Obama next iraq move may be deadly?Stay or Leave

[prankyoudude]

 Play Video Video: Obama's White House staff starts to take shape AP  Play Video Video: Obama Reaches Out To McCain In Historic Meeting CBS 2 Chicago  AFP ? US President-elect Barack Obama (2nd R) meets with former Republican presidential candidate Arizona Senator ? In a talk to the Atlantic Council this week CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I'll take his word for it. But bin Laden's strange disappearance makes one wonder what exactly happened to him. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he appears in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden scoff at the idea he would ever dye his beard. They think the tape was manipulated from old footage, and that bin Laden is in fact dead. But then again, they would have an interest in making us believe bin Laden is dead, since it would relieve American pressure to find him by any means necessary, including going into Pakistani territory.


And what about all the other audiotapes bin Laden has put out since 9/11? Experts will tell you that off-the shelf digital editing software could manipulate old bin Laden voice recordings to make it sound as if he were discussing current events. Finally, there's the mystery why bin Laden didn't pop up during the election. You would think a narcissistic mass murderer who believes he has a place in history would find it impossible to pass up an opportunity to give his opinion at such a momentous time, at least dropping off a DVD at the al Jazeera office in Islamabad. (Read "Barack Obama on Homeland Security")


I asked a half dozen of my former CIA colleagues who have been on bin Laden's trail since 9/11. What surprised me was that none would say for certain whether he is alive or dead. Half assumed he is dead, the other half assumed he is alive. I suppose a lot of their timidity has to do with the still open wounds about the CIA's missing an event like Saddam's destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It would be so much easier to miss the death of a single man.


The important point of Hayden's Atlantic talk Thursday was that Muslims have turned against bin Laden, realizing that his campaign against the West has ended up killing more Muslims than it has Islam's enemies. Al-Qaeda may be picking up adherents in North Africa and Yemen, preparing its return, but it certainly is no longer in a position to destabilize Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country. And, although Hayden didn't say it, there is no good evidence bin Laden is capable of mounting a large-scale attack. He failed to pull off an October surprise, as many in the FBI and CIA had feared he would.


Despite all this, whether bin Laden is alive or dead is actually pretty irrelevant. Obama has no real choice but to revitalize the search for him, if only for political considerations. If al-Qaeda were to attack in the United States the first months of his term, Obama would end up for the rest of it explaining why he wasn't more vigilant.


But what if bin Laden really is dead, buried under a hundred tons of rock at Tora Bora or so weakened that he might as well be dead? Indefinitely crashing around Afghanistan and Pakistan's wild, mountainous tribal region on a ghost hunt cannot serve our interests. The longer we leave troops in Afghanistan the worse the civil war there will become. One day Obama will need to give up the hunt - declare bin Laden either dead or irrelevant. He has more important enemies to deal with, from Iran to Russia.


Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower


Why Can't We Find Bin Laden?

[jackulator]

if he's dead, good - if not, Barack will find him - probably within his 18 months in office, because unlike Bush and co., Obama actually wants to find him instead of the Bushies, who wanted to use him the way The Party used Goldstein in Orwell's 1984 - to make everyone fearful so they are easier to manipulate and control

I actually wrote an article about it back in 2002 entitled 'Bin Goldstein'


"In the latter part of 2000 I was attending college in upstate New York. To celebrate the fact that every friend I have was participating in the election (albeit one was voting for Elvis) I invited two buddies over to my dorm room to party, and listen to the election results on the radio. We picked up some vodka and Kahlua for white russians, and some pseudo-draft Guinness. It was exciting. As far as I was concerned, a lot was riding on the election. Gore didn't show much personality, but from what I'd seen of the three debates with George W - it was clear he was vastly more intelligent. The fact that W supposedly "won" two out of three of the debates speaks to the shocking level of control the old-school corporate republican world has over the media. Using words like "Nukular", "subliminably", and according to Saturday Night Live - "strategery" - it was clear that W wasn't going to show us he'd benefited in any way from his Yale education.

But Gore dropped the ball in those debates. Yes he beat him, but the victories were lackluster. If I were debating W, and had at my disposal the knowledge base, experience level, IQ and vocabulary that Gore has to work from, I would've demolished that little hick simian clod. I'd have sent him back to the Texas ranch unable to remember the Alamo, much less which office he was running for. The only explanation I can give for Gore's weak handling of W is that he probably didn't want to beat up on him intellectually and come off as a snob. As a consequence, the media was successful in painting the debates in such a way that the people on the fun side of the country's IQ bell curve slope probably believed George W had won. I looked on in exasperation as this same type of scenario played out over and over again, as supposedly impartial and objective journalists "reported" on various aspects of the election race. There was a definite slant, spin, or tone on everything that was said, and it bordered on infuriating... (Everything was slanting so far to the right that it started messing with the vertical hold on my television set.)

