A report out today includes a “highly placed source” as saying that part of the reason George W. Bush is not appearing with President Barack Obama at ground zero is that he feels he is not getting part of the credit in the killing.
The source stated “Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way.”
Of course, it was Bush (like Clinton) who ignored warnings of the possible attacks and then it was Bush Administration that let Bin Laden slip out of Tora Bora. Bin Laden was nailed years after the departure of Bush and based on recent intelligence hits on the surveillance net. As noted earlier, I am not sure why there is not more discussion of the alleged failure of this and the prior administration to locate Bin Laden in such a conspicuous setting after alleged leads from Pakistan and India. It appears that much of our intelligence estimates on his location may have been wildly wrong.
Clearly, many of the people outside of the Administration (joining some Obama officials) citing torture as part of the success in this story are Bush officials — trying desperately not only to claim part of the success but to legitimate an act defined as a war crime.
This is all part of the spasm of celebration over the killing. I must confess a bit of unease in the scenes of people dancing in the streets and presidents fighting over credit for the killing. I have the same unease when people assemble outside of prisons with frying pans and signs to celebrate the execution of a murderer. Some scenes this month looked uncomfortably like images we saw in the Middle East after the 9-11 attacks. I am also glad that Bin Laden is dead. I will not deny it. However, all of these celebrations only elevate the importance of the man.
As I stated earlier, I have always found it bizarre that we give presidents personal credit for such operations. Whether it is Bush parading around on the aircraft carrier in his flight suit or Obama at ground zero, presidents claim credit for successes by others. Obviously, this order would have been given by Bush and Clinton once Bin Laden fell into our surveillance net. Ironically, presidents are very successful in basking in such glory of others, but do not feel the full brunt of their mistakes like Tora Bora or, more importantly, ignoring the warnings about an attack using aircraft. Those are simply dismissed as missed opportunities or confused circumstances.
What is equally fascinating is that we continue to define victory by Bin Laden’s death while insisting that nothing will change in light of it, as discussed in this week’s column.
Source: NY Daily News
@ Frank:
Check those dates. 5 months after 9-11. Boy Blunder was not interested in eliminating Bin Laden, he had bigger F-ups to focus on. NOW he wants some credit? Like everything else in his life, no effort on his part but always first in line for the credit.
I have to agree. Can we know to an absolute certainty that Bush’s actions led directly to the capture and death of Osama bin Laden 9 years after he stated that bin Laden was no longer a priority? No. But to be fair, we can’t entirely rule them out either.
I’m sure Bush did something that contributed in some small way to this week’s event, but the fact of the matter is, if Bush’s actions or policies were as important as this “highly placed source” is making them out to be then bin Laden would have been killed years ago under the Bush administration and not the Obama administration.
If the “highly placed source” is accurate, then that means Bush is looking for a concession from Obama that the waterboarding sanctioned by the Bush administration turned out to be an effective tool against terrorism after all. However, the only problem with that conclusion is that there is no straight line between waterboarding KSM and the death of Osama bin Laden. Many other intelligence leads intervened along the way over the years that broke the causal connection between the two.
I hope all can hear it … I’m playing the world’s smallest violin … My heart bleeds for you …
Thursday, May 5, 2011 12:30 ET
War Room
Source: Bush didn’t go to New York today because he wants credit for bin Laden kill
By Alex Pareene
Barack Obama is in New York today, visiting with firefighters and families of victims of 9/11 and laying a wreath at the World Trade Center site. Though the president invited his predecessor, George W. Bush, to join him, the former president declined the offer. At first I thought that Mr. Bush was being gracious, and had decided that his presence would’ve been an unnecessary distraction. But no, according to a “highly-placed source” who spoke to the New York Daily News, Bush is staying home because he is a big baby who’s mad that Barack Obama is taking all the credit for killing bin Laden, just because Obama is the one who did it.
“[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap,” a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.
[…]
“He doesn’t feel personally snubbed and appreciates the invitation, but Obama’s claiming all the credit and a lot of other people deserve some of it,” the source added.
[…]
“Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way.”
Now that this comes from one source, who spoke to, of all possible outlets, the Daily News. It’s possible — maybe even probable — that this reflect this one source’s opinion more than the feelings of our former president. (Bush, after all, has always tended to hire and surround himself with petty, hypersensitive apparatchiks, and they may mistake their own wounded pride for that of their current or former boss.) I certainly believe that most veterans of the Bush White House have convinced themselves that failing to credit them for accomplishing something they very famously failed to accomplish is somehow unfair, just as I believe that Bush himself is probably so completely 100% comfortable with everything he did and accomplished that he feels no need for validation.
