Trump Is Right to Blame George W. Bush for 9/11

It is really frightening when I find myself agreeing with Donald Trump on anything.  I find man to be a loud mouthed egomaniac who is having a tempestuous love affair with himself.  Yet, on starting a narrative that Jebbie Bush's feckless brother George W. Bush - a/k/a the Chimperator on this blog - bears responsibility for the disastrous 9/11 attacks  - Trump is on the mark.  It's a conversation that needs to be had, especially with yet another doltish Bush seeking the White House.  A piece in The Atlantic makes the case that the Chimperator and his puppeteer Dick Cheney could have perhaps stopped the attacks had they paid attention to information in their possession.  Here are article excerpts:

His [Trump's] latest ugly truth came during a Bloomberg TV interview last Friday, when he said George W. Bush deserves responsibility for the fact that “the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments “pathetic.” Ben Carson dubbed them “ridiculous.”

Former Bush flack Ari Fleischer called Trump a 9/11 “truther.” Even Stephanie Ruhle, the Bloomberg anchor who asked the question, cried, “Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that.”

Oh yes, you can. There’s no way of knowing for sure if Bush could have stopped the September 11 attacks. But that’s not the right question. The right question is: Did Bush do everything he could reasonably have to stop them, given what he knew at the time? And he didn’t. It’s not even close.

When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke both warned its incoming officials that al-Qaeda represented a grave threat. During a transition briefing early that month at Blair House, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Tenet and his deputy James Pavitt listed Osama bin Laden as one of America’s three most serious national-security challenges. That same month, Clarke presented National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice with a plan he had been working on since al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole the previous October. It called for freezing the network’s assets, closing affiliated charities, funneling money to the governments of Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Yemen to fight al-Qaeda cells in their country, initiating air strikes and covert operations against al-Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, and dramatically increasing aid to the Northern Alliance, which was battling al-Qaeda and the Taliban there.

But both Clarke and Tenet grew deeply frustrated by the way top Bush officials responded. Clarke recounts that when he briefed Rice about al-Qaeda, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.” On January 25, Clarke sent Rice a memo declaring that, “we urgently need…a Principals [Cabinet] level review on the al Qida [sic] network.”

By early summer, Clarke was so despondent that he asked to be reassigned. “This administration,” he later testified, “didn’t either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem. And I thought, if the administration doesn’t believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there’s an urgent problem and if it’s unprepared to act as though there’s an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job.”  

During that same time period, the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA told the White House by May 1 that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief warned that al-Qaeda strikes might be “imminent.”

But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, “the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled . . . 

The following day [July 30], the CIA included in its Daily Brief an article entitled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” On July 1, the Brief predicted that an attack “will occur soon.”Then, on July 10, Tenet and CIA counterterrorism head Cofer Black held an emergency meeting with Rice to push for action against Bin Laden. But according to Woodward’s State of Denial, “both felt they were not getting through to Rice.” 

The warnings continued. On July 11, the CIA sent word to the White House that a Chechen with links to al-Qaeda had warned that something big was coming. On July 24, the Daily Brief said the expected al-Qaeda attack had been postponed but was still being planned. Finally, on August 6, the CIA titled its Daily Brief: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US.” The briefing didn’t mention a specific date or target, but it did mention the possibility of attack in New York and mentioned that the terrorists might hijack airplanes.

[I]t was the 36th time the CIA had raised al-Qaeda with President Bush since he took office.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Clarke’s anti-al-Qaeda plan was sitting on Bush’s desk, awaiting his signature. It was the ninth National Security Presidential Directive of his presidency.

Would the Bush administration have stopped the 9/11 attacks had it taken the threat more seriously? Possibly.

On August 16, FBI and INS agents in Minnesota arrested another potential hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, after being tipped off by his flight instructor. But despite numerous requests, they were denied permission to search his apartment or laptop. These incidents “might have exposed the” 9/11 plot, writes Eichenwald, “had the government been on high alert.”

Four Americans died in Benghazi.  Far more than 3,000 died on 9/11.  If the House Republicans want to hold hearings on terror attacks, they need to reopen an investigation of how Bush/Cheney failed to keep America safe - not to mention launched a war based on deliberate lies that took thousands of more American lives.

