Posted on 11/13/2008 7:52:48 PM PST by 82ndABNOfficer
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden is isolated from al Qaeda and spending much of his energy merely surviving, the head of the CIA said on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Seems pretty simple: after the invasion of Afganistan the roaches were run out of there and many went to NW Iraq where there was already an extensive al Queda network in place making war on the Kurds, Saddam’s enemies. Others were treated in Saddam’s hospitals including the one-legged A hole who led the terror for a while, Zaquari or something like that.
Pakistan was under the control of an ally and had nukes so keeping him in power with control over them was critical. While some of the enemy fled into NW Pakistan the area was not under government control and gave the central government difficulty. We could not act in a manner which could alienate the country against us. It is a very delicate balancing act which had to be carried out there. One false step and a nuclear war could erupt given its hostility to another nuclear power in the area.
Another reason Iraq was critical was that it had huge revenues which were being converted into trouble for us worldwide, the abu sayef group in the Philippines for example. It had cooperated for almost ten years with al Queda providing training, funds and personnel as appropriate to its ends. It was funding Palistinian terror as well. Recall the Sudanese plant bombed under Clinton for making chemical weapons was alledged by the SecDef to be a joint al Queda-Iraqi project.
Don’t forget the entire nuclear research facility secretly funder in Libya by Saddam and the tons of weapons forbidden him by the UN which were found. Libya turned over all CBN warfare programs after our invasion of Iraq. Our “Intelligence” agencies did not know a damned thing about this connection to Saddam. Caught totally blindsided in a colossal intelligence failure. One of the biggest in history in fact.
After the Afgani invasion al Queda even admitted the center of the War on Terror was Iraq.
Thanks for your service BTW.
Nah, they couldn’t find their asses with both hands. As you said “think Valerie Plame.”
Saddam and his oil! Think Afghanistan and Pakistan and all the other 'stans' in the region would not be better armed and equipped if old Saddam was still selling his oil for military wares?
isolated-—does this mean they know where he is?
First of all, thanks for your service, even if ‘advance_copy’ doesn’t understand how that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner was distorted by the lamestream media. Any moron can parrot what the America-hating leftists have been spewing about that banner, it takes someone with intelligence to think a little harder than the typical Michael Moore fan.
Moving right along now, as I see it, the decision to take out Saddam like the garbage he was, was based on the fact that Saddam had thoroughly corrupted the whole oil-for-food process at the U.N., was busy rebuilding his entire military structure, specifically his nuclear weapons program. Anyone who says he didn’t have one is either plain stupid, or they missed the fact that all of the yellowcake uranium was shipped off to our friend and ally to the North (aka Canada) to be used in their commercial nuclear power plant generating systems. Saddam had a program, we can be sure of that and just because we didn’t find a physical warhead with a radiation warning symbol on it and a smiling picture of Saddam painted on, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a nuclear weapons research effort underway.
If we had not moved on Saddam’s Iraq, we would be facing the prospect of not only Iran moving towards a nuclear weapons capability as fast as their camels can take them, we would have Saddam competing with Iran in that arena, because there is no way in Hell that Saddam would allow his old enemies in Tehran to acquire a nuke capability which could turn him into a crispy critter. And then there is that little matter of Libya’s nuclear weapons program, had we not liberated Iraq from Saddam, there would have been no incentive for Muammar Gaddafi to turn over his goodies to the U.K. and the U.S., where said goodies are now safely stored at Oak Ridge Tennessee.
The decision to go into Iraq was the right decision, but poorly executed. The L Paul Bremer approach was doomed to fail, we should have gone after that little Iraqi phatphuck Moqtada al-Sadr and waxed his ass early on and made an example of him. And when it came to the Iranian-trained insurgents and IEDs constructed in Iran, we should have been (for example) sinking one Iranian ‘patrol boat’ or naval vessel everytime one of those damn Iranian-IEDs went off (we would have run out of boats to sink pretty quick, that is true however I’m confident we could have found additional Iranian targets-of-opportunity).
And IMHO, the decision to put Saddam Hussein on trial was a total waste of time, he should have been shipped off to Gitmo and given the waterboard treatment until he was singing like a canary and/or Ethel Merman. After extracting whatever information the SOB had to give, we should have dispatched him with a single pork-dipped bullet between the eyes, ground him up in one of his infamous shredding machines, and then given out free cases of Saddam-burgers to his apologists like Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei. Eat ‘em up boys, it’s Ramadan!
