Osama Bin Laden and the Leak That Wasn't

When I heard him say that I thought, damn, that happened when Clinton was president.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005121901545.html?nav=rss_print/asection

In his news conference yesterday, President Bush twice pointed to the same example to express his concern about the danger of newspaper leaks -- Osama bin Laden's phone.
"The fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak," the president said. "And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated."

(snip)
The White House says the president was referring to a profile of the al Qaeda leader that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998. In the 21st paragraph, the article stated: "He keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and has given occasional interviews to international news organizations."

only a few dozen to go.

and nobody said boo, but when the NYTimes outs the BushCo regime, it's high melodrama? Sorry, don't buy it.

I think it was the governmant that talked about distinctly hearing him. (Pentagon briefings) They even arrested his chaffeur who took the satelitie phone in the opposite direction from Bin Laden. (Kerry even spoke of the missed opportunities of not getting Bin Laden at Tora Bora - in 2003 when the Bush administration both said he was surrounded and didn't have US troops surround Tora Bora.)

....these stories were first hand accounts from troops at Tora Bora who said that they had Osama surrounded and were about to capture his whole contingent, when they were ordered to stand down.

A helicopter was sent from Pakistan to pick up Bin Laden and his upper management and take them away to safe houses in Pakistan.

This was reported here from Asian Times (I think).

IOW, The BFEE did not want Bin Laden captured. I believe there were two reasons for this. First, they did not want the longtime connection between the Bush Family and the Bin Laden Family investigated too closely. The fact that Al Qaida grew out of the Bush I supported Mujahadeen would not had sat well with the american people. They might put two and two together and come up with a conspiracy.

Second, if Osama was killed or captured he would lose the 'BoodieMan' factor and Mad George would no longer have him to scare us with. I believe, in fact that poor old Osama is no more than a ghost of his former self, having been either killed or died of natural causes by this time.

Remember Tim Ohlsen? The Bush operative who told us after 9/11 that there were time our government would lie to us. I think Old Tim wasn't just whistling Dixie then. The ALWAYS lie.

claims the 1998 "leak" in the WA Times cost the US their best chance at OBL...Seems the authors are for centralizing authority in the WH.

Strange how the exaggerated threat of Y2K and then a blow job somehow freed OBL to plan 9-11 :eyes: Who was behind promoting those 2 things to begin with? :tinfoilhat:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030101fareviewessay10229/ellen-laipson/while-america-slept-understanding-terrorism-and-counterterrorism.html

snip>

Benjamin and Simon also decry the impact that political scandals had on the last two years of the Clinton presidency and passionately denounce the media's obsession with Clinton's fall from grace. In their view, the press lost sight of the national interest and distracted the American public and government from core security concerns. The uproar over Clinton's decision to bomb the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan after the East African embassy bombings was a case in point. Critics questioned whether the plant had a military purpose and accused Clinton of using foreign policy to distract attention from his domestic problems. For Benjamin and Simon, the target choice was completely defensible, even in hindsight. They make a strong case that Salah Idris, al Shifa's owner, had ties to al Qaeda and that his plant was involved in the production of suspicious chemicals. But they have trouble accepting that the president's credibility was not strong enough to withstand the intense press scrutiny that would naturally follow such a high-profile, high-risk operation. One can agree about the excesses of some parts of the media, but the "blame game" that the authors play is more than a bit lopsided.

A few other instances of myopia slip into this first-person account. For example, Benjamin and Simon recount with some drama the millennium weekend, describing multiple threat warnings and the immense stress of trying to monitor and prevent any terrorist attack against the United States at home or abroad. But many of their colleagues were holed up in special 24-hour command posts monitoring not terrorism but the year 2000 computer rollover. For these officials, the burning question was not whether radical Islamists would strike but whether the world's computer systems would crash and lead to global confusion. Although the authors are obviously right to emphasize the importance of terrorism, it is worth remembering that the U.S. government must contend with a whole range of national security concerns.

snip>

Benjamin and Simon's description of American counterterrorism efforts during the 1990s raises important questions about preventing future attacks. Can the big bureaucratic machine of government, with its intentional diffusion of power and multiple interests, work as one unit in fighting terrorism? Will officials in intelligence, law enforcement, and policymaking figure out how to overcome the competitive instincts and security concerns that interfere with effective information sharing? Will they find ways to gather more information more quickly about terrorists, without compromising America's fundamental civil liberties and freedoms?

Benjamin and Simon cannot answer all these questions, but they shed some useful light on what it is like on the inside, how well-informed and well-intentioned people sometimes focused on the wrong things, and how small failures of leadership can allow the bureaucracy to muddle along in its inertia. Their account makes one very wary of the real impact of the new Department of Homeland Security in rectifying the problems of the past. For every bureaucratic logjam it fixes, it will likely create new ones. The authors, moreover, would like to centralize authority in the White House, so that all departments and agencies are accountable to the president and his team. Yet decades of history suggest that the American system of governance always veers away from excessively accumulating power in any one institution. Should terrorism push the United States to revise its core belief in checks and balances?

more...

Amazing their projection of what 'centralized authority' should be is entirely based on government propaganda...

The al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan bombing wasn't defensible.

-No chemical weapons what's so ever. (sound familiar?)

-The owner, Salah Idris, was never on a terror list, even though his assets in the US were seized, the US courts released them nonetheless less than a year later.

-The factory was inspected by the UN as it was on the approved list of suppliers to Iraq--it just shipped animal vaccine to be used on a suspicious outbreak.

But that is past history and simply becomes part of a long series of 'terrorist' bombings the US has done in the ME that went to fuel the terrorists rage. (thx Mr. Clinton--we will never forget no matter how many times you pretend to be different at international photo-ops)

But the strange part is the not the whackjob book, but the Foreign Affair review:

Yet decades of history suggest that the American system of governance always veers away from excessively accumulating power in any one institution. Should terrorism push the United States to revise its core belief in checks and balances?

Oh really...any first year student could easily argue that one of the hallmarks of US governing institutions over, particularly the military and the Presidency, is the accumulation of power at the expense of other institutions.