Why the Afghan War? And is Osama bin Laden dead or alive?
President Barack Obama appears set to approve a dramatic increase in troops in Afghanistan. The original goal of the U.S. effort there was to find and capture Osama bin Laden. Why is Washington not still seeking the man who allegedly masterminded the attack on American on Sept. 11, 2001?
In an Oct. 7, 2008, debate, candidate Obama said, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."
But Obama was already backtracking on that goal just days before his inauguration, saying "I think that we have to so weaken [bin Laden's] infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function," he said. "And I'm confident that we can keep them on the run and ensure that they cannot train terrorists to attack our homeland."
Why is the goal not still to capture bin Laden? Is it because capturing him might end the “war on terror,” a racket that continues to generate money for the military-industrial complex, even as it breeds more terrorists and makes us less safe, the longer it lasts?
Wouldn’t it be less expensive to us tax payers to capture bin Laden, rather than to keep his followers “on the run” and “pinned down”? Or was Obama signaling something when he said, “whether he is technically alive or not”?
Read the rest of my piece at Consortium News.
In an Oct. 7, 2008, debate, candidate Obama said, "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."
But Obama was already backtracking on that goal just days before his inauguration, saying "I think that we have to so weaken [bin Laden's] infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function," he said. "And I'm confident that we can keep them on the run and ensure that they cannot train terrorists to attack our homeland."
Why is the goal not still to capture bin Laden? Is it because capturing him might end the “war on terror,” a racket that continues to generate money for the military-industrial complex, even as it breeds more terrorists and makes us less safe, the longer it lasts?
Wouldn’t it be less expensive to us tax payers to capture bin Laden, rather than to keep his followers “on the run” and “pinned down”? Or was Obama signaling something when he said, “whether he is technically alive or not”?
Read the rest of my piece at Consortium News.
posted by Real History Lisa at 3:07 PM - Permanent Link -
7 Comments:
Lisa, David Ray Griffin's recent book "Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive" sets out a pretty convincing case that OBL died in December 2001. This raises a number of questions. One would be: who benefits from the repeated fake videos that have been released since OBL's death? Another would be: if the rationale for the invasion of Afghanistan was to capture OBL and destroy "al qaeda" then doesn't the admission that there are fewer than 100 AQ fighters left in Afghanistan and the death of OBL render that nugatory?
Which then raises the question as to the real reason for the US invasion and occupation.
The oil pipeline route (which just happens to mirror US troop deployment) is one. Geopolitical positioning for future attacks on Russia, china and iran is another. The CIA's traditional control of the heroin traffic is another.
Odd that Obama's speech ignored all of these.
Bin Laden may or may not be alive, but David Ray Griffin is about the last source who is trustworthy on this question. There are some good things in his 9/11 books, but also an enormous amount of nonsense claims -- most notoriously the false claim that Flight 77 supposedly didn't crash into the Pentagon. One of Griffin's books spent a long time trying to establish that the phone calls from the doomed planes on 9/11 were faked by the perpetrators, which was a brilliant way to annoy the relatives of the victims, few of whom will dare go anywhere near the so-called Truth Movement. Plus, Griffin even relies upon white supremacists as legitimate sources, so the odds that his reporting on this story are low.
The truth of whether Bin Laden is alive or not is unlikely to be established by an academic sitting in his home office in California, one would need to spend a lot of time in Pakistan and Afghanistan and possibly other places, and even then it would be very difficult to determine what was a fact and what was not.
Mark Robinowitz
http://www.oilempire.us/griffin.html
Anonymous: If you actually read Dr Griffin's work you will see that he raises questions about the alleged crash of flight 77 into the Pentagon. There are a great many unanswered questions about that topic. You would be better asking why the FBI continues to suppress the multiple video images they confiscated within minutes of the "crash".
As to the phone calls, why don't you acquaint yourself with the evidence? The FBI gave sworn evidence at the Moussaui trial. Their evidence was that most of the alleged cell phone calls never occurred, most notably the Burnett and Olsen calls. Which raises a huge number of questions which you apparently prefer to ignore by making cheap jibes about David Griffin.
As for upsetting the relatives, I suggest you have your priorities all wrong. Launching two illegal wars on a false pretext and killing and/or displacing millions more is rather more important an issue than whether some apologists for the official conspiracy theory such as yourself are upset.
All of the alleged questions about Flight 77 supposedly not hitting the Pentagon were answered a long time ago, even from the best analysts in the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The government and media are delighted to frame the story as either you believe the plane hit the Pentagon and therefore there was no conspiracy, or you believe there was a conspiracy (to let 9/11 happen) and therefore no plane hit. The third point of view - that Cheney is complicit and the plane hit the Pentagon - gets ignored in this fake debate.
