So Osama bin Laden, fearful of remaining Osama bin Forgotten by the Bully Boy, allegedly releases a a message to the world.
In case you missed it:
Bin Laden Threatens US, Hints At Truce in New Message (Democracy Now!):
In an audiotaped message broadcast on the Arabic television network Al Jazeera Thursday, Osama Bin Laden warned of new attacks on the United States. Warning Islamic militants were prepared to carry out further attacks, Bin Laden said "[that] reality testifies to the fact that the war against America and its allies is no longer restricted to Iraq, as [Bush] claims, but rather Iraq has become a centre that attracts and renews the energies of those who are qualified (to fight)." Bin Laden added: "mujahedeen have been able to infiltrate all the security measures taken by the unjust allied countries time and time again, and the proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the most important European countries in this aggressive alliance. The delay in the perpetrating of similar operations in America is not because of an inability to penetrate your security measures; the operations are being prepared, and you will see them in the midst of your own territory." [. . .]
The White House responds:
White House Dismisses Idea of Truce With Bin Laden (Democracy Now!):
The US immediately rejected the idea of a possible truce with Bin Laden. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said: "We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business. We must not stop until they are defeated."
"We put them out of business." At Tora Bora, Scotty?
Why does it all seem like a lovers' quarrel, between two men, that the rest of the world has to put up with?
Kitty Kelley' The Family (page 626):
The President told Lionel Chetwynd, a conservative filmmaker who wrote DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, that visiting Ground Zero had been visceral for him. "I was lifted up by a wave of vengeance and testosterone and anger. I could feel it."
What does it take to get your ya-yas, Bully Boy? And why does the world have to suffer through your attempts to get "lift off"?
As we face another terrorist threat, we'd be wise to keep our wits about us. That means grasping both what happened before (only the adminstration, according to Condi Rice, couldn't have known) and some perspective.
First let's note some recent history.
From Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Pages 98-99):
According to insiders, FBI agents had wanted to check into two members of the bin Laden family, Abdullah and Omar, but were told to stay away by their superiors -- until September 13, 2001. By then, Abdullah and Omar were long gone from the USA.
Why no investigation of the brothers bin Laden? The Bush administration's line is that the Binladdins (a more common spelling of the Arabic name) are good folk. Osama's the Black Sheep, supposedly cut off from his Saudi kin. But the official line notwithstanding, some FBI agents believed the family had some gray sheep worth questioning -- especially these two working with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the file labels "a suspected terrorist organization." Let's be careful here: WAMY may be completely innocent. The FBI targets lots of innocents, too many in fact, but there were plenty of signs that the WAMY crew deserved the organization's scrutiny. . . .
Despite these tantalizing facts, Abdullah and his operations were A-OK with the FBI chiefs, if not their working agents. Just a dumb SNAFU? Not according to a top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity. After Bush took office, he said, "there was a major policy shift" at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they touched on Saudi royals and their retainers. That put the bin Ladens, a family worth a reported $12 billion and a virtual arm of the Saudi royal household, off limits for investigation. Osama was the exception; he remained a wanted man, but agents could not look too closely at how he filled his piggy bank. The key rule of any investigation, "follow the money," was now violated, and investigations -- at least before September 11 -- began to die.
So Bully Boy had a back off policy? And did it cease on September 11th?
From Bob Graham's Intelligence Matters (pages 105-106):
On September 13 as we [Congress] were working out the draft language of the joint resolution authorizing the President to use force against those responsible for September 11, the President was holding a meeting with Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, more commonly called Prince Bandar. Bandar had been informed the night before by a high-ranking CIA official that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis, and that it looked increasingly as if Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi, might have been its mastermind. Presumably, this information created a difficult situation for both Prince Bandar and President Bush. Prince Bandar, a scion of the Saudi Royal family, had to maintain a relationship with America -- a country that purchased hundreds of billions of dollars in Saudi oil and supplied Saudi Arabia with hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry -- although many of the people his family ruled saw America as a mortal enemy. President Bush owed a debt to a family that had been an ally in the 1991 Gulf War, funneled millions of dollars to his own family through an investment group, and, stunningly, would reportedly propose, more than a year later, to lower the price of oil to "prime the U.S. economy for 2004."