But hindsight is of course always 20/20.
What I can see happening in the coming year is that another inexperienced n00b of a President will make a wrong move, possibly provoke Pakistan into an actual shooting war with U.S. forces in that region and reenergize the jihadi sentiments that are for the most part right now, damn demoralized (except for their celebrating the election of 0bama).
What Jimmy Carter did in Iran, look for 0bama to do in Pakistan and/or Afghanistan.
The pooch is about to be screwed again, with fervor.
God help us all.
So what? When “The One” takes office, he won’t hate us anymore and we can stand hand in hand with the terrorists and sing “Kum By Ya”.
Excuse me, but if the CIA knows this details, why don’t they just ask him during these apparent and intimate, one-on-one conversations how come he doesn’t surrender? If he says “no”. Then cap him. Otherwise, they need to can all of their moogly boogly psychoanalysis mumble jumble and STFU.
Couldn’t somebody just ask a direct question of Hayden during this speech, “Sir, how do you know what state he is in? Did you talk to a bodyguard, or is Curveball back in action?”
When you think CIA, think Valerie Plame. Once that rotten commie gets in office, the leftists in the CIA will get Osama for Obama. Count on it.
yeah, just like they got Osama for Clinton.
Look, if Obama gets bin laden then that’s great. we can’t be like the democrats who only hope for bad news.
ROFL!
bump
I remember that Clinton address in 1998.
If it is what I am thinking of, I saved a copy of the newspaper that day.
I saw the headline and thought “WAG THE DOG”
I showed the paper to my son and said that this was an example of a President trying to make the American public not notice his dirty laundry.
I kinda remember something else of importance going on around the same time. Maybe the Monica thing...?
This is the “planet of the apes”. We are told wrong is right and right is wrong.
Perhaps we did “get” bin laden. However, if I were king for a day, and my troops were thinly deployed but succeeding, I sure wouldn’t hand deliver the opposition a publicity opportunity for rousing the faithful to a worldwide intifadah (sp?) while my own boys and girls were in harms way. Rather, the unstated would have its own unsettling confidence debilitating effect of dispersing rather than uniting the enemy. V’s wife.
Is this the same CIA that missed the rise of Khomeini, the fall of the Soviet Union, and later, asleep at the switch for 9-11? Just asking ...
Yep. What’s sad is that Obama will get credit when Osama is killed for the second time.
Osama is greatly relieved that Obama won the election.
When someone says one thing but does another, always believe what they do: The CIA disbanded their Bin Laden unit (Alec Station) in 2005. If they truly believed he was still alive, they wouldn't have decided that those resources were better used elsewhere.
Secondly, I've yet to see a tape that is in any way convincing. A 12 minute freeze up? Why not just re-shoot the tape if it wasn't impossible?
Why not have a tape of OBL holding up a copy of yesterday's Hyderabad Times saying "I'd like to congratulate the Pittsburgh Penguins on their 5-4 shoot out victory over the Philadelphia Flyers. We may or may not be about to unleash a wave of suicide bombings in U.S. shopping malls during the Christmas shopping season."
So long as you don't have absolute proof that he's dead, it makes sense to continue to function (at least publicly) as if he's still alive, but I believe they pretty well know he's dead.
Owl_Eagle
“When the stock market crashed,
Franklin Roosevelt got on the television
and didn’t just talk about
the princes of greed, he said,
‘Look, here’s what happened.’"
-Slow Joe Biden
C'mon, all they need is more money and more people.
“I’ll cover your travel expenses if you drive over there and whack his sorry ass.”
No. He is doing the jobs that ordinary American leftists won’t do.
Saddam Hussein tried to kill daddy Bush, which if the plot had been successful, would have killed Laura Bush too. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
Good military strategy is to go after the low hanging fruit first, and that would have been Afghanistan. I remember an Army general said that the Army doesn't solve problems, it overwhelms them (another good strategy). That would have been a lot easier to do if they only had to deal with Afghanistan first.
Rumor has it that Osama and Elvis are co-owners of a Dairy Queen in Kalamazoo, Michigan and they spend their winters in West Palm Beach.
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