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Sunday, August 07, 2005

Black sheep my ass
Posted by Jill | 2:29 PM

I liked it better when my thoughts about 9/11 made me a crazy person.

But the more time that elapses between 9/11 and the present, and the more we see how the Bush Administration's so-called anti-terrorism is playing out (and doing little to address the problem of terrorism, but a whole lot to plow cash into Dick Cheney's pockets and a whole lot to make Americans less free), the less crazy I seem.

The accepted meme has always been that Osama Bin Laden is the "black sheep" of the Bin Laden family that has been in business with the Bush family for years. This has been a convenient way of separating out the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks from the rest of his clan, who are up to their tits in shady oil and other business dealings with Poppy Bush through the Carlyle Group and other companies.

It's always seemed odd that our military has been so stymied by a 6-foot-plus Arabic guy in kidney failure. Could it be that Osama Bin Laden is more valuable to the Bush Junta as an ever-present boogeyman than he would be as a corpse -- or even a captive?

Yup, it sure can be, and it seems that it is -- either that or this Administration is so fucking inept it shouldn't be trusted to fight terrorists:

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. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

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. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."

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