Neither the President nor Prince Bandar has disclosed what was discussed in that meeting. But later that day, something strange began to happen. Although the FAA had ordered all private flights grounded, a number of planes began flying to collect Saudi nationals from various parts of the United States. For example, a ten-passenger Learjet picked up three young Saudi men in Tampa and flew them to Lexington, Kentucky, where a Boeing 747 was waiting for some Saudi horse-racing enthusiasts. (For nearly three years, the White House and other agencies insisted that these flights never took place, confirming their existence only under investigation by the independent 9/11 Commission.)
By September 19, more than 140 Saudis -- including several members of the bin Laden family -- had been flown out of the United States. Certainly, the majority of the travelers were innocent of any crime. However, at least one is thought to have had terrorist ties, and even the innocent members of bin Laden's family could probably have provided some insight into his funding and operations. The FBI interviewed none of them.
What did Bully Boy and Bandar discuss? And what of a "debt"? For the answer to the last question, we turn to Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? (Pages 7-9):
Mr. Bush, in 1977, when your father told you it was time to get a real job, he set you up with your first oil company, something you called "Arbusto" (Spanish for "shrub"). A year later, you received financing from a man named James A. Bath. He was an old buddy of yours from your days (the ones when you weren't AWOL) in the Texas Air National Guard. He had been hired by Salem bin Laden -- Osama's brother -- to invest bin Ladens' money in various Texas ventures. Some $50,000 - or 5 percent of control of Arbusto -- came from Mr. Bath.
Was he acting on behalf of the bin Ladens?
Most Americans might be surprised to learn that you and your father have known the bin Ladens for a long time. What exactly is the extent of this relationship, Mr. Bush? Are you close personal friends, or simply on-again, off-again business associates?
[. . .]
After leaving office, your father became a highly paid consultant for a company known as the Carlyle Group. One of the investors in the Carlyle Group was none other than the bin Laden family. The bin Ladens put a minimum of $2 million into the Carlyle Group.
Until 1994, you headed a company called CaterAir, which was owned by the Carlyle Group. The same year you left the soon-to-be-bankrupt CaterAir, you became governor and quickly oversaw the University of Texas -- a state institution -- make an investment of $10 million in the Carlyle Group. The bin Laden family had also gotten on the Carlyl gravy train in 1004.
The Carlyle Group is one of the nation's largest defense contractors, among their many other lines of work.
[. . .]
After September 11, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence. Your first response, Mr. Bush, was to ignore it, hoping, I guess, that the story would just go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the bin Laden investment. Your army of pundits went into spin control. They said, we can't paint these bin Ladens with the same brush we use for Osama. They have disowned Osama! They have nothing to do with him! They hate and despise what he has done! These are the good bin Ladens.
And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of those "good" bin Ladens -- including Osama's mother, a sister and two brothers -- with Osama at his son's wedding just six and a half months before September 11. It has been reported in The New Yorker that not only has the family not cut ties to Osama, but they have continued to fund him as they have been doing for years.
So there's a complicated "entanglement" (to steal a favorite term of Bill Keller's)? From Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling (page 103):
Carlyle specializes in buying down-and-out defense contractors, then reselling them when their fortunes miraculously improve after they receive new government business. Among the company's employees is former President George H. W. Bush. Among the group's investors, until late October [2001], was the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
Well that's certainly interesting. Ties between Bully Boy's family and bin Ladens. But Bully Boy was determined to catch bin Laden, right? We went into Afghanistan with the Bully Boy cry of "dead or alive," remember?
