July 16, 2009--Make Believe You're Osama bin Laden
Offline yesterday, in response to my blog posting about how the Bush administration is not telling the truth when they continue to claim that they kept us safe for the full eight years they were in office (9/11 happened on their watch seven and a half months into their first term), one of my best and smartest friends gave me a lot a grief, saying that because the Clinton administration for five years prior to that knew about the al Qaeda threats while Bush at worst only knew about them for seven months, Clinton was therefore 87% responsible for the attack on America and Bush bore only 13% of the blame. And therefore by blog was “unfit to line [his] bird cage.”
I responded, saying that his ratio of percentages showed that math can sometimes obscure the truth, sometimes “numbers lie”—they are not always objective and absolute: what they apply to counts a lot. And no matter what Clinton failed to do—he at best carried out some “pinprick” attacks on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden--Bush and Cheney and his daughter Liz are simply not telling anything resembling the whole truth.
I went on in my blog to claim that the Cheneys right now are scrambling to sell their version of revisionist history because Cheney has recently been exposed in the act of perhaps committing a crime—authorizing the formation of a secret assassination squad to go after “suspected terrorists” (note the “suspected”) and ordering the CIA not to inform Congress about it, which is required by federal law.
Not so subtly, though not admitting to this directly, Dick and Liz Cheney are justifying this potential law breaking because, at the time, we were in a national crisis, we were at war against a stealthy enemy who didn’t pay by the rules, and thus in order to “keep us safe for eight years” (their direct quote) we had to do some equally stealthy, “black” things. If we had told Congress, they have been implying, noting how traditionally leaky members are, news of this assassination unit would have been published on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. Remember the Pentagon Papers.
OK, let’s grant them that. A member of Congress, undoubtedly a liberal (though conservatives who believe in the Constitution and the supremacy of law should be the first to be criticizing these practices) would have leaked the news about the hit squad to the press and it would have appeared above the fold in blaring headlines. Osama bin Laden (still at large after eight years of Bush-Cheney and almost six months of Barack Obama—I suppose my friend would thus say this is 16-times more Bush’s fault than Obama’s), OBL, it was feared by Cheney, would see this in his cave-delivered copies of the Post and Times and say, “Wow, the CIA has this new operation. I’m probably their prime target. If I don’t want to be killed by them I had better be even more careful than in the past.”
A few things—Doesn’t bin Laden already have a pretty good record of keeping himself safe even though he and everyone else knows that the U.S. government has placed a $50 million cash bounty on his head? And, if you were bin Laden wouldn’t you also know, since at least 1998 when Bill Clinton went after you with cruise missiles in Afghanistan, that the U.S. military as well as the CIA has been hunting for you? And if bin Laden hadn’t been paying attention didn’t he hear, after September 11th, the famous swaggered comment by George Bush about bringing him in “dead or alive”?
So what would be the big deal if Bush and Cheney had obeyed the law and informed Congress of this charge to the CIA? Even if it were leaked. Didn’t the Black September terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics know Israel had this kind of assignation squad, and that even with this knowledge they couldn’t protect themselves? All but one have thus far been hunted down and killed.
From this experience, knowing how the CIA for many years bungled their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, rather than foolishly, as the Bush administration did, turn the capture of bin Laden over to the Afghanis, shouldn’t they instead have hired the Israeli Mossad? In fact, if they had done so they could even have informed Congress because it would not have made a difference—though the Times would learn about it and publish the news, bin Laden would by now be dead.
Now that would be an example of keeping us safe.
I responded, saying that his ratio of percentages showed that math can sometimes obscure the truth, sometimes “numbers lie”—they are not always objective and absolute: what they apply to counts a lot. And no matter what Clinton failed to do—he at best carried out some “pinprick” attacks on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden--Bush and Cheney and his daughter Liz are simply not telling anything resembling the whole truth.
I went on in my blog to claim that the Cheneys right now are scrambling to sell their version of revisionist history because Cheney has recently been exposed in the act of perhaps committing a crime—authorizing the formation of a secret assassination squad to go after “suspected terrorists” (note the “suspected”) and ordering the CIA not to inform Congress about it, which is required by federal law.
Not so subtly, though not admitting to this directly, Dick and Liz Cheney are justifying this potential law breaking because, at the time, we were in a national crisis, we were at war against a stealthy enemy who didn’t pay by the rules, and thus in order to “keep us safe for eight years” (their direct quote) we had to do some equally stealthy, “black” things. If we had told Congress, they have been implying, noting how traditionally leaky members are, news of this assassination unit would have been published on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. Remember the Pentagon Papers.
OK, let’s grant them that. A member of Congress, undoubtedly a liberal (though conservatives who believe in the Constitution and the supremacy of law should be the first to be criticizing these practices) would have leaked the news about the hit squad to the press and it would have appeared above the fold in blaring headlines. Osama bin Laden (still at large after eight years of Bush-Cheney and almost six months of Barack Obama—I suppose my friend would thus say this is 16-times more Bush’s fault than Obama’s), OBL, it was feared by Cheney, would see this in his cave-delivered copies of the Post and Times and say, “Wow, the CIA has this new operation. I’m probably their prime target. If I don’t want to be killed by them I had better be even more careful than in the past.”
A few things—Doesn’t bin Laden already have a pretty good record of keeping himself safe even though he and everyone else knows that the U.S. government has placed a $50 million cash bounty on his head? And, if you were bin Laden wouldn’t you also know, since at least 1998 when Bill Clinton went after you with cruise missiles in Afghanistan, that the U.S. military as well as the CIA has been hunting for you? And if bin Laden hadn’t been paying attention didn’t he hear, after September 11th, the famous swaggered comment by George Bush about bringing him in “dead or alive”?
So what would be the big deal if Bush and Cheney had obeyed the law and informed Congress of this charge to the CIA? Even if it were leaked. Didn’t the Black September terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics know Israel had this kind of assignation squad, and that even with this knowledge they couldn’t protect themselves? All but one have thus far been hunted down and killed.
From this experience, knowing how the CIA for many years bungled their attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, rather than foolishly, as the Bush administration did, turn the capture of bin Laden over to the Afghanis, shouldn’t they instead have hired the Israeli Mossad? In fact, if they had done so they could even have informed Congress because it would not have made a difference—though the Times would learn about it and publish the news, bin Laden would by now be dead.
Now that would be an example of keeping us safe.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:37 AM
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