 

Donald Trump: George W. Was President on 9-11

The August 6, 2001 Briefing to Bush

As noted yesterday, Donald Trump has had the audacity to bring up a fact that Republicans find particularly inconvenient given their Benghazi witch hunt against Hillary Clinton which is ultimately based solely on the fact that she was Secretary of State at the time: George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001 and, by their theory against Hillary, is responsible for the massive security failure on that fateful date.  Of course, the truth is that Bush had much more warning about a potential Bin Laden back attack that existed in the Benghazi situation.  But in the GOP alternate universe, none of this matters - or at least did not until The Donald spoke the truth (for a change).  Talking Points Memo looks at the continuing dispute roiling the GOP.  Here are excerpts: 

On Friday, Donald Trump generated substantial controversy when he asserted that George W. Bush was president at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said. “He was president, O.K.?”

Jeb Bush immediately pushed back, calling Trump’s comments “pathetic” and insisting “my brother kept us safe.”

The media jumped on to the burgeoning controversy. According to The New York Times the idea that Bush was president on 9/11 and failed to stop the attack is a “break from the GOP.” 

According to ABC News, George W. Bush spent the entire month of August 2001 on vacation at his ranch in Texas, which is not typical behavior for someone who is president. Other reports, however, reveal Bush continue to receive the “Presidential Daily Brief” at the ranch, strongly suggesting he was still president.

According to ABC News, George W. Bush spent the entire month of August 2001 on vacation at his ranch in Texas, which is not typical behavior for someone who is president. Other reports, however, reveal Bush continue to receive the “Presidential Daily Brief” at the ranch, strongly suggesting he was still president.

If Hillary has guilt for Benghazi, the GOP and Bush have much more guilt for the massive failure to stop 9-11 from occurring.

The GOP Pretends That 9/11, ISIS and Iraq Were Not the GOP's Fault

With the run up to the 2016 presidential elections in the offing and increase focus on foreign policy issues thanks to the Iran nuclear arms agreement, the GOP is again sabre rattling and in the process striving to make Americans forget that 9/11, ISIS and the Iraq fiasco all trace back to the bungling and fabricated facts of the Bush/Cheney regime that were all happily rubber stamped at the time by Congressional Republicans.  Clues were ignored that might have prevented 9/11, the Iraq war was based on deliberate lies, and the rise of ISIS is the result of Bush/Cheney's failure to have an post war plan to address the poisonous influences of Islamic extremists and Sunni/Shiite hatred.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP effort to whitewash history and lead America into yet another debacle that will squander lives and again bankrupt the country.  Here are excerpts:

T]the trajectory of resurgent international conflict during Obama’s second term—epitomized by ISIS, though not limited to it—has already infused the 2016 election with much higher levels of foreign policy concern. If 2012 was all about trying to blame Obama for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular domestic economic catastrophe, then 2016 is shaping up—at least in part—to be about blaming him for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular foreign policy catastrophe, either.

At the moment, Obama’s historic nuclear deal with Iran is center stage, but the much more widespread geopolitical problem typified by (though not limited to) ISIS has a much more pervasive political influence. Case in point: the emergence of ISIS, with its provocative spectacles of violence have unexpectedly renewed American’s willingness to send troops to fight overseas, completely forgetting that this was precisely bin Laden’s reason for 9/11 in the first place: to lure the U.S. into a “holy war” with Islam. Election year dynamics being what they are, there’s no telling how badly this could turn out.

So before we go off and blow several trillion dollars recruiting the next wave of terrorists, perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider what we did the last time around.