Remember the backing off of that cry? From Gore Vidal's Dreaming War (page 43-44):
Also, there is USA Today, November 11, 2001, "The US combat commander in Afghanistan said Thursday that apprehending Osama bin Laden isn't one of the missons of Operation Enduring Freedom."
[. . .]
Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered three thousand American citizens, once that "war" was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we're back to the Unocal pipeline, no a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the Junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: "Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?" And we get his best twinkle.
Wait, as Danny Schechter might ask in his documentary WMD, was it all a dream? Bully Boy did make that cry, right? From Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege (page 326):
For his part, Bush started talking tough about "smoking out" al-Qaeda or bringing in Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." He also broadened America's goals, defining the task ahead as not just the defeat of the al-Qaeda killers but the destruction of terrorism and the eradication of "evil." Bush began to see the "war on terror" as part of his religious calling. "I think in [Bush's] frame, this is what God has asked him to do," a close acquaintance told The New York Times. "It offers him enormous clarity."
Well it offered him something. A wave of testoterone which is apparently something to be prized by the prep school boy who spent his teens as a male cheerleader. The facts have never spoken to Bully Boy's "valor." Let's return to Parry's Secrecy & Privilege (page 325-236):
In explaining Bush's delay in returning to Washington until after 4 p.m., political adviser [Karl] Rove said there were still reports about civilian jetliners aloft until then and thus still a threat to Air Force One. But Benjamin Sliney, the top Federal Aviation Administration official responsible for air-traffic control, said the agency informed the White House and the Pentagon at 12:16 p.m. that there were no more hijacked planes in the air and all commerical planes were out of U.S. airspace, the Wall Street Journal reported.
There were additonal discrepancies about what orders Bush actually issued that day. Bush told the town-hall meeting in Orlando that "one of the first acts I did was to put our military on alert." But the Journal reported that the evidence was that Air Force General Richard Myers, the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the decision to raise the U.S. defense level to Defcon III, the highest state of military threat since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
Ah yes, his little Bunny Fu Fu hop-scotch across the nation that followed his sitting in a Florida classroom and doing NOTHING.
So here we are, five years later this September and what's been accomplished? Bully Boy's blustered and stomped his feet. He's lost interest in Osama bin Laden as he pursued an old partner of his father's. And now Osama sends out his "You Ought to Know" recording. (Tip of the hat to Isaiah's whose The World Today Just Nuts illustrates this feature and who caught the "I'm hear to remind you . . ." nature of the alleged recording.)
We've gone to war on Afghanistan. Supposedly the Taliban but we really didn't run them out of that country. We did go to war on Afghanistan and now we're pretty much done with assisting them, in case you missed that news. We went to war with Iraq for many stated reasons and none of them had any basis in reality. We're still there (as we are in Afghanistan) and "quagmire" may be too weak a word for the situation. We're done pretty much with finanical assistance there as well. We bombed the public utilities and water and electricity are still hit and miss but, hey, that's something for private investors to take care of.
So two wars (still ongoing) and no Osama. (It might be worth remembering that the Taliban asked for our proof of Osama's involvement in 9/11 before they would turn him over. We rebuffed that and the nation still awaits the proof from the government. The media's offered a variety of accounts but the government's much touted proof appears to have slipped everyone's mind.)
Let's drop back a bit again. From Arianna Huffington's Pigs At The Trough (pages 119-120):
It is now painfully clear that our leaders -- both in the current administration and its predecessor -- knew that a terrorist attack on American soil would almost surely happen at some point. So, why didn't they do more to protest us? Could it be because the public interest didn't have a gaggle of lobbyists patrolling Congress and the White House offering cash incentives to protect American people from fanatics and madmen?
If counterterrorism had been an industry doling out large contributions, our political leaders would surely have leapt into action -- pushing through legislation to ensure our airports were secure and our intelligence operations were actually collecting intelligence. Instead, the attacks exposed not only how vulnerable our airports are but how vulnerable our system of government is when policy priorities are determined not in response to the public interest but in response to the best-funded interest groups.
