Bush's Treason At Tora Bora

Kind of ironic that reactionaries are demanding that George Bush get the credit for Obama's assassinating Osama bin Laden. The Wall St. Journal and every other of the seemingly endless neofascist media outlets that blanket the U.S. consciousness has been harping on that ridiculous theme. Their justifications boil down to two: 1) he "started the process," whatever that vagary is supposed to mean, and 2) "enhanced interrogations" (what normal humans call torture) produced intel that led to bin Laden.

Of course, if Obama were a Republican, and Bush had been a Democrat, these neofascists wouldn't be demanding credit for Bush, they'd be sneering at what a failure Bush was compared to the manly Obama.

Of course, "enhanced interrogation" is torture. Aside from the fact that it obviously is, by the descriptions of the "techniques," the whole point is to FORCE prisoners to TALK by physical pressure and pain. If it wasn't torture, they wouldn't be doing it.

And it's a lie to say they got critical intel that way. In fact, Sheikh, Khalid Mohammad, the "mastermind" of 9/11, was waterboarded (drowned) 183 times, and he refused to give up the courier that supposedly led to bin Laden. So if anything, we now have proof that torture DOESN'T work (it certainly didn't work in this case). Fact is, as the former chief army interrogator in Iraq says, FALSE intel derived from torture sent them on time-and-resource-wasting wild goose chases. If anything, torture RETARDED  the hunt for bin Laden.

Now, on to Bush's treason. The CIA's former head of the Get bin Laden squad, Michael Scheuer, said on at least one radio interview that I heard personally that he was at Tora Bora when bin Laden was cornered there. Scheuer radioed to have 450 army Rangers sent to get bin Laden- and this was REFUSED.

Now this is just 2 months after 9/11. You might remember the frenzy the U.S. was in at that time about bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. They were going to turn the world upside down and shake it until bin Laden fell out.

Instead they decided to outsource getting this #1 monster to the ragtag "Northern Alliance," a grabbag of Afghan opportunists, mercenaries and warlords!

So why on earth would they deliberately allow bin Laden to escape? Simple. They needed to bogeyman to still be out there. They were still in the process of passing more repressive laws, grabbing more and more secrety police powers for the FBI, NSA, CIA. And critically, they needed bin Laden as an excuse to invade Iraq. Recall, on the very day of 9/11/01, Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's War Secretary, ordered that the attack be connected to Iraq. Even before they came into power on Bush's coattails, the so-called "neoconservatives" (mostly Jewish hard-right reactionaries) had been pushing for years to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, presumably to serve Israel. There is plenty of public papers and articles by this gang to that effect. (Even more sinisterly, they wanted "another Pearl Harbor" to galvanize public opinion to invade Iraq. And they got one. Plus, the evidence is overwhelming that the FBI and CIA had the 9/11 plotters in the U.S. under surveillance, and deliberately allowed the plot to go forward. That's another essay, but I'll just mention two key facts- the refusal of FBI D.C. headquarters to allow the FBI office in Minnesota to search the computer of captured 9/11 would-be pilot Zacarias Moussaouri, who was arrested prior to the fateful day, and who French intel had told the U.S. was a terrorist; and the fact that the landlord for 2 of the hijackers was an FBI informer. When Congress wanted to qauestion the informer and his FBI handler, the FBI flat out refused, and Congress backed down. Which by the way proves the U.S. is a police state. How else can a secret police force outrank the national legislature, except in a police state? [See, NY Times, Oct. 6, 2002,

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/us/threats-responses-inquiry-congress-seeks-fbi-data-informer-fbi-resists.html?scp=14&sq=fbi&st=nyt     click on title of this post for link.]

So the traitor Bush should get credit for killing bin Laden. That's rich. Typical of GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) and general reactionary over-the-top GALL.