Republicans, naturally, want to blame the rise of ISIS on Obama, which is absurd. Three extremely foolish actions undertaken by Bush were absolutely crucial for the emergence of ISIS: First, by responding to 9/11 as an act of war, rather than a crime, Bush gave al Qaeda and its future ISIS off-shoots the holy war and the status of holy warriors they so desperately craved, but could never attain on their own. Second, by invading Iraq—which had nothing to do with 9/11, and was actually a counter-weight both to al Qaeda (ideologically) and to Iran (both theologically and geo-strategically)—Bush destabilized the entire region, creating a tinder-box of multifaceted incentives for sectarian violence.  Third, by disbanding Iraq’s Sunni- and Bath-Party-dominated army, Bush both ensured an intense power struggle and civil war in Iraq (with vastly more power in Iran-friendly Shiite hands) and provided Sunni terrorist ideologues with hardened, experienced military command personnel.

The combined effect of all three Bush actions was to turn Iraq into a virtual hell—along with various portions of several other countries as well.  America had one 9/11, one massive loss of 3,000 innocent civilian lives, and that was enough for us to lose all sense of proportion, restraint, and good judgment. Why should the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan respond any better?  . . . around 400 Iraqi, Afghani, and/or Pakistani civilians have died for every American who died on 9/11 . . . It puts the total dead in in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at around 1.3 million, roughly two orders of magnitude more than most Americans realize.

Given how heavily the drums of war have been beating lately, this is a timely reminder what a huge role Bush’s post-9/11 response played in creating the current violent conditions throughout the region and beyond.

The U.S. authorities have kept no known records of such deaths. This would have destroyed the arguments that freeing Iraq by military force from a dictatorship, removing Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and eliminating safe-havens for terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has prevented terrorism from reaching the U.S. homeland, improved global security and advanced human rights, all at “defendable” costs.   However, facts are indeed stubborn. Governments and civil society know now that on all counts these assertions have proved to be preposterously false.

[T]he estimates of U.S. military casualties were strikingly accurate, while the estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties were wildly under-estimated—by at least a factor of 7, and probably more like 70.  Clearly, if Americans had had anything close to a realistic view of the war, their level and intensity of opposition would have skyrocketed—as might their expectations of terrorist blowback, as well. There was nothing defendable about the costs involved—which is why those costs had to be hidden. Tragically, as the new report makes clear, the media itself has been deeply implicated in hiding the true cost of war in its most brutal form—the extent of lives lost.

“The numbers relayed by the media (previously 43,000 and now 110,000) should in themselves be terrifying enough, as they correspond to the annihilation of an entire city’s population. But apparently they are still perceived as tolerable and, moreover, even easy to explain given the picture of excessive religiously motivated violence,”

The original pretexts for going to war quickly turned out to be spurious, and from then on only the “liberation of the country from a violent dictatorship” and the “democratization” and “stabilization” of Iraq remained as justification for the war and occupation. This picture, laboriously constructed with the help of the media, is of course impossible to reconcile with the many hundreds of thousands of war casualties.

Perhaps, if we think of how America rallied behind George Bush after 9/11, and we think of 400 9/11s (or maybe “only” 200 9/11s) being suffered through since by the people whose countries we’ve invaded, perhaps then the horrific, barbaric savagery of ISIS might begin to become comprehensible—not, of course, excusable, but comprehensible, meaning something we can figure out and respond to effectively. More importantly, if we actually understood how we got where we now are, we might begin to figure out how to get out, get someplace else, someplace better.  The question of how to get someplace better has been staring us in the face at least since 9/11. It’s high time we began to face up to it.

Otherwise, we will simply be repeating the same foolish response to 9/11 that bin Laden was counting on.

Failed GOP policies created the disaster in the Middle East.  Therefore, more GOP advice that wants to compound the disaster further should be the last thing anyone sane listens to. 

Pentagon Threatens Lawsuit Over Navy Seal Book about Bin Laden

Knowing a number of past and present Navy Seals, it has been disheartening to see some of that group rush to make money or - like local Scott Taylor, a failed GOP candidate who lost the nomination to hate group endorsed Scott Rigell - or shore up their bona fides with far right elements of the Republican Party.  Worse yet is the fact that the truth seems to lose out to whatever best fits the author's or spokesman's personal agenda be it cash or political advantage.  Thankfully, the Pentagon appears to have perhaps had enough of the partisanship and greed and is threatening legal action against at least one of these, in my opinion, less than honorable individuals. Politico has coverage on the development.  Here are excerpts:

The Defense Department is threatening to go after an ex-SEAL author and his publisher over a new book that challenges the administration’s official account of last year’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon late Thursday released a letter from its top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, to publishing giant Penguin and “Mark Owen,” the pseudonym of an ex-SEAL special operator who has been identified as Matt Bissonnette. In the letter, Johnson said Bissonnette had breached non-disclosure agreements he signed while on active duty in 2007.

