There are not many sane people who can say with confidence that, had a president of America only listened to them, they could have saved $1.3 trillion and many hundreds of thousands of lives. Michael Scheuer can.
During his 22 years in the CIA – three and a half as head of a 18-man Osama bin Laden unit – he told his bosses at Langley on 10 occasions that he had a clear opportunity to kill or capture the terrorist chief. On all 10 he was told to hold his fire.
To look at Scheuer, 59, bespectacled, bearded and apparently every inch the academic and author he has become, you would not guess at his espionage past. The unit he led between 1995 and 1999 was codenamed Alec station, after his son, but it was nicknamed the “Manson family”, after the criminal Charles Manson, for the zeal with which it approached its task.
According to an AP press release and a CNN blog update it is being reported that the body of Osama Bin Laden has been dumped at sea in accordance with Islamic tradition.
A U.S. official says Osama bin Laden has been buried at sea.
After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.
The official, who spoke Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters, did not immediately say where that occurred.
Osama bin Laden’s body was buried at sea according to Islamic law because no country was willing or able to take his body for burial on land, senior Defense officials said.
“When there is no land alternative, Islamic law dictates that the body be buried within 24 hours, and that was the basis,” one official said. “
A second senior Defense official said there was no country willing or able to accept the body for burial, and U.S. forces “took pains to observe Muslim law.”
“Today’s religious rites were conducted on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in the Arabian sea. The ceremony started at 1:10am and finished at 2:10am ET,” the second official said. “Procedures for Islamic body were followed. The body was washed and placed in a white sheet. A military official read prepared remarks, which were then translated into Arabic by a native speaker. The body of Osama bin Laden was placed on a flat board, which was then tipped up, and allowed to slide into the sea.”
That report is from 2006. The FBI still has “no evidence” directly linking Bin Laden to 9/11 and that brings up the question, ” on what grounds was this operation ordered?”
Looking at the FBI webpage today I find that they have updated his profile to “deceased”, yet there is still NO mention of 9/11. (Disclaimer: this links to the FBI web-page for Bin Laden)
It is worth noting the 2010 story about the FBI using a Spanish lawmakers web-photo as a “Bin Laden 10 years later” photo. Worth noting so we remember the level of credibilty that officials have in regards to Usama Bin Laden and the war on terror in general.
The news of Bin Laden being killed is unlikely to help, or soothe these 9/11 family members:
As a preface to the “news” of Osama Bin Laden’s death I have gathered headlines carried here on Nor Cal Truth and other respected bogs over the last few years detailing the saga of Osama Bin Laden. Please review these articles and become familiar with more details of this very complex story.
Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 on videotape.
Admittedly, German experts say (rough English translation here) that the Bin Laden confession tape was mistranslated. But what do the Germans know, other than how to make beer?
Sure, an American computer expert says that a Bin Laden video released in 2007 was spliced together from earlier footage, and that:
There are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video….
Gary Faulkner, 50, is being held in Pakistan after being stopped near the border with Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, Pakistani police announced Tuesday. He was carrying a pistol, a sword, night-vision equipment and Christian religious books, said Mumtaz Ahmed, a police chief in the area.
He told police that he had been looking for bin Laden since al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and had traveled to the area several times before, Ahmed said
The suspect was arrested in the northern mountains of Chitral, once a rumoured hiding place of bin Laden, near Afghanistan’s Nuristan province, said police officer Mumtaz Ahmad Khan.
Police identified him as Gary Brooks Faulkner. He was caught armed with a pistol, a dagger and a sword, carrying night-vision goggles, a night-vision camera and religious literature on Christianity, Khan said.
In 2009, I published a little book entitled Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?1 Much evidence, I showed, suggested that Osama bin Laden had died on or about December 13, 2001. (Although this book was ignored by the US press, it received major reviews in British newspapers,2 and it even provided the basis for a BBC special.3) Pointing out that the only evidence to the contrary consists of “messages from bin Laden” in the form of audiotapes and videotapes that have appeared since 2001, I devoted one chapter to an examination of the most important of these tapes, showing that none are demonstrably authentic and that some are almost certainly fakes.
In the chapter preceding that examination, I discussed two videotapes containing purported interviews of Osama bin Laden in the fall of 2001, when the issue was whether he had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I suggested that both of these tapes, in which bin Laden allegedly admitted his responsibility, were fakes. If they were, I pointed out, this fact would increase the likelihood that all of the “Osama bin Laden tapes” appearing in the following years – when the question of whether he was still alive was added to that of his responsibility for 9/11 – were also fakes.
The clearest example, I argued, was the most famous of the so-called bin Laden confession videos. Having allegedly been found in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in late November 2001, it is sometimes called the “November 9 bin Laden video,” because this date was stamped on it, implying that this was when it was made. It is also called the “bin Laden video of December 13,” because that was the date on which it was released to the public by the Pentagon – which is perhaps significant, given the evidence that bin Laden may have died on that day. (If he had, he would have obviously, and perhaps conveniently, been unable to comment on whether the tape was authentic.) In any case, I provided several reasons for concluding that this video was almost certainly fabricated.
Update #1 – I have tried to introduce with why I see this as an important development in the story of 9/11 due to conversations with friends of mine. Though it is really late at night now for me to try to write, here it goes:
There are only a few that know what is happening behind the smoke and mirrors. The fact that not even the members of Al Qaeda expected the towers to fall might say a lot. The towers did not fall from fire, we know that. The towers did not fall from the planes, we know that too. Building 7 is only emphasis of these facts.