Why didn't they do more to protect us? Good question. And here's the kicker for the Bully Boy who seems to benefit from each of Osama bin Laden's broadcasts, he and his party are in charge.
They control the Congress, they control the White House. (And they stack and pack the judiciary.) If there's another attack on America, he'd be better off not kidding himself that America will want to play rally 'round the loser one more time. He's had almost five years and what has he done?
Nothing really. Well, he did stage his third war, war on Americans. But other than that, he's vacationed a lot, he's handed out a lot of tax breaks to the rich, he's obsessed over the state of gay marriage in a manner that honestly should beg questions as to why he's so concerned, he's made the world less safe, he's vacationed, he's hidden out from Cindy Sheehan (apparently a more frightening figure to him than Osama), he's mangled the English language, he's vactioned . . .
It's going to be a bit more difficult to scream "Bill Clinton!" this time though we're sure he and his court will do just that. But the reality is that he's probably in a worse spot than he was before 9/11. Back then, people just suspected that he was inept. 9/11 came along and two days after he had a photo op, people were scared, and there was a rallying behind him. Bully Boy would do well to remember the reaction to his administration in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. People held him accountable, rightly. And if there's another attack on American soil, people will hold him even more accountable. Photo-ops following a Bunny Fu Fu will probably fall flat.
The 9/11 Commission came up with a list of recommendations. He ignored them. Now here's Osama back to "remind him" in a very Alanis style manner.
We have no idea what sick, symbiotic relationship the two of them share but bin Laden does seem to pop up whenever Bully Boy needs propping. As valid questions are being asked about his illegal activites in spying on Americans without warrants, here's Osama with another recording. It's all very Bully Boy & bin Laden. Someone should stage an adaptation of Romeo & Juliet with the two of them in the leads.
Riding the wave that seemed to assure him that, despite the fact that Big Babs once kicked off the house shoes to join her little cheerleader on the field, he had testes, Bully Boy's waved his hammer and struck at will. The world's a lot less safe for it. Maybe if we'd had a leader with a lot less to prove, we could have followed a wiser course?
Such as the one suggested in Amy Goodman and David Goodman's The Exception to the Rulers (page 39-40):
A few days after the Twin Towers fell, President Bush came to Ground Zero. I watched as a chilling cheer went up around him: "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chanted the crowd in unison. Among those who set up this Ground Zero photo op -- a defining moment in Bush's presidency -- was Jim Wilkinson, who went on to become the media point man in Qatar spinning the Jessica Lynch story and was then appointed communications czar of the 2004 Republican National Convention.
I don't think rallying around the flag is the answer to what happened on Septemeber 11. The answer is a global community united against terror, determined to rout it out wherever it originates -- including the White House and the Pentagon.
The answer is institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), where people who commit crimes against humanity can be tried. But who is the primary force opposing this court? The United States. A reluctant President Clinton waited until the last moment to sign the treaty to recognize the authority of the ICC. Then Bush came in and unsigned the treaty. In mid-2003, Bush strong-armed the UN Security Council to pass a resolution that would exempt U.S. officials and soldiers from being held accountable in the same way as others around the world. And the Bush adminstration has pressured countries, at the risk of losing U.S. aid, to sign bilateral agreements that would prohibit them from bringing charges against the U.S. citizens before an international court.
Of course I think that Osama bin Laden and his accomplices should be tried for what happened on September 11. But when you look at where bodies have stacked up around the world -- from Chile and Argentina to Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and East Timor -- I think Henry Kissinger should also be tried for crimes against humanity.
If we have any hope of routing out terror and breaking the cycle of blowback, we must have a universal standard of justice.
But we didn't choose international order, we chose Bully Boy chaos. The world's a lot less safer. If the recording is real and accurate, we don't appear any safer than we were prior to September 2001. But remember Bully Boy was occupying the Oval Office then too.