Posted by Jim Lindgren:
That CIA Had Plans to Kill or Capture Bin Laden Was Public Knowledge.
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_12-2009_07_18.shtml#1247588042
Today at NRO, Andrew McCarthy [1]comments on the revelation that the
CIA was plotting to kill Osama Bin Laden.
Yet the program to kill Bin Laden was public knowledge. Iraq-War
critic Michael Scheurer, who ran the Bin Laden desk at CIA, talked
widely about it. Buzz Patterson in his book [2]Dereliction of Duty
tells one particularly disturbing story. In 1998 when Bin Laden had
been located by the CIA and the US had a 2-hour window to kill him,
Sandy Berger was waiting in the Situation Room in the White House for
an OK to send a Tomahawk missile to try to kill Bin Laden. But
President Clinton was too indecisive to act.
Clinton defended his actions, saying in 2002 that during his
administration, they [3]trained to kill Obama:
Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's
got 20/20 vision - the real issue is should we have attacked the
al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan.
Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no
support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we
actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this.
We trained people.
But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack
helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat - maybe illegally
violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval.
And we would have had to do a refueling stop.
That there was extensive planning within the CIA to capture or kill
Obama was so well known that I [4]blogged about it in 2005:
The latest set of lawyers' restrictions to be alleged grew out of a
plan to capture Bin Laden. So great was the lawyers' concern for
Bin Laden's comfort that a special chair was built to hold him and
they were concerned whether the tape used to hold him would hurt
his beard. This latest nonsense was revealed by the man who for 10
years headed the CIA's desk tracking Bin Laden, Michael Scheuer,
interviewed by Nora O'Donnell on Hardball. . . .
The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.
When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the
lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden�s safety and his comfort
than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had
to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special
comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even
worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn�t
irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence
community.
Here is Andrew McCarthy's [5]views at NRO:
Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of
Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was
contemplating � not implementing, but essentially brainstorming
about � plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.
This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time � and that�s
saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about
President Bush�s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and
given President Clinton�s indignant insistence (against the weight
of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin
Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was
doing for the last eight years?
And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to
kill or capture bin Laden, why weren�t they screaming from the
rafters about such a lapse?
Certainly the existence of a CIA program to capture or kill Bin Laden
was well known since late 2001. Of course, that does not mean that
Congress was adequately briefed on that program.
References
1.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjYxMzEyMmFmYzZkOWY1Y2NiNWU3YWM3NTNkNjEwMjk=
2.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260603?ie=UTF8&tag=prodreviand0e-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0895260603
3. http://www.lotterypost.com/blogcomments.asp?i=10561
4. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_14-2005_08_20.shtml#1124584469
5.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjYxMzEyMmFmYzZkOWY1Y2NiNWU3YWM3NTNkNjEwMjk=
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