But in case this is an accurate explanation for why Bush refused Obama’s invitation, I think Barack Obama should make sure to keep inviting Bush places, forever, as long as that will keep him home, stewing in silence.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/george_w_bush/index.html
Now What?
Wednesday 4 May 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
Newspaper covers hang on a wall near the World Trade Center site the day after President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. (Photo: Marcus Yam / The New York Times)
“We need to counteract the shockwave of the evil-doer by having individual rate cuts accelerated, and by thinking about tax rebates.”
– George W. Bush, October 2001
There is something fundamentally crazy-making about the fact that Osama bin Laden, damned murderer of thousands, met his demise on the anniversary of the day George W. Bush, damned murderer of thousands, pulled his infamous “Mission Accomplished” stunt on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. I suspect that, had Mr. Bush managed to back up his big talk and actually bag bin Laden before his second term expired, we would have seen him jump out of an attack helicopter at Ground Zero wearing a SEAL uniform – complete with night-vision scope and even larger codpiece – under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished II.”
You just know Bush would have done it, too. The core of his greatest strength was his utter and complete lack of shame. The fact that he said, “I don’t know where he is. Nor do I – you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him to be honest with you,” in 2002 would not have fazed him one bit. He would have smirked his way through it, and the mainstream media would have cooed over his masculinity and awesome presidential excellence.
So, at least, we were spared that madness. Thank God for small favors. Seems like that’s all we get these days.
I wanted to celebrate the death of bin Laden, and in my own way, I did. I didn’t dance in the streets or wave a flag or shout “USA! USA! USA!” But I definitely smiled, and I don’t apologize for it. There an old joke about a man who would buy a newspaper every day from a paperboy, scan the front page, and then throw the paper away in disgust. After a while, the paperboy asked him why he kept throwing the paper away. “I’m looking for someone in the obituaries,” the man replied. “But, sir,” said the paperboy, “the obituaries aren’t on the front page.” The man looked at him and said, “When the son of a bitch I’m looking for dies, he’ll be on the front page.”
Or, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “I never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” That’s about right, and that’s enough about that.
For you see, despite all the rampant celebration and cheering crowds, the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead does not alter the landscape much at all. To be sure, the families and friends of those who died by his hand can perhaps find a measure of closure, and those who bought wholesale into the fear-tactic idea that bin Laden was lurking behind every corner and under every bed can maybe put the Tums down and get a good night sleep for a change. For the rest of us, however, the Earth still spins on its axis just as it did before the deal went down.
After all the chest-beating and hoot-hollering dies down, it is my devout hope that we as Americans give ourselves over to a somber, sober reflection on the ten years that have passed since Osama bin Laden slammed into our collective consciousness. In the end, I hope we can arrive at a promise, made to ourselves and to each other, that we will never allow such horrific madness to take hold of our country ever again.
I do not mean by this to say that we must promise to stop terrorism. That would be nice – incredible, actually – but it isn’t going to happen any time soon. Ten decades of ruthless American foreign policy have spawned a host of implacable foes, and they are not going to close up shop because Osama bin Laden now sleeps with the fishes. His acolytes have promised retribution, and they very well may keep their word. In the end, terrorism is something we must all live with for now, until the day comes when we make the collective, democratic decision to change the way we operate in the world. Terrorism is not all our fault, but we bear a substantial portion of the burden that has been imposed upon us. Intelligence types call it “blowback,” and thanks to so many wretched decisions made in our past, it is going to keep blowing for at least the foreseeable future.
Call me a cynic or an America-hater (and how’s that for a G.W. Bush flashback), but it is what it is. After the euphoria of the moment passed, I found myself awash in deep feelings of woe and regret. Not over bin Laden himself or the manner of his end, but over the utterly ruinous decade that was allowed to transpire under the banner of “getting him,” and over the equally ruinous and painful days that are still to come.