The CIA has detainees that are surprised at the towers collapse on 9/11.
Infact the world was surprised that the towers fell, not just Al Qaeda,
Ultimately al Qaeda was never in full control of the operation known as 9/11.
The concept of a building the size of WTC 1 or 2 being turned to pieces by a plane’s impact could not possibly be in the mind of a hijacker: It is not possible. Did the USS Cole sink? Our defense being another issue altogether, everyone knows there were plenty of warnings to intelligence agencies – so Al Qaeda never fooled anyone, really
So there they are, sitting in jail cells illegally - the dupes and the duped, unknowingly grunts of a front organization, bewildered, just as all of the world was on 9/11/01, as to how the towers fell.
Osama bin Laden had no idea the U.S. would hit al-Qaeda as hard as it has since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a former bin Laden associate tells WTOP in an exclusive interview.
“I’m 100 percent sure they had no clue about what was going to happen,” says Noman Benotman, who was head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the summer of 2000.
Benotman’s assessment is backed up by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, who was active in the fight against al-Qaeda. The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says “several captured terrorists have said publicly that al-Qaeda never expected the towers to fall. Their goal was to frighten people and impact the U.S. economy, so they really didn’t plan for the massive response the U.S. launched.”
After a hiatus of a couple of weeks, dozens of new entries have been published in the 9/11 Timeline over the last few days. The largest chunk of them covers events at the DC Air National Guard, based at Andrews Air Force Base, on the day of the attacks. Initially, officers assumed that the first crash into the WTC was an accident. However, after the second crash, Andrews learned the Secret Service wanted fighters launched. Although the Secret Service then said it didn’t on the phone, pilots started overwriting recent exercise data on their flight disks.
In a patently absurd follow-up to the made-over Osama by the Justice Department (using the face of an Italian communist), the CIA and Defense Department linked propaganda unit IntelCenter has released yet another Osama audio tape. IntelCenter was caught adding its logo and that of As-Sahab to the same layer of a purported al-Qaeda video, according to Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant. The As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication is said to be al-Qaeda’s media production house.
“Osama bin Laden’s word choice in the latest audio message attributed to him is seen as a ‘possible indicator’ of an upcoming attack by his Al-Qaeda network, a US monitoring group warned Sunday,” reports AFP.
The phrase “Peace be upon those who follow guidance,” appears at the beginning and end of messages “released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda’s enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked,” said IntelCenter.
Audio releases were Osama bin Laden’s normal vehicle for statements, with video statements having been very rare since September 11, 2001, according to IntelCenter.
In 2002, scientists in Switzerland indicated that an audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden was a fake. Researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, in Lausanne, said the message was recorded by an impostor. The CIA and Pentagon stopped using video to propagate the al-Qaeda myth after the Fat Bin Laden video and the Grecian Formula video were widely criticized and easily debunked. Recent video tapes show images of Bin Laden before he died in late 2001.
CAIRO – Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt in Detroit, in a audio message released Sunday, and vowed further attacks on the U.S.
In the short recording carried by the Al-Jazeera Arabic news channel, bin Laden addressed President Barack Obama saying the attack was a message similar to that of Sept. 11 and more attacks against the U.S. would be forthcoming.
“The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11,” he said.
On Christmas Day, Nigerian national Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight he was sitting on as it approached Detroit Metro Airport. But the bomb he was hiding in his underwear failed to explode.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula originally took credit for the attack, but by issuing this message, bin Laden seems to be indicating that he himself is ordering attacks, rather than just putting his seal of approval on events afterward.
Analysts had previously suggested that al-Qaida’s offshoots in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere were operated independently from bin Laden, who is believed to be somewhere in Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.
There was no way to confirm the voice was actually that of Bin Laden, but it resembled previous recordings attributed to him.
The US Federal Bureau of Intelligence is red-faced after being caught using a photo of a member of Spain’s parliament to create images of what the world’s most wanted terrorist might look like after years of seclusion.
Two images of what an FBI forensic artist thinks bin Laden might look like today were featured on the US Web site Rewards for Justice for several hours. However, both images were based on a photo of Spanish MP Gaspar Llamazares, who was decidedly unhappy with the move.
The FBI’s last photo of bin Laden is from 1998, according to media reports.
“I was surprised and angered because it’s the most shameless use of a real person to make up the image of a terrorist,” Llamazares said at a press conference, according to the BBC. “It’s almost like out of a comedy if it didn’t deal with matters as serious as bin Laden and citizens’ security.”
The top military commander in Afghanistan – Stanley McChrystal – says that getting Bin Laden is the key to defeating Al Qaida.
Getting Bin Laden sounds fine to me. But apparently the Bush administration couldn’t have cared less about him.
The oldest – and second-largest – French newspaper claims that CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. If true, the CIA could have nabbed him then.
On October 14, 2001, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted bombing gave the Taliban evidence of Bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11. As the Guardian writes:
Millions of Messages Sent, but Only Handful Mention Al Qaeda Leader
“Missing” White House emails retrieved from Bush administration records indicate that top Bush Justice Department officials had little interest in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar, head of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), prolonged correspondence has pursued “missing” emails between the Bush White House and Bush’s attorney general, deputy attorney general, associate attorney general, Office of Public Affairs, Office of Legal Counsel and Office of the Inspector General, in the Justice Department.
Posted by Brian 