According to official Navy records obtained Thursday by POLITICO, Bissonnette served in the Navy from 1998 until April of this year. Johnson wrote that the NDA he’d signed remained in effect “even after you left the active duty Navy.”

“In the judgment of the Department of Defense, you are in material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements you signed,” Johnson wrote to “Owen,” in keeping with DOD’s policy not to identify some special operators. “Further public dissemination of your book will aggravate your breach and violation of your agreements.”

Johnson closed by informing “Owen” and Penguin that the Defense Department “is considering pursuing against you, and all those acting in concert with you, all remedies legally available to us in light of this situation.”

The Pentagon could ask the Justice Department to try to prosecute Bissonnette or seize the royalties raised by the book, which is officially due out Monday but has already gone on sale in some places.

These opportunists truly need to be shut down and I'm glad the Pentagon seems to be prepared to take action

Did Osama Bin Laden Win?

In many ways the last decade has been a nightmare - eight years of misrule under Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney, an endless war in the Middle East that has played no small role in bankrupting the nation, growing Christianist extremism, the use of torture as approved policy by the military and intelligence services, and a level of domestic surveillance most of us never thought possible in America. And what helped usher all of this in? Andrew Sullivan makes the case that it was 9/11. Rather than being destroyed from an outside force, Bin Laden lit the fuse to set America on a course to destroy itself from within. And unfortunately, the nation's leadership fell for the bait. Bin Laden may not have won, but the damage he caused the USA to inflict upon itself will be long lasting, especially if the GOP should win the White House in 2012 and gain control of Congress. Obviously, things could still change and lead to a different ending, but at present, Sullivan seems to be on to something. Here are highlights from his column:

We often talk about terror in terms of the terrorist. We do so less in terms of the terrorized. But it was how this act changed those of us who were bystanders that made this event more awful than a mere mass murder. It was mass murder as theater and as threat.

We need to understand that 9/11 worked. It worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction, even if it failed spectacularly as a strategy to advance Al Qaeda—and its heretical message of suicidal warfare—across the globe. It worked because this was not just another terror attack.

The simplicity of the plot made it even scarier. On that day the West’s own airplanes, which had taken off peacefully, were transformed into makeshift weapons of mass destruction; the only actual weapons deployed were a handful of box cutters you could find in any office-supply store. The rest was merely human will and the advantage of surprise. More to the point, the people murdered that day, charred in the remains of the towers or jumping from windows in the sky only to thud onto the pavement below, had only that morning been just like us: settled complacently in airline seats or beginning their day at the office.

Nobody seemed to know if this was the end or just the beginning. But what we did know was that only one word really sufficed to define the scale and gravity of what had taken place: war. And in that very formulation, in the depths of our psyches and souls, we took the bait. The bait was meant to entice the United States into ruinous, polarizing religious warfare against the Muslim world, so that the Islamist fringe could seize power in failing Muslim and Arab dictatorships. The 9/11 attacks were conceived as a way to radicalize a young Muslim population through a ginned-up war of civilization against the Great Satan on the Islamist home turf of Afghanistan and, then, Iraq. It looks obvious now.

As mysterious envelopes containing anthrax began to appear in mailboxes, as our airports shut down and reopened as police states, as terror-advisory color codes were produced, as the vast new bureaucratic behemoth of the Department of Homeland Security was set up, as a system of torture prisons (beginning with Guantánamo Bay) was constructed ... many concluded the threat must be grave enough to justify shredding some of the Constitution’s noblest principles and precedents.

Hence the turn to Iraq. Without the psychic terror of 9/11, and its swamping of reason in our frontal cortex, the Iraq War would never have happened. In our panic, fear kept spiraling upward. . . . . a majority of Americans who supported the war that handed bin Laden exactly what he wanted.

