April 4, 2012
Exclusive: President George W. Bush not only botched the Afghan and
Iraq wars but he bungled his "dead or alive" pursuit of Osama bin
Laden, assuring al-Qaeda's leader nine more years of life and the
opportunity to father four more children with his 20-something third
wife, Robert Parry writes.
By Robert Parry
Recent disclosures about Osama bin Laden's life after he slipped
through George W. Bush's fingers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks
put into a more personal light why the terrorist leader so appreciated
Bush's decision to divert U.S. military attention to Iraq: Bin Laden
spent his last nine years living with his three wives and fathering
four more children.
Bin Laden especially got to enjoy the pleasures of his youngest wife
who was in her 20s — and who bore him the four children — as the
fugitive family skipped across Pakistan from safe house to safe house
before settling down at a compound in Abbottabad. Bin Laden was
finally tracked down there and killed in May 2011 on President Barack
Obama's orders.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (left) in a scene from an al-Qaeda
video, released by the U.S. Defense Department.
Bin Laden's youngest wife, Amal Ahmad Abdul Fateh, said the family
moved into the Abbottabad compound, near Pakistan's national military
academy, in mid-2005, according to her account to Pakistani
authorities. At the time, the war in Iraq was descending into ever
more hellish violence.
But a decisive end to the U.S. war in Iraq – either victory or
withdrawal – was not in the interests of bin Laden and his inner
circle holed up in Pakistan. If not preoccupied with the Iraqi
occupation, the U.S. military might remember who it was after in the
first place.
After bin Laden settled into his Abbottabad compound and got to
fathering two more children with his 20-something bride, it was clear
to him that his security – and his domestic bliss – were tied to
dragging out the U.S. military debacle in Iraq, which Bush had deemed
the "central front in the war on terror," though bin Laden was about
1,500 miles away in Pakistan.
In a letter, dated Dec. 11, 2005, bin Laden's closest lieutenant,
Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, conveyed bin Laden's concerns to the then-leader
of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Atiyah
criticized Zarqawi's excessive violence, especially toward Shiite
Muslims, and urged a more measured pace for the war.
"Prolonging the war is in our interest," Atiyah explained to 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. Atiyah himself
was killed by a U.S. drone strike in August 2011. [To view the
"prolonging the war" excerpt, click here. To read the entire Atiyah
letter, click here.]
By 2005, Bush and bin Laden shared a common goal in Iraq. They both
wanted U.S. forces to "stay the course." It was only after the Obama
administration drew down U.S. forces in Iraq and expanded
counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda headquarters that the
leads were developed that located bin Laden's possible hideout in
central Pakistan.
A raid by a helicopter-borne Special Forces team swooped in on bin
Laden's compound in the early hours of May 2, 2011. Bin Laden and four
others were killed and his youngest wife, Fateh, was wounded in the
leg. Later, Pakistani authorities arrived to take the survivors into
custody and began the process of debriefing them about bin Laden's
life as a fugitive.
Strange Symbiosis
While criticism fell on Pakistani authorities – as either complicit or
incompetent – for allowing bin Laden to live so long in their country,
bin Laden's belated demise also spotlighted the curious symbiotic
relationship that had existed since 9/11 between bin Laden and 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 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 in a retrospective on the hunt for bin Laden,
"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."
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."
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 supporting 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. Most
Americans weren't aware that Hussein, a secularist, and bin Laden, a
fundamentalist, were mortal enemies in the Islamic world.
Bush kept the American people in line as his administration touched
off periodic panics over terrorism by pushing the color-coded warnings
up the threat spectrum.
'Winning' in Iraq
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," 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 enabled bin Laden to
begin rebuilding his tattered organization by recruiting new terrorist
cadre angered over the Iraq War.
The new revelations from bin Laden's youngest widow indicate that he
was adding to his ranks in another way, by fathering children with
her. A thankful bin Laden then gave Bush a big assist in the tense
final days of Campaign 2004.
Since no WMD stockpiles had been found in Iraq and with the war going
badly, Bush's reelection campaign was staggering toward Election Day
with Democrat John Kerry within reach of victory. It was then that bin
Laden ended nearly a year of silence by taking the risky step of
releasing a new video on Oct. 29, 2004.
Bin Laden's rant attacking Bush was spun by Bush's supporters as bin
Laden's "endorsement" of Kerry, but some observers noted that bin
Laden's reappearance was having the predictable result of giving Bush
an October Surprise boost. 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 – remained untouched," Suskind wrote.
Cheering Bush
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."
Indeed, two polls taken during and after the videotape's release
showed exactly that. 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.
How hard would it have been for bin Laden – a longtime student of
American politics – to have figured that out?
We now know that bin Laden saw Bush's second term as a time to feel
more confident and to find a more permanent homestead. In 2005, as
Bush closed down the special CIA unit assigned to track bin Laden's
whereabouts – folding its responsibilities into the broader
counter-terrorism office – bin Laden and his three wives settled into
their new home in Abbottabad.
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, 2006, 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, nor
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 Texas Air 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 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 jailed 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. government refocused its attention on getting bin Laden.
President 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. But 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 young wife and his growing family.
When CIA analysts concluded that the preponderance of evidence
indicated that bin Laden was in the compound, President Obama ordered
the May 2 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, including one 20-year-old
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. U.S. authorities said 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 at
all. 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 paradoxically revealed 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.
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 like the Nazis.
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. More than two years after Bush left office, Obama's
administration finally finished the job, but Bush's acolytes still
couldn't bring themselves to admit Bush's failure or Obama's success.
Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, 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. Blaming
Clinton had been the main point of the 2006 docu-drama "The Path to
9/11," produced by Disney's ABC-TV which assigned pro-Bush operatives
to be the 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 prevent 9/11, the blame had to be
shifted to his predecessor, and when his successor finally got bin
Laden, the credit was assigned to Bush. The power of the right-wing
news media and the influence of the neoconservatives ensured that many
gullible Americans accepted 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 innocent of 9/11.
All the while, Bush pursued at best a feckless strategy for tracking
down al-Qaeda's top leader and even chuckled to a conservative author
about how bin Laden helped assure his reelection victory in 2004.
Relatively safe in Pakistan, bin Laden pursued his own domestic
pleasures.
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 Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth' are also available there.
More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/04/bin-ladens-personal-debt-to-bush/
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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