There never was any evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon and tremendous evidence that it did.
The reason the Pentagon won't release the best images of the collision is reverse psychology - they are baiting the skeptics to think a falsehood that discredits them. But there's lots of photos of plane parts available, hundreds saw the plane, hundreds more cleaned up plane parts afterwards and the "no plane" claim never made sense anyway. And anyone who's been to the scene knows that there are large highways that had good views of the crash - which were filled with commuters that morning.
The "no plane" claim and similar false conspiracy theories ensured the marginalization of the 9/11 Truth Movement. They will be teaching it in disinformation classes for years to come. It was a clever hoax in the same way that giving Dan Rather altered reports about George W. Bush going AWOL was also clever and effective.
Binary thinking is illogical - pointing out the plane really did hit the Pentagon and that the Pentagon is behind the "no plane" claim is not support for the official story.
The media is delighted to focus on the "no plane" nonsense since they know it is not true. But they don't dare touch the better evidence such as the 15 countries that warned the White House that 9/11 was imminent, the overlapping wargames during 9/11, or why the plane was steered into the mostly empty, under reconstruction sector of the Pentagon instead of the National Military Command Center or Rumsfeld's office.
They did the same thing to the JFK Truth Movement -- sow confusion with disinformation to keep the best evidence harder to find. Gaeton Fonzi's book The Last Investigation and Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins talk about this phenomenon.
Mr. Griffin's books would benefit from hiring fact checkers, not trusting alleged allies baiting him with false claims, and not including white supremacists as alleged credible sources.
----
Binary thinking is a mind cancer that retards insight, and unfortunately flourishes in conspiracy culture. "The beginning of wisdom," said Terrence McKenna, "is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on." But popular conspiratology is a pathological neat freak that abhors disorder and complication, which is why it can never rise above the level of entertainment and become an agent of change and justice. It's not meant to. And so it thrives.
-- Jeff Wells, "Grassroots Wisdom" Rigorous Intuition blog, 2007-09-14
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/09/grassroots-wisdom.html
---
http://www.oilempire.us/pentagon-truth.html
9/11 truth activists point out the "no plane" is not real
http://www.oilempire.us/no-plane-timeline.html
No Planes on 9/11 timeline
Donald Rumsfeld made up this hoax on October 12, 2001
I don't know how much President Obama knows or understands about OBL and al Qaeda, but I believe it has been well demonstrated that the origins of al Qaeda lie in the CIA support provided semi-covertly to the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan in the late 70's early 80's. OBL was a leader in the Mujahadeen fight and reportedly had CIA funds funneled to him through the Pakistan intel agency, ISI.
Carter's National Security Advisor, Brzezinsky, followed by the Reagan administration, callously and arrogantly played geo-political games with the lives of the Afghan people by attempting to create a "Vietnam" debacle for the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was a direct spin-off from that despicable operation. Al Qaeda has become an essentially Muslim-world mercenary fighting force, supported by Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern big oil interests (and possibly covertly by Western oil interests, IMHO).
I look upon al Qaeda as the flip side of a coin which has on its opposite face white "Christian" caucasians working for private "security" companies, such as Blackwater.
Al Qaeda and Blackwater are opposite sides of the same mercenary coin, minted by America's CIA. Recent articles in the media, such as the NYT, support this extremely close connection between the CIA and Blackwater.
A quick search on the "internets" turned up this provocative article from the UK's Daily Mail, titled, "Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?"
My hunch is that OBL is indeed dead. Griffin is just one of several sources (some more discerning than him) to make me believe this.
The revelation of the videotape supposedly offering "proof" of OBL's connection to the 9/11 attacks, always seemed to me from the date it was aired to just be too conveniently timed with the US's military actions to be merely coincidental. It aroused my suspicions from the outset; red flags shot up saying this tape is propaganda and bogus.
Another excellent analyst of the various information sources concerning 9/11 is Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed who is the author of The War on Truth. He does not necessarily accept the information sources of Griffin, but he comes to similar conclusions looking at a larger universe of sources. He also has a blog called The Cutting Edge: http://nafeez.blogspot.com/
If you take a look at David Frost's interview of Benazir Bhutto shortly before her assassination you will see that she not only casually mentions Bin Laden's death, but also names his assassin. Frost doesn't blink an eye or address her comment in any way. Check out 2:15 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnychOXj9Tg.
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