What he wanted, it seems obvious now, was central relevance to the power shifts in the Middle East, and U.S. troops in lands they could never understand and never fully win over. History has proved him right on that. Even the finest soldiers in the world, with the finest leadership in the world, were not capable of miracles.

The fiscal costs of our actions are one reason we find ourselves today in a lost, jobless, debt-driven decade. About $2.6 trillion was spent in a decade of war—approaching some of the most ambitious spending cuts now being proposed. The human cost—in lives, limbs, and loves—is incalculable. And not just for us. Millions of Iraqis lived through the closest human equivalent to hell for years as the incompetent occupation tore Iraq apart.

The approval of sickening torture techniques by the president and vice president destroyed American moral standing in the world, eviscerated our soft power, and became the prime recruitment tool for the Islamist thugs. Neoconservatives alone can call this “victory.”

So did bin Laden succeed? Not at all. On most fronts, he spectacularly failed—down to the amazing end to his pathetic, deranged life. . . . . From the streets of Tehran to Cairo, it appears that the young Muslim generation does not want to withdraw from the modern world into a cultural and intellectual blind alley forever. They are too busy on Twitter. That’s why after 9/11, Al Qaeda saw its popularity in the Arab world plummet, resuscitated only by American floundering in a newly anarchic Iraq.

It’s time we fessed up: the madmen of 9/11 were not the Soviets; they were not the Nazis. If we had seen them in that calm perspective a decade ago, we would be living in a very different America today. Bin Laden and his henchmen failed, in other words. But our own fear won. Fear stopped us, overwhelmed us, as our ra-tion-al-ity deserted us.

[W]e need to admit that our response was close to fatal. A bankrupted America that tortured innocents and disregarded its own Constitution is barely recognizable as America. We have survived and endured as a civilization because we have recognized our errors and corrected most of them. That capacity is proof that our democracy still lives. But fear is a tougher enemy than mere mistakes. It can only be overcome by hope. And hope is a choice, not a fate. Until we decide to grasp hope again, the war will live on.

Obama's Popularity Surges in Virginia - At Least for Now

Voters can be fickle - especially Virginia voters based on a new polls - and have a "what have you done for me lately" mindset. A concept lost on the Democrats in 2009 and which helped saddle Virginia with the twin Christianists Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell and Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli. At the time I blamed the debacle on national Democrats' failure to have delivered anything substantive - not that Creigh Deeds' lackluster campaign didn't work to make matters even worse. Now, in the wake of Obama's mission that took out Osama Bin Laden, it seems Virginian's are happy that Obama delivered something for them. The key, of course, is whether he can maintain the mindset all the way into 2012. Obviously, a lot can happen between now and the 2012 election and given Obama's general spinelessness, I'm not making any bets that he can maintain popularity. Here are highlights from the Washington Post on Obama's popularity surge in Virginia:
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The targeted killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden boosted President Obama’s prospects for reelection over several potential Republican challengers in the battleground state of Virginia, according to a Washington Post poll. The poll provides a view of the impact of bin Laden’s death in a state widely viewed as a bellwether for Obama’s chances for reelection nationally.
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Against all five potential GOP contenders tested in the poll, Obama stretched his margins after the death of bin Laden. In a hypothetical matchup against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, for example, interviews before the bin Laden announcement showed voters splitting 48 percent for the president and 46 percent for Romney. Afterward, Obama edged ahead, 51 to 44 percent.
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Against former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and businessman Donald Trump, twin 19-point Obama advantages swelled to 31 points in interviews conducted in the three days after bin Laden’s death.
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Still, big vulnerabilities remain for the president, the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Virginia in more than 40 years. More than half of all Virginia voters are dissatisfied, even angry, with the Obama administration’s policies, and a vast majority retains a bleak view of the economy. Those opinions did not change with bin Laden’s death, leaving open the question of whether, or how long, the spike in Obama’s fortunes will last.
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A large contingent of the Obama coalition stayed home in 2010. Obama’s major challenge next year is bringing it out again — and holding it together. At this stage, with his bin Laden bump included, the president maintains much of the support he had 31 / 2 years ago. Fully two-thirds of voters younger than 30 approve of the job Obama is doing; in 2008, he won 60 percent of the state’s young voters.
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The economy is also seen as being in far worse shape. Nearly nine in 10 see the national economy as in “not so good” or “poor” shape, with the proportion saying poor more than doubling since 2007. Now, nearly three in 10 see themselves as “falling behind financially.”
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As I keep saying over and over again, until the housing market stabilizes and foreclosures and lender high handedness is reined in, it's foolish to think the economy will significantly improve. For the life of me, I don't know why the Congressional Democrats can't seem to figure that out.

