Keepin' Us Safe

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

[A] new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan.

[...]

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

[...]

American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A.

[...]

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas.

[...]

[It] is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

[...]

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

  More – much more – at the NYT

Nice goin’ BushCo. And thanks.

Omar the Peacemaker

Omar Osama bin Laden bears a striking resemblance to his notorious father — except for the dreadlocks that dangle halfway down his back. Then there's the black leather biker jacket.

The 26-year-old does not renounce his father, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, but in an interview with The Associated Press, he said there is better way to defend Islam than militancy: Omar wants to be an "ambassador for peace" between Muslims and the West.

Omar — one of bin Laden's 19 children — raised a tabloid storm last year when he married a 52-year-old British woman, Jane Felix-Browne, who took the name Zaina Alsabah. Now the couple say they want to be advocates, planning a 3,000-mile horse race across North Africa to draw attention to the cause of peace.

  Raw Story

Yeah, that should do it.

“Gee, Zaina, what could we do with all our millions of dollars to help bring peace to the world?”

”Well…..”

”I’ve got it! A horse race across Africa!”

” It’s so crazy, Omie, it just might work.”

Maybe a competition through Kenya or the refugee camps in Sudan is just what’s needed right now.

"It's about changing the ideas of the Western mind. A lot of people think Arabs — especially the bin Ladens, especially the sons of Osama — are all terrorists. This is not the truth," Omar told the AP last week at a cafe in a Cairo shopping mall.

Some of them are fun-loving rastamen.

"Omar thinks he can be a negotiator," said Alsabah, who is trying to bring her husband to Britain. "He's one of the only people who can do this in the world."

Ah, the eyes of love.

Teams from around the world will be encouraged to join in what the couple envisions as an equine version of the Paris-Dakar car rally. That rally was canceled this year due to fears over terrorist threats made by al-Qaida-affiliated groups in North Africa.

Omar, however, said he isn't worried.

"I heard the rally was stopped because of al-Qaida," he said. "I don't think they are going to stop me."

[...]

"My father thinks he will be good for defending the Arab people and stop anyone from hurting the Arab or Muslim people any place in the world," [Omar] said, noting that the West didn't have a problem with his father when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

[...]

"My father is asking for a truce but I don't think there is any government (that) respects him. At the same time they do not respect him, why everywhere in the world, they want to fight him? There is a contradiction," he said.

If that’s a sample of your negotiating skills, I suggest you don’t quit your day job, Omar.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Bhutto Assassination

On November 2, 2007, David Frost interviewed Benazir Bhutto, at which time she says she had sent a letter to Musharraf telling him where to look if she were to be assassinated, naming individuals who might be financing the extremists carrying out the suicide bombings.

What is very strange is that she casually mentions Omar Sheikh as "the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden."

Bloggers and blog readers are discussing it a-plenty, with many suggesting she made a slip and meant to say Daniel Pearl. But how strange that she doesn't notice what she's said, nor does David Frost bat an eye. Was he listening to what she was saying? (The entire interview is here, and it's never mentioned again or cleared up.)

I would think there might have been some news agencies digging into it or even a follow-up on the Frost show after surely some viewers wrote in or called, or an editor noticed it, but I can't find anything.

What's that all about?

Addendum:

Pakistani police abandoned their protective posts before Bhutto was shot.

Report from a McClatchy special correspondent at the scene:

Three to five shots were fired at her, witnesses said. She was hit in the neck and slumped back in the vehicle. Blood poured from her head, and she never regained consciousness. Moments after the shooting, there was a huge explosion to the left of the vehicle.

[...]

Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts. As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: "Willing to die for Benazir."

  McClatchy

There is now a new official report on Bhutto’s death, claiming she died from hitting her head on her car, rather than from being shot. No autopsy was performed. CNN’s Ken Robinson suggests that is a political ploy to try to deny her a martyr’s death.

Another White House Leak?

Who would believe a thing like that?

U.S. intelligence officials will investigate allegations that the government improperly leaked a secretly obtained Osama bin Laden video, alerting al-Qaeda to a security gap in the terrorist group's internal communications network that it was able to shut, an intelligence spokesman said yesterday.

Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said officials are looking into the leak allegation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which passed the video on to the White House and the director of national intelligence's office before its leak.

"At this point, we don't think there was a leak from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or the National Counterterrorism Center," Feinstein said.

  WaPo

So who from the White House could it have been then? And why would they do that? Hmmmm?

SITE founder Rita Katz told The Post that her company covertly obtained an early copy of a bin Laden video message in early September, then shared the video with senior administration officials on Sept. 7 on the condition that it not be distributed or made public before its official release.

Soon afterward, the video was downloaded by dozens of computers registered to government agencies. Within hours, SITE's copy of the video was leaked to television news networks and broadcast worldwide.

Gee, for some reason, we just can’t seem to catch that bin Laden fella.

SITE said in the Post article that it had obtained the video ahead of its planned al Qaeda release and given two senior Bush administration officials access to it on condition they not reveal they had it until the official release.

[…]

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," SITE founder Rita Katz told the Post.

[...]

The White House denied it had leaked the video but said the issue was a cause for concern and an investigation would be needed to determine what happened.

  Reuters

Yeah, move over Scooter.

Two senior Bush administration officials. Will we get their names?

Update: Yes.

Like a Bad Penny

I have two questions about the BinLaden tape that is supposed to be aired on 9/11.

1) How is it that the US government has come up with a copy of the tape in advance?

2) Isn't the timing just a little too coincidental with the "Petraeus" report which will supposedly convince Congress to throw more money at the "surge"?

The last time we heard from old Bin was just before the 2004 elections. He's nicely timed when the GOP has some big stakes at issue.

I'm not accusing, I'm just saying.

