Posted on 12/25/2005 10:47:26 AM PST by foreshadowed at waco
WASHINGTON - Before he was captured last spring, Osama Bin Laden's top operational commander was solely focused on killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaff, the Daily News has learned.
The capture last May of Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, said a senior Pakistani official, whose information was corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials.
"Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told The News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably."
"It was clearly something they wanted to do. There's no question about that. It's the holy grail of jihad," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed.
Al-Libi organized several failed assassination attempts on Musharraf before he was nabbed, officials have said. But the plot by Al Qaeda's international operations chief to send assassins to the U.S. to kill Bush was only disclosed this week.
The officials asked for anonymity because details of the Bush plot are still highly classified. The officials added that there is little evidence the U.S. mission advanced beyond initial planning by Al-Libi in Pakistan.
Two years before Al-Libi's capture by Pakistani and CIA operatives in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier province, near where many believe Bin Laden is hiding, American officials were informed by Musharraf envoys that the top Al Qaeda thug was bent on assassinating Bush, officials said.
Officials said it was not known if Bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, personally ordered Al-Libi to hit the U.S. President.
Al-Libi replaced 9/11 attacks mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. Al-Libi's aide and successor, Abu Hamza Rabia, was killed this month in Pakistan by a missile fired from an unmanned CIA predator drone, sources said.
This won't get much play in the MSM. Can't risk having the country rally around the President.
Similarly the holy grail of the DNC is to remove George Bush from office...also qualifies as Jihad.
Oh, yeah. We're losing the terror war. We're doing nothing right. Keep telling yourself that, libs.
To know this before the fact has to be unconstittional...or something.
now you know why the libs are against the patriot act, so characters like this get through the cracks and in their twisted world makes them look good.
Yeah, they want to get their hands on a nuke or enough U235 to make a dirty bomb, but like you, I don't think they have thought through the consequences of detonating such a weapon against us.
Have we publically stated a consequence? Or do they think we will just chase after the perp.
Had they been threatened with retaliation for such an act I think we would know about it. So I think they would just chase the perps. I think it doubtful that the US would unleash a nuke against Al-Qaeda. Possible but doubtful. Nukes will likely remain in our strategic arsenal for decades but their use will strictly be as a deterrent.
The DumbDems are deeply sadden for the failure of the attempt.
This shows the extent to which Al Qaeda and other jihadist thinking is dominated by what has come to be called "fantasy ideology." This is why the jihadists favor spectacular symbolism over practical strategy in planning their assaults.
Essentially, their actions are driven by a script, they are interacting with a scenario that exists largely in their own minds. In the Al Qaeda script, the US is Satan and Bush is an arch-demon. This, in turn, is driven by the set of memes propagated by the institutional media.
Targets, like the World Trade Center, are chosen for their role in this fantasy scenario, and attacked as a means of asserting the Al Qaeda view of that role through the mass media. The target is chosen for the conclusions the action will invite from the institutional media, and such choices are driven by the jihadists' own understanding of the biases and themse of the institutional media.
One of these themes, seen in mass media coverage since the 1950s, is that the motives of heinous criminals must be understood in terms of grievance; the more heinous the crime, the greater the resentment and oppression that motivates it. In this way, the media culture itself is fully complicit in terrorism, for it has created a cultural environment in which a terrorist or other power-seeker can legitimize any grievance, claimed or real, simply by committing a spectacular and cruel enough act on behalf of that grievance.
This country is full of media brainwashed soccer-moms and SNAGs (sensitive new age guys) who shake their heads at every terrorist outrage and ask piously, "What would drive people to do such awful things? It can only be something that all would agree is truly horrible. We must change whatever it is that oppresses them." It is a built-in mechanism for blaming the victim, and the driving force of the current war. The media are the enemy.
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