Executive Orders

Posted by Void on 08/07/2005

t r u t h o u t – CIA Commander: We Let bin Laden Slip Away
Yes, we already knew that. It was certain as early as summer or fall 2002.

Let’s think it through: If we got bin Laden, Bush would have had no boogeyman to frighten us with. So the military let bin Laden slip off into Pakistan. He’s 6-foot-tall, a giant among Arabs, with a seriously damaged arm and possibly dragging a kidney machine. How hard could it really be to find him? Trust me, he is in a comfortable, air-conditioned apartment somewhere in Pakistan.
Pakistan – their President, Musharraf, gets a lot of mileage out of being an ally in the “War on Terror”. The Pakistani Muslim schools – madrasses – are veritable terrorist kindergartens. They teach the kids from before they can walk that giving their life to kill an infidel is the greatest gift they can give their god. How does a moderate Pakistani president remain in power in an Islamic extremist country? With lots of aid from the U.S., of course.
My thought was that Pakistan knew where bin Laden was from the time he got away from the caves in Tora Bora. I thought Bush was going to pull him out of his hat just before the election. It turned out he’d poisoned the well in Ohio so he didn’t need to.
Ohio, yeah, we knew about that too, didn’t we? Remember all the complaints the day after the election, and how quickly they went away?
But I digress… Pakistan also needs us to protect them from their enemy, India, another nuclear power. If they give us bin Laden, if a Islamic extremist government gets in power, that’s all over. We drop our friend Pakistan like a hot potato and India starts pushing on their borders again. So they keep bin Laden to themselves and dish out low-level terrorists at appropriate intervals. Everybody wins except the American people.
The military and the government have little euphemisms that they use to obfuscate the situation. You are probably familiar with the term, “extreme prejudice.” That’s a left-handed way of saying “shoot the fucker where he stands.” It’s all like that. You don’t kill the enemy, you “engage” him. Well, anytime they quote some government mouthpiece directly, you have to look at the unfamiliar word combinations and figure out what they’re really saying. It helps if you read a few books about the military. Tom Clancy novels are a relatively painless intro to spook-speak, if you skip the parts where he masterfully makes love to his wife. His stuff can be kind of technical, though. John le Carre is a good choice for non-technical people. You know, the ones with social skills.
Incidentally, in Clancy’s 1999 book, Rainbow Six Executive Orders, a Japanese terrorist flies an airliner into the Capitol building. How can the U.S. government pretend they had never considered the possibility of such an attack?
Working in the defense industry for several years is another way to get an intro to military slang. I don’t recommend it. :-)

I can’t help thinking that truthout is merely documenting it for history.

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