Fighting Them Over There

That would appear to be the desire of both Cheney-Bush and bin Laden. The "following us back here if we leave Iraq" ridiculous line (What? They can't find their way here if we don't lead them? How'd they get here on 9/11?) should be put to rest not only for the stupidity, but for the inaccuracy...

As Professor Robert A. Pape proved in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism – by studying every single individual suicide bomber on Earth between 1980 and 2004 – the one characteristic that all suicide bombers have in common is the presence of foreign combat forces in their country – not Islam.

[...]

The Bush team's invasion killed a few birds with one stone for bin Laden: It got rid of the Ba'athists, put tens of thousands of Americans within rifle range and it created a training ground and propaganda tool for new recruits.

There had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq before 2003. Never. Now there have been well over a thousand.

[...]

Ask an old Commie. He'll tell you, "The action is in the reaction."

This is why they knocked down the towers: al-Qaeda's purpose was to give the United States "no choice" but to come fight on their territory personally instead of, as they saw it, through their Western-installed governments and the Israelis, and then "bleed" us until the American people demand an end to the intervention or the dollar breaks, whichever comes first.

Bin Laden couldn't have laid out his strategy more clearly than in his speech of October 2004:

Continue reading at Antiwar.com...

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Zarqawi's Replacement

I haven't got the time this morning to hunt down the appropriate links (and I haven't made much progress attaching labels to my past posts in order to make that job easier), but maybe I can do it later.

At any rate, most of you will recall at least the flavor of my posts about Zarqawi, the number one bogie man (in place of bin Laden - let's think about why that would be), who was reported dead and subsequently alive, sometimes with one leg, until finally we had to lay him to rest. Of course, then he had to have a replacement.

And now, that replacement is being played in the exact same fashion. We are so damned gullible.

According to ABC News, reports that al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri has been killed are “unconfirmed and part of a misinformation campaign.”

  Think Progress post

First, al-Masri was reported wounded at an opportune time for the Bush administration to counter bad news at home. Then that report was claimed to be false. And now, when Bush is battling Congress for increased funds, he has been killed. Or maybe not.

An Egyptian news source says the guy has been in prison there for the past seven years.

Back in '06, when he was reported dead and then alive, Joe Cannon wrote:

I doubt that I've ever before used the acronym WTF, but this story delivers good reason to take up the habit. In his most recent broadcast to the world, Osama Bin Laden proclaimed that Zarqawi's successor in Iraq is one Abu Ayyub al-Masri. The United States concurred, and offered both a bounty and a history:

The military said al-Masri was born and brought up in Egypt. He then went to Afghanistan, where he trained in bomb-making before going to Iraq in 2002.

Get that? "The United States concurred..."

As I periodically say, "Are we sure bin Laden is an ex-CIA agent?" Or at least, a guy who made a deal.

Bin Laden's activities and purposes sure dovetail nicely with bin Bush's.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Karl and Osama

Cannonfire comments on Karl Rove's statement that Osama bin Laden started the pre-emptive war business.

I cannot agree completely, since evidence indicates that the invasion of Iraq was in the planning stages well before 9/11. However, when Osama got the memo, I'm sure he wrote the Arabic equivalent of "I love it!" in the margins.

The invasion of a secular government detested by Al Qaeda? A government that had never attacked the United States? A military action against Arabs that would make Bin Laden look like a prophet throughout the Islamic world? An action that would radicalize all Muslims and magnify anti-U.S. sentiment?

From Osama Bin Laden's point of view, what was there not to love?

What makes us so sure bin Laden is a former CIA agent? Or at the very least, a man who made a deal.

Conspiracy

This is why I'll never be a top-notch blogger.

Bob puts me to shame commenting on my post about the FBI agent killed under "chaotic" circumstances:

It must be after your bedtime--otherwise your headline would have been "Bush shot by FBI after being questioned by Patrick Fitzgerald about Osama bin Laden."

More likely, the NSA overheard him reserving a rental car or something. They heard him say "Barry Bush," which under the Patriot Act is more than sufficient grounds for a summary execution.

Excellent, Bob. I do wish I had thought of that. I should just funnel these stories directly to you and let you blog them. Add a little conspiracy edge to your blog.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

As Long As I'm In Mystery Mode....

READINGTON, N.J. - An FBI agent who was killed Thursday when a stakeout team opened fire on three armed bank robbery suspects might have been shot accidentally by another agent, the FBI said.

Agent Barry Lee Bush, 52, assigned to the Newark office, died after agents confronted three men suspected in a series of armed bank robberies.

[...]

Pedro Ruiz, an agent in charge of the Newark office, said the suspects did not fire their weapons, which included two assault rifles and a handgun. He said he did not know how many shots were fired and declined to elaborate about what led the agents to shoot.

  Yahoo article

It's past my bedtime, but I'm going to engage in a little speculation by suggesting that, while "friendly fire" might be common amongst the soldiers in Iraq, and maybe amongst police officers to a lesser extent, I'd guess that it's a pretty rare thing indeed in the FBI.. Not sayin' it couldn't have happened like that. Just sayin'.

I Googled Barry Lee Bush. Unless there are two FBI agents with that name, this same agent Bush did some testifying in a case called United States v. Usama Bin Laden in March of 2001 (pre 9/ll), under the questioning of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, about some papers Bush recovered from a search of a building in Kenya.

Okay, so maybe I just watched the old movie Serpico. But still. Kinda odd, isn't it? Isn't it? Or is it just past my bedtime?

Update

Another CIA agent waiting to have his book approved

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught.

  MSNBC article

Bin Laden was and, for my money still is, a CIA asset (agent? operative?) himself.

In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members.

Q But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

  Press Conference March 13, 2002