Why Didn't Bush Go After Bin Laden?

There was a program that BBC aired in November of 2001 (just days before the famous incident in Tora Bora where U.S. troops had cornered Osama Bin Laden) in which news anchor Jeremy Vine produced an FBI document that revealed U.S. agents were told to "back off" from investigating the Bin Laden family. That seemed out of sorts but it became even more relevant a few days later when the Pentagon ordered American soldiers to stand down in Tora Bora eventhough they now had Osama bin Laden cornered.  Dalton Fury, the commander on the ground at Tora Bora, reveals the details of the Pentagon ordering him to 'stand down' in his book, Kill Bin Laden.  Which brings up the obvious question: Why? If you have Bin Laden cornered, literally just feet from where our troops are dug in, just weeks after 9/11, then why order our troops to stand down? 

At the time, the reasons behind the order to stand down were not known to the public at large and the Bush/Cheney gang pivoted into high gear toward a costly effort to misled the America people into supporting an invasion of oil-rich Iraq.  Bush/Cheney famously claimed that they knew that Saddam had WMDs and that they knew exactly where those WMD were, yet when WMDs never actually materialized there was only a slight grumbling of a 'bait and switch'.  For the most part America went along for the ride and soon enough the world was tuned into their mainstream media of choice as the Bush/Cheney Gang mounted a pre-emptive strike that kicked off an unethical war that was not paid for and which eventually nudged the U.S. economy spiraling into the worse recession it had seen since the 1930s.  A large reason for the faint resistance to a war that resulted in the death, displacement and injury of millions of innocent Iraqi citizens along with the death and dismemberment of thousands of U.S. troops was because Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack was still at large.  Americans were either afraid or pissed off and they wanted the government to do something about it.

But once the tanks started rolling into Iraq, the mastermind of the largest attack on US soil in history was no longer a concern for Bush/Cheney. In fact, at a press conference Bush43 famously came out and admitted that he didn't care about Bin Laden and wasnt interested in going after him. Such a comment sparked disbelief in some - especially soldiers in Iraq who had joined the military after 9/11 to fight in retaliation of bin Laden's brutal attack on innocent U.S. civilians.  It also prompted serious questions whether Bush43's loyalty was to the American people or the corporate oil industry.  Then, on top of that, reports came out about how the Bush family had deep business ties to the Bin Laden family - ties that began when Bush43 and Osama's Bin Laden's brother Salem Bin Laden founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas.  As research uncovered that a bank controlled by the Bin Laden family had bailed out one of Bush 43's failed businesses during the 1980s Bush's reasons for not going after Bin Laden came under even more scrutiny.  And then eyebrows were further raised when reports came out of the ties between the Bush Family and the Bin Laden family via The Carlyle Group, a private global equity group whose senior advisor was Bush41.  

The Bush family's connections to the Bin Laden family was interesting and certainly grist for conspiracy theorists, but to understand the real motive behind the Bush/Cheney gang ordering Dalton Fury's troops to stand down in Tora Bora you must go back to 1997 when a rightwing think tank called The Project for the New American Century produced a document outlining how America needed to be transformed. Members of this think tank included Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Several of these future members of the Bush Administration took their plans for a war in Iraq to Bill Clinton with the hopes of convincing Clinton to invade Iraq.  After presenting Clinton with a fully detailed plan, Clinton refused and the wheels were set in motion for the Cheney-led cabal to groom a candidate for the White House who would promote The Project for the New American Century's agenda.

The designs that the The Project for the New American Century had in mind are clearly laid out in a report they issued titled Building America's Defences - which states "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."  Or a 9/11 perhaps?

Again, conspiracy theorists have since jumped on Building America's Defences report to argue that 9/11 was more than just coincidence.  And in fact, Congressional investigators such as John Farmer, a Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Comission, has said this about the Bush/Cheney gang's involvement in the events of 9/11: "At some level of the governmet at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened."  While Senator Bob Graham added that "the White House was directing the cover-up".  

But the important thing to take from the Bush/Cheney cabal's Building American's Defenses report is that it makes it very clear that when 9/11 (the new Pearl Harbor they needed) actually occured, the Bush/Cheney Administration was already prepared to use such a tragedy and, in fact, was able to quickly ratchet together the machinations for exploiting 9/11 to justify public support for a build-up to a war for oil in Iraq - after all, they had been planning for nearly a decade. Combine this with the Bush Administration's blatant dishonesty, their misinformation campaigns and the military-indusrial complex agenda that they were beholden to, it would suggest that their entire reign was full of evil-minded plots that reveal their obvious intentions. 

In hindsight, you would think the American people would have been quicker to catch on, or more vocal and assertive in their opposition.  After all, Americans had been doubting the government and expecting cover ups in large numbers since the assasination of JFK and the crimes committed during Watergate.  Yet, in general, the American people reacted more like fearful citizens during the rise of Hitler's Third Riech.  There were a few in the Land of the Free however who stood up on the right side of history.  One of those few would become Bush43's replacement who was very vocal against the War in Iraq.

For more writing by Ed Wagemann click here:  ED WAGEMANN

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