Bush and Cheney, et al, Are Still War Criminals

Former Chimperator Bush is apparently feeling peevish that his administration "hasn't been given enough credit" for his contributions to the war on terror. Hence, his childish refusal to join President Obama in New York City yesterday. Bush and his sycophants continue to try to re-write the history of misrule and high crimes during the eight years of the Bush/Cheney nightmare. It is so very important that we not forget what was done to ruin the honor of this nation - and that doesn't even touch upon the economic catastrophe that flowed from Republican deregulation efforts during that same time period. Andrew Sullivan has a dead on assessment of just what the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney brought to the USA - with the help, of their Republican enablers in Congress. Here's Andrew's summation of the Bush/Cheney years:
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Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers [John Yoo] refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history.
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So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.
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What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America.

Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli Proves He's and Idiot - and Embarrassment to Virginia

It's unclear whether Virginia's mentally unstable Attorney General was endeavoring to be funny or what, but his tweet about wanting to be one of Osama Bin Ladens 72 virgins was a lead balloon. Meanwhile, some of us find the thought of Kookinelli being Bin Laden's bitch rather entertaining. As I've noted before, there are those unproven rumors that Cooch has played for the LGBT team in the past.

Andrew Sullivan's Message to Birthers

This photo over on Andrew Sullivan's blog was too good to pass up. It must be driving the birthers nuts that Obama got Bin Laden. :)

Bin Laden Reportedly Dead

I missed the news last night having gone to bed early, but the media this morning is filled with coverage of the report announced by Barack Obama last evening that American military and C.I.A. operatives had confronted Osama Bin Laden in a stronghold in Pakistan and that the terrorist leader had been killed in a resulting fire fight. Bin Laden's death in no wise end's the menace of Al Qaeda, but psychologically it cannot but undermine the air of invincibility that sometimes seemed to cling to the terrorist network. The irony, of course, is that Bin Laden was located and died under Obama's watch rather than that of the war loving Chimperator Bush who had been unable to pull of the feat. Some of the far right loonies in the USA must be feeling that someone peed in their Cheerios because of this fact (Wing Nut Daily is still hyperventilating about Obama's birth certificate). Bin Laden should remain a symbol of the danger of hatred driven by religious extremism whether the religion be Islam or Christianity and U.S. politicians of all stripes ought to heed the lesson both at home and abroad. Here are highlights from the New York Times:
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Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan, President Obama announced on Sunday night.
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In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.
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Bin Laden’s demise is a defining moment in the American-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Bin Laden’s followers by turning him into a martyr or serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to Mr. Obama to bring American troops home.
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How much his death will affect Al Qaeda itself remains unclear. For years, as they failed to find him, American leaders have said that he was more symbolically important than operationally significant because he was on the run and hindered in any meaningful leadership role. And yet, he remained the most potent face of terrorism around the world and some of those who played down his role in recent years nonetheless celebrated his death.
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Given Bin Laden’s status among radicals, the American government braced for possible retaliation. A senior Pentagon official said late Sunday that military bases in the United States and around the world were ordered to a higher state of readiness. The State Department issued a worldwide travel warning, urging Americans in volatile areas “to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations.”
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After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.
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Al Qaeda sympathizers reacted with disbelief, anger and in some cases talk of retribution. On a Web site considered an outlet for Al Qaeda messages, forum administrators deleted posts by users announcing Bin Laden’s death and demanded that members wait until the news was confirmed by Al Qaeda sources, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors radicals.
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In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, said it welcomed Bin Laden’s death. “As we have stated repeatedly since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bin Laden never represented Muslims or Islam,” the group said in a statement. “In fact, in addition to the killing of thousands of Americans, he and Al Qaeda caused the deaths of countless Muslims worldwide.”
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The president was careful to add that, as Mr. Bush did during his presidency, the United States is not at war with Islam. “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims,” Mr. Obama said. “Indeed, Al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