After 9/11, much of the country went collectively crazy with fear and rage, and the members of George W. Bush’s administration capitalized on that to great and terrible effect. They knew exactly what they were doing, right down to the facile “terror alerts” they would vomit on us whenever they found themselves in a political corner. They lied about bin Laden connections and WMD in Iraq to promote an invasion that made their rich friends even richer while killing a lot of people, and drove the nation down into the ditch. They used that horrible day against us, deliberately and with intent. All you hear from the media since bin Laden was killed is how “united” we were after 9/11, but I don’t remember feeling that unity. I remember thinking we were reacting to that event in exactly the wrong way – with the PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act, the gutting of essential rights, and the calamitous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan – and being told I was not a real American for my trouble.
Remember where we were ten years ago, with an unprecedented budget surplus, relative peace, and no talk of the destruction of Social Security or Medicare anywhere. Ten years later and we are still mired in those two wars, with a third now thrown on top for good measure, and all that surplus tax money is now lining the pockets of a fortunate few who capitalized on our fears while the rest of us scratch and scrape just to survive. Legions of elderly people pass through my neighborhood to dig through trash barrels for recyclable cans and bottles they can turn in to get by. That is bin Laden’s legacy, as much as it is Mr. Bush’s.
It is hard to escape the fact that, in far too many ways, bin Laden won even in death. He hoped to provoke a drastic over-reach from that resident idiot in the White House, and he got what he was after. The damage done to us by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and the rest of that crowd of cretins will echo painfully down the corridor of our history for a long time to come. Osama bin Laden hurt us, and in response, we hurt ourselves ten times worse. We are still hurting ourselves; 24 hours before the news of his death hit the wires, all the “mainstream” media could talk about was birth certificates. This is not the characteristic of a flourishing society. This is the characteristic of a failing state that lacks the courage or the will to address what truly ails it.
So many have died, in Iraq and Afghanistan and right here in America – from bombs, bullets, inadequate health care, indifference and simple despair. So much has been wasted, so many opportunities squandered, so much pain dealt and received. After we finish patting ourselves on the back for what the president and his SEALs did on Sunday night, it would be human and proper of us to realize that this is not a time for celebration. Too much has happened, too much blood has been spilled, too many lives have been lost or ruined for us to indulge in self-congratulation. Ours is a sorely wounded country, and we must face the fact that many of those wounds have been self-inflicted. We are falling apart in large part because of these last ten years, and instead of throwing a parade, we should look inward and decide to choose a different way.
Someone on the television called the death of Osama bin Laden this generation’s VE Day. I would hope, instead, we make it our VO Day: Victory in Ourselves. Let us never allow an act of violence to compel us to eviscerate what is best in us and our country. Let us never allow any person – be they terrorist or president or talking head – to make us fear anything but fear itself, because that fear is the window through which they steal from us. The last decade was a smash-and-grab robbery writ large, a tremendous act of first-degree murder, and it delivered us today to this place of ashes and loss.
The future is not what we hoped it would be, and the pain of these years will linger for a long time to come. Stand your ground. Make it better. Don’t ever let it happen again.
http://www.truthout.org/now-what/1304441219
Elaine M,
“He was one of the worst terrorists organizing attacks on the United States. I mean, no president in his right mind would not approve that decision to go eliminate him.”
Pssst! I guess he didn’t read the memo that McFlightsuit let bin Laden go in Tora Bora …
But I think this is more telling:
“He just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is. … So he’s getting a lot of recognition and his polls have jumped up, but his decision was the easiest of them all. The real hard work was done by the intelligence and the SEALs.””
Awww … poor David … he’s going to take his toys and go home …
And now a word from…David Koch:
David Koch Gives President Obama Zero Credit for Bin Laden’s Death
New York Magazine, 5/5/2011
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/billionaire_conservative_david.html
Considering the stark partisan divide over the amount of credit President Obama deserves for the death of Osama bin Laden, it should probably not come as a surprise that billionaire David Koch, a rabidly anti-Obama conservative activist, isn’t ready to throw any praise Obama’s way. Strolling toward the dining area last night at the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Spring Ball, he told us that it was the military and intelligence agencies that deserved all the credit, while “all that Obama did was say ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ we’re going to take him out or not. I don’t think he contributed much at all.” He continued:
“He just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is. He was one of the worst terrorists organizing attacks on the United States. I mean, no president in his right mind would not approve that decision to go eliminate him. So he’s getting a lot of recognition and his polls have jumped up, but his decision was the easiest of them all. The real hard work was done by the intelligence and the SEALs.”
