any WMD stockpiles. A few weeks later, Bush flew onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California and gave his Mission Accomplished speech declaring the end of major combat. Eventually, Bush had the satisfaction of having U.S. troops deliver Hussein to the scaffold where he was hanged in late [See Consortiumnews.com s Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness. ] But the war also drove Iraq into eight years (and counting) of a living hell, with the death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands, with many more maimed and with millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes and living in degradation and squalor. More than 4,400 U.S. troops also died and the total cost to the U.S. Treasury will likely exceed $1 trillion. Back in Afghanistan The consequences for Afghanistan from Bush s premature pivot away from that war to the one ardently desired by the neocons were also devastating. Rather than stabilizing Afghanistan and snuffing out al-qaeda s threat in the region, Bush watched as the Taliban staged a comeback in Afghanistan and key al- Qaeda leaders remained at large to inspire a new generation of jihadists. According to his memoir, Bush recognized the deteriorating situation but couldn t do much about it because U.S. forces were bogged down in the Iraq

20 occupation. He wrote: My CIA and military briefings included increasingly dire reports about Taliban influence. The problem was crystallized by a series of color-coded maps I saw in November The darker the shading, the more attacks had occurred in that part of Afghanistan. The 2004 map was lightly shaded. The 2005 map had darker areas in the southern and eastern parts of the country. By 2006, the entire southeastern quadrant was black. In just one year, the number of remotely detonated bombs had doubled. The number of armed attacks had tripled. The number of suicide bombings had more than quadrupled. By the time Bush left office in early 2009, U.S. commanders were beseeching the new president, Barack Obama, to dispatch reinforcements to Afghanistan to stave off the Taliban s consolidation of control over wide swaths of the country. Obama also had to deal with a worsening crisis in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where leaders of the Afghan Taliban and al-qaeda had built safe havens. To the dismay of Obama s liberal base, the President agreed to dispatch tens of thousands of more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, even as he withdrew others from Iraq. According to accounts of Obama s thinking, his decision was colored by the risks of al-qaeda and other extremist groups destabilizing the fragile civilian government of Pakistan and possibly gaining access to the country s nuclear arsenal. Obama also needed a platform in the region to reenergize the counterterrorism campaign against al-qaeda. During the 2008 campaign, Obama had vowed to kill Osama bin Laden, a statement that most interpreted as a tough-guy sound-bite, rather than a serious plan. But Obama apparently meant what he said. In his brief televised speech on Sunday night, Obama disclosed that shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network. That redirection of U.S. priorities reversed the course taken by President Bush and his neocon advisers in late Instead of waging a regional crusade against perceived U.S. adversaries, who also were at the top of Israel s enemies list, Obama refocused U.S. intelligence agencies on the man who sanctioned the 9/11 attacks.

21 Closing In According to Obama and other senior U.S. officials, the renewed attention began to bear fruit last year as a possible location of bin Laden s hideout was identified in the middle-sized Pakistani city of Abbottabad, only about a onehour drive north from the capital of Islamabad. In his speech, Obama said: Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body. Obama s announcement late Sunday night touched off spontaneous celebrations by Americans outside the White House and at Ground Zero in New York. There was an immediate sense that finally the U.S. government had gotten its priorities right, going after the people responsible for the 9/11 atrocities, rather than other Muslim leaders who had nothing to do with the attack. Though it remains unclear what the long-term consequences of this action will be, Obama s success after years of Bush s failure does suggest one important lesson: U.S. officials would be well advised to ignore the special pleadings of the neocons who remain highly influential inside Official Washington. The neocons, along with other Bush advisers, exploited the 9/11 tragedy to justify a policy of inserting U.S. military forces into the heart of the Arab world to the detriment of bringing the masterminds of 9/11 to justice. That miscalculation did horrendous damage to both the United States and the people of the Middle East. It also allowed Osama bin Laden to remain at large for more than nine years, until Sunday. [For more on these topics, see Robert Parry s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.]

22 Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraqand Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth are also available there.

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