The bin Laden death mythology -- INSURGE intelligence -- Medium

But as Filkins observes:

"Before taking over the ISI, Taj was the commandant of the Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. That is, he was the senior military official in Abbottabad at the time that American officials believe bin Laden began living there. Taj retired from the Pakistani Army in April, just days before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in Pakistan were unsuccessful."

According to a 2009 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report into the Tora Bora debacle, US intelligence had confirmed bin Laden's presence among al-Qaeda fighters, during the December 2001 bombing campaign"--"a matter confirmed by the official history of the US Special Operations Command.

Yet the commander of the operation, General Tommy Franks, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other senior officials claimed falsely that "the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader's location."

Gen. Franks to this day justifies the decision on an outright lie: "I have yet to see anything that proves bin Laden or whomever was there."

In reality, the Senate report proves that White House and military officials knew bin Laden was there, and were warned repeatedly that the failure to mobilise US forces to block the wide-open routes into Pakistan would result in his escape.

Henry Crumpton, head of special operations for the CIA's counter-terrrorism division and chief of its Afghan strategy, had told the Bush administration that "we're going to lose our prey [bin Laden]" without bringing in US marines already stationed in Kandahar to block those routes.

"The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape," the Senate report noted, "was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, General Tommy Franks."

"The implications of these statements are that bin Laden was alive and was allowed to escape," said Prof. Sunil Ram of the American Military University, writing in the respected Canadian defence journal, Frontline Defence.

Just a month earlier, the Pentagon was directly complicit in secret Pakistani military airlifts into Kunduz which rescued beleaguered Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from America's elite Delta Force units on the ground. A CIA official and a Delta Force military analyst told Seymour Hersh for the New Yorker that "the Administration ordered the United States Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights."

The operation was purportedly undertaken to save Pakistani military and intelligence operatives on the ground in Kunduz, whose deaths under US bombing would jeopardise the political survival of Pakistan's then leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Yet on 21st November, in response to questions from journalists about reports of the airlifts, Rumsfeld denied the Pentagon's involvement while also inadvertently revealing his knowledge of the operation's foreseeable consequences:

"Any idea that those people should be let loose on any basis at all to leave that country and to go bring terror to other countries and destabilise other countries is unacceptable."

In other words, senior White House and Pentagon officials were complicit in ISI operations that foreseeably "let loose" Laden's Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to "go bring terror to other countries."

According to Prof. Ram, who was a senior military strategy advisor to the Saudi Royal family for over a decade:

"The Battle of Tora Bora obviously raises the question why was he [bin Laden] allowed to escape? " if US Special Forces had killed or captured him in Tora Bora in 2001, the basic justification for the Global War on Terror would have been eliminated and the subsequent (and false) claims of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq would have been meaningless."

He points out that many of the "expansionist policies" subsequently pursued by the Bush administration as outlined by the neoconservative think-tank, the Project for a New American Century, would have had little traction had al-Qaeda been routed and bin Laden killed in Tora Bora.

"The US would have been hard pressed to convince anyone of the need to invade Iraq or continue the war in Afghanistan," concludes Ram, who was previously an editor at SITREP, the defence journal of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, where he sat on the Defence Studies Committee. "Thus, logic dictates that bin Laden was allowed to escape into Pakistan in late 2001."

The Haqqani network, which appeared to have been integral to the post-9/11 ISI operation "to care for bin Laden," to quote Afghanistan's former intelligence czar, Amrullah Saleh, also remains connected to Saudi Arabia.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12  |  13  |  14  |  15  |  16  |  17  |  18  |  19  |  20  |  21  |  22  |  23

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).