So it’s probably safe to say that Koch hasn’t contributed to the boost in Obama’s poll numbers since bin Laden was killed? Obama is “a hardcore socialist,” Koch told us, “and he’s marvelous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He’s scary to me.”
.
Well, if a report says a highly placed source says it, it must be true.
Personally I think we should choose our leaders based on their success in killing their enemies, of course we need proof. I say we start collecting trophy heads. Or they could capture them and use them as public sacrifices to the Sun God.
Of course if “Credit” our former President means “prosecution for war crimes.” I’d be more than willing to let him claim his fair share.
SL,
re: More light needs to be shed on these facts in order to destroy any notion that McFlightsuit deserves credit for anything other than being the lousy president he was …
Yes, to “more light”… It’s pretty damn dark where I’m sitting.
Mr. Bush is evidently back on the sauce. Alcohol destroys the memory, dontcha know…
anon nurse,
There are so many points in the article that are being purposely eliminated in the narrative of McFlightsuit garnering any credit. I think it was Mark Halpern who said on “Morning Joe” that this will, historically, reflect well on McFlightsuit … with that in mind …
More light needs to be shed on these facts in order to destroy any notion that McFlightsuit deserves credit for anything other than being the lousy president he was …
Stamford Liberal,
Well worth the read… Thanks.
Moar,
you are correct.
Dismantling the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in 2006 ought to be all the cause anyone would need to deny Bush any credit for anything related to the discovery or execution of this mass murderer.
rafflaw,
“Come on now. Don’t bring facts into this discussion about the the Bush Administration’s inability to capture or kill OBL! :)”
My bad … momentary lapse of reason … 🙂
Stamford,
Come on now. Don’t bring facts into this discussion about the the Bush Administration’s inability to capture or kill OBL! 🙂
US Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave Bin Laden a Free Pass
Wednesday 4 May 2011
by: Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service
Washington – When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid- October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden’s terrorist career for the next nine years.
The al Qaeda leader was able to escape into Pakistan a few weeks later, because the Bush administration had no military plan to capture him.
The last Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, offered at a secret meeting in Islamabad Oct. 15, 2001 to put bin Laden in the custody of theOrganization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to be tried for the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States,Muttawakil told IPS in an interview in Kabul last year.
The OIC is a moderate, Saudi-based organisation representing all Islamic countries. A trial of bin Laden by judges from OIC member countries might have dealt a more serious blow to al Qaeda’s Islamic credentials than anything the United States would have done with bin Laden.
Muttawakil also dropped a condition that the United States provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks, which had been raised in late September and reiterated by Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef on Oct. 5 – two days before the U.S. bombing of Taliban targets began.
There had been sketchy press reports at the time that the Taliban foreign minister had made a new offer in Islamabad to have bin Laden tried by one or more foreign countries. No Taliban or former Taliban official, however, had provided details of what had actually been proposed until Muttawakil’s revelation.
Muttawakil, who was detained at Bagram airbase for 18 months after the ouster of the Taliban regime and now lives in Kabul with the approval of the Hamid Karzai government, told IPS he had also offered a second alternative – a “special court” to try bin Laden that Afghanistan and two other Islamic governments would establish.
Muttawakil was believed by U.S. officials to have had the trust of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. A December 1998 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said he was “considered Omar’s closest adviser on political issues” and that he had become Omar’s “point man” on foreign affairs in 1997.
The new Taliban negotiating offer came almost immediately after the U.S. began bombing Taliban targets on Oct. 7, 2001. The fear of the bombing – and what was likely to follow – evidently spurred the Taliban leadership to be more forthcoming on bin Laden.
But Bush brusquely rejected any talks on the Taliban proposal, declaring, “They must have not heard. There’s no negotiations.”
Bush rejected the Taliban offer despite the fact that U.S. intelligence had picked up reports in the previous months of deep divisions within the Taliban regime over bin Laden. It was because of those reports that Bush had authorised secret meetings by a CIA officer with a high-ranking Taliban official in late September.
Former CIA director George Tenet recalled in his memoirs that the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Robert Grenier, met with Mullah Osmani, the second ranking Taliban official, in Baluchistan province of Pakistan.
But Grenier was only authorised to offer Osmani three options: turning bin Laden over to the United States; letting the Americans find him on their own; or a third option, as Tenet described it, to “administer justice themselves, in a way that clearly took him off the table”.