Newsweek on Afghanistan: It's Not Working and It's Time to Get Out

In an assessment that ought to be obvious to anyone other than neo-cons and senior military brass types who love nothing better than waging war - although they are always safely far from the front - and will claim to be on the verge of victory right up until the last troops get massacred, a Newsweek column by a former Bush official, while self-serving, has nonetheless had the guts to say what too few in the mainstream media have been willing to say: we are losing in Afghanistan, we cannot win, and we need to get the Hell out of there.
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Yes, stating the obvious is heresy amongst the far right who would have the U.S. go on throwing money and young lives down a rat hole, but sooner or later the nation needs to wake up to reality. Other than a quick foray to take out Bin Laden - which the Chimperator botched because of his eagerness to invade Iraq - we should never have been in Afghanistan. Plain and simple. Lives squandered, billions of dollars wasted and we're losing. Here are some column highlights:
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The war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan today is fundamentally different and more ambitious than anything carried out by the Bush administration. Afghanistan is very much Barack Obama’s war of choice, a point that the president underscored recently by picking Gen. David Petraeus to lead an intensified counterinsurgency effort there. After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn’t likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.
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The first thing we need to recognize is that fighting this kind of war is in fact a choice, not a necessity. The United States went to war in October 2001 to oust the Taliban government, which had allowed Al Qaeda to operate freely out of Afghanistan and mount the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban were routed; members of Al Qaeda were captured or killed, or escaped to Pakistan. But that was a very different war,
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My colleagues in the Bush administration had no interest in my proposal. The consensus was that little could be accomplished in Afghanistan given its history, culture, and composition, and that there would be little payoff beyond Afghanistan even if things there went better than expected.
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By the time Obama became president in 2009, the situation inside Afghanistan was fast deteriorating. . . . Since then Obama has had several opportunities to reassess U.S. goals and interests in Afghanistan, and in each instance he has chosen to escalate. . . the return of the Taliban was equated with the return of Al Qaeda, and the United States became a full protagonist in Afghanistan’s civil war, supporting a weak and corrupt central government against the Taliban.
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Today the counterinsurgency strategy that demanded all those troops is clearly not working. The August 2009 election that gave Karzai a second term as president was marred by pervasive fraud and left him with less legitimacy than ever. While the surge of U.S. forces has pushed back the Taliban in certain districts, the Karzai government has been unable to fill the vacuum with effective governance and security forces that could prevent the Taliban’s return.
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All this argues for reorienting U.S. Afghan policy toward decentralization—providing greater support for local leaders and establishing a new approach to the Taliban. The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better.

9-11 Reflections

With today being the 8th anniversary of 9-11 and us being in New York City, it is hard not to reflect back to what happened eight years ago. Flying in last night we flew along Manhattan and the fallen towers were represented by beams of light straight up into the sky. So many lives needlessly lost and so little accomplished by the Chimperator and his minions who, had they been on the ball and worried about national security rather than kissing the ass of the Christian Right, might have prevented the tragedy. Bob Felton at Civil Commotion has an assessment that I believe to be pretty much right on point:

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Eight years later Osama bin Laden remains at large and al Qaeda continues its plotting; Afghanistan and Iraq are in ruins and without a realistic prospect of civil stability; the Taliban controls Pakistan’s Swat Valley and enjoys a de facto veto of that country’s government; and the United States are bankrupt, its citizens hemmed by a steadily-growing lattice-work of security regulations, the ability to make public decisions frozen in polar acrimony. Needlessly, we have given Bin Laden a success that must vastly exceed his fevered imaginings.