At around midnight during the vote counting there was a strange ripple in the universe. Looking back I know that there was a definite moment where it no longer seemed like an average presidential election. My friends and I felt things shift into the surreal, and listened in shock as bizarre events began taking place... Shortly after that we slugged down the booze, and conversed in dejection as we tried not to imagine the nightmare to come. We knew almost for certain that GW was going to be president. I said "you watch - we'll be at war within a year".

If I had qualms about the future there were several good reasons. Bush said he wanted to lower taxes. The taxes pay for programs. Some of these programs are quite good, and necessary considering how difficult the ruthless corporate sharks make it for the mild-mannered working man. When you cut taxes you're basically rearranging the financial structure in such a way that the wealthiest people are no longer forced by law to fund what they view as "communism", or if they're feeling generous - "socialism." Because most of them lack the temerity to simply announce the deletion of socialist programs from the budget, a tax-cut is the obvious alternative. The democrats (more and more resembling the slightly estranged fraternal twin of the republican party) said the tax cut would "only benefit the top one percent". The republicans said it would benefit "the American people." This difference of opinion disappears when one is reminded that when the republican party speaks of "the American people" - they are specifically referring to the wealthiest top one percent!

During the weeks following election night, I logged between 4-10 hours a day in front of the tube, carving figurines out of clay for my ceramics class, and getting angry about the way things were going with the recounts. I noticed that the republicans always seemed to have exactly the same opinion. It was as if they waited for a top party member to issue a paradigm or declare and validate one perspective, and once this was done it was expected of the rest of the underlings to either quote this back to the media verbatim, or if intelligent enough (in order to give the illusion of some intelligence and diversity within the party) - paraphrase. Given how republicans love the 'Divide and Conquer' strategy, it certainly makes sense that they would not be self-injurious enough to risk the possible aftermath of any bumbling public displays of free thought amongst their party members. After all - their absolute goal - their holy grail - their miracle of miracles was to get this genie-in-a-bottle George W elected. After this was accomplished there would be plenty of room for individual thought... Right.

The really annoying thing about Bush in my humble opinion is that he seems to be just dumb enough to be the perfect golden child for the republicans. He can likely be persuaded and manipulated into just about anything. So, whether he understands the delicate intricacies of international relationships, it matters not. If he doesn't understand something, all they have to do is give him a donut and flip on the tube, and when it's all said and done, he'll sign anything they put in front of him. So, the republican party - not Curious George, is in fact in charge. That was what we feared from the beginning - from the first day we heard he was running..

And so it was that in the late hours of 2000 there was another coup in America. Not with rifles as in 1963, but with southern solidarity and the helpful distraction of 'hanging chads'. Once the GOP had a puppet like W in the white house, they were free to cut taxes, fatten the industrial-military complex, and give all the good old boys a healthy raise. Then, at their leisure, they could decide which war would be the easiest to sell to the American people, and begin drafting various mobilization plans. The troops would then be given their orders, and soon they'd be off to haphazardly try out all the gee-whiz new destructo-toys on the populace of unsuspecting third-world nations. It was around this time that September 11th came along...

So here we are - two years after the election. Yes - I was correct. Within about a year of his presidency we were in fact at war. Some people might think it unfair of me to say this given the horror of September 11th, and the possibility that this terrorism was completely out of Bush's hands, and had nothing to do with his nor the republican party's tendency for militarizing international policy and leading the country to war. To those people I would say that given obvious collusion between major players in military/industrial complex, I'm not so sure. We as a nation should put on some big yellow latex gloves - because the contents of this can of worms could be putrid and ugly. There could be a very glaring, real reason for why and how this terrorist attack took place, and it may have more to do with certain key players than you think.

Since September 11th, teachers have been beaten up and fired for speaking their minds. Reliable sources close to the inner sanctum of the Bush horde say this administration is paranoid and aggressive. The fascists are here, ..."coming out - guns blazing!"

According to Bush - "We will all speak with one voice." My question is - is that anything like the two-minutes hate in Orwell's "1984" Mr. Bush? Also - I wonder - as our troops say goodbye to mom and pop, and Rumsfeld and co. goose-step around outside the door to the oval office - is W going to be kicking back at the Texas ranch with bin Goldstein over steaks and bourbon? Happy voting "