Osmani rejected those three options, as well as a subsequent proposal by Grenier on Oct. 2 that he oust Mullah Omar from power and publicly announce on the radio that bin Laden would be handed over to the United States immediately.
On Oct. 3, Bush publicly ruled out negotiations with the Taliban. They had to “turn over the al Qaeda organisation living in Afghanistan and must destroy the terrorist camps,” he said, adding “There are no negotiations.”
Milton Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan during the Mujahideen war against the Soviets, observed to the Washington Post two weeks after Bush had rejected Muttawakil’s new offer that the Taliban needed a face-saving way of resolving the issue consistent with its Islamic values.
“We never heard what they were trying to say,” Bearden said.
The Bush refusal to negotiate with the Taliban was in effect a free pass for bin Laden and his lieutenants, because the Bush administration had no plan of its own for apprehending bin Laden in Afghanistan. It did not even know what level of military effort would have been required for the United States to be able to block bin Laden’s exit routes from Afghanistan into Pakistan.
The absence of any military planning to catch bin Laden was a function of Bush’s national security team, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, which had firmly opposed any military operation in Afghanistan that would have had any possibility of catching bin Laden and his lieutenants.
Rumsfeld and the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, had dismissed CIA warnings of an al Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States in the summer of 2001, and even after 9/11 had continued to question the CIA’s conclusion that bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to allow a focus on bin Laden to interfere with their plan for a U.S. invasion of Iraq to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime.
Even after Bush decided in favour of an Afghan campaign, CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, was not directed to have a plan for bin Laden’s capture or to block his escape to Pakistan.
When the CIA received intelligence on Nov. 12, 2001 that bin Laden had left Kandahar and was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border, Franks had no assets in place to do anything about it. He asked Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, commander of Army Central Command (ARCENT), if he could provide a blocking force between al Qaeda and the Pakistani border, according to Col. David W. Lamm, who was then commander of ARCENT Kuwait.
But that was impossible, because ARCENT had neither the troops nor the strategic lift in Kuwait required to put such a force in place.
Franks then had to ask for Pakistani military help in blocking bin Laden’s exit into Pakistan, as Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting, according to the meeting transcript in Bob Woodward’s book “Bush at War”.
But Rumsfeld and other key advisers knew it would a charade, because bin Laden was a long-time ally of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, and the Pakistani military was not about to help capture him.
Franks asked President Pervez Musharraf to deploy troops along the Afghan-Pakistan border near Tora Bora, and Musharraf agreed to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India, according to U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who was present at the meeting.
But the Pakistani president said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States to carry out the redeployment. That would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region, according to Lamm.
Those were assets the U.S. military did not have in the theatre.
Osama bin Laden had been effectively guaranteed an exit to Pakistan by a Bush policy that had rejected either diplomatic or military means to do anything about him.
In an implicit acknowledgement that the administration had not been seriously concerned with apprehending bin Laden, Bush declared in a Mar. 13, 2002 press conference that bin Laden was “a person who’s now been marginalised”, and added, “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him…”
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
http://www.truthout.org/us-refusal-2001-taliban-offer-gave-bin-laden-free-pass/1304517217
“Obviously, this order would have been given by Bush and Clinton once Bin Laden fell into our surveillance net” Why is this obvious? Bush let Osama get away at Tora Bora, and Carter ordered a bombing in Sudan only to find that he had destroyed an aspirin factory.If this operation had failed, Obama would have been pilloried as the new Jimmy Carter.I see plenty of reasons why no president would try this, including Obama. Just because he did, why assume previous presidents would as well?
Don’t worry Mr. Bush when Wikileaks releases memo’s from that day in a few years you will be vindicated. I am positive that you pulled out your “Mission Accomplished” flight suit and personally piloted those Navy Seals into the compound. However, your victory will be short lived. In the next batch of released documents we will find out that you were piloting the chopper that had to be destroyed.
Give them all the credit they deserve in a court of law. -Jill
Bring back the rule of law and prosecute all Bush regime members who participated in, or authorized the illegal torture of detainees and then we can discuss Bush the Second’s hurt feelings, through the bars of his jail cell. -rafflaw
Yes and yes.
How soon you think the charges against the team members will finally happen for the murder?
Personally, I’m glad they did what they did, but the whole story reeks of hypocracy and reflects horribly against the U.S.