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It is mind numbing that given the Chimperator's failings - perhaps some of the worst of any U.S. president - that the GOP and its lunatic base have the nerve to attack Obama and claim he is ruining the country. THEY ruined the country during their eight years of misrule that I suspect Obama ever will or could.

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My fellow LGBT Blogger Summit friend Waymon Hudson has an interesting reflection here - he was working as a flight attendant on 9-11-2001 and had left on a flight out of New York City that fateful morning.

Canada threatens to pull soldiers from Afghanistan

It seems that another U.S. ally is coming to recognize the quagmire that the Chimperator has drag itself and other nations into in Afghanistan. While the initial premise of going into the country had a rational basis - unlike Iraq - the bungled handling of the military operations under the Chimperator and the allowance of Bin Laden to escape the country has left a huge mess for which there is no easy solution. Canada apparently has recognized that further half-ass efforts are futile. I can't say that I blame the Canadians whatsoever. Here are some highlights from Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN2248709020080128):

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada will pull its 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan early next year unless NATO sends in significant reinforcements, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Monday, signaling Ottawa has lost patience with what it sees as foot-dragging by allies. The minority Conservative government wants the soldiers to stay beyond their current withdrawal date of February 2009 but in another potential threat to the mission, the main opposition Liberal Party expressed doubts about the idea of an extension.

Harper, who is exasperated at the refusal of many other NATO nations to commit more troops to Afghanistan, said the Alliance's failure to provide enough forces meant the whole future of the organization was under serious threat. Harper said he accepted the recommendations of an independent panel which last week urged Canada to end its mission in the southern city of Kandahar unless NATO provided an extra 1,000 troops and Ottawa obtained helicopters and aerial reconnaissance vehicles.

"For this mission to go forward and achieve its objectives and be successful, we do have the need for a substantial increase in combat troops and particular needs in terms of military equipment," Harper told a news conference. "Both of those recommendations will have to be fulfilled or Canada will not proceed with the mission in Afghanistan. We believe these are essential to our success."

Bin Laden may have arranged family's US exit: FBI docs

The liberal new site, The Raw Story (http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Bin_Laden_may_have_arranged_family__06202007.html) is reporting that Osama bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said FBI documents released Wednesday:

The papers, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, were made public by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based group that investigates government corruption.

One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 airplane that departed Los Angeles International Airport on September 19, 2001, and was said to have carried Saudi nationals out of the United States.
"The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden," according to the document, which was among 224 pages posted online. The flight made stops in Orlando, Florida; Washington, DC; and Boston, Massachusetts and eventually left its passengers in Paris the following day.

In all, the documents detail six flights between September 14 and September 24 that evacuated Saudi nationals and bin Laden family members, Judicial Watch said in a statement. "Incredibly, not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value," Judicial Watch said.

"These documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI's investigation of the Saudi flights. "For example, on one document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 20 of 23 passengers on the Ryan International Airlines flight ... on another document the FBI claims to have interviewed 15 to 22 passengers on the same flight."

Asked about the documents' assertion that either bin Laden or the Saudi royals ordered the flight, an FBI spokesman said the information was inaccurate. "There is no new information here. Osama bin Laden did not charter a flight out of the US," FBI special agent Richard Kolko said. "This is just an inflammatory headline by Judicial Watch to catch people's attention. This was thoroughly investigated by the FBI."

Kolko pointed to the 9-11 Commission Report, which was the book-length result of an official probe into the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the

Pentagon in Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.
"No political intervention was found. And most important, the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals that left on chartered flights. This is all available in the report," Kolko said.

Nevertheless, unedited footnotes in the texts allowed lawyers to determine that bin Laden's name had been redacted. They pressed the issue in court and in November 2006, the FBI was ordered to re-release the documents. Diliberto said mention that "either" bin Laden or Saudi royals had chartered the flight "really threw us for a loop." "When you combine that with some of the family members not being interviewed, we found it very disturbing."

To be truthful, I am not sure what to think. Sadly, given the many deliberate lies and untruths put out by Chimperator Bush's administration combined with the then GOP controlled Congress' failure to hold Bush in any way accountable, the stage was certainly be set for almost anything to be potentially believeable.