Bombshell: Newly Released CIA Documents Prove Bush Could have Killed Bin Laden; Prevented 911

Salon.com article reveals shocking facts about what the Americans knew, and failed to do.

(SALEM) - A real serious bombshell today comes from Salon.com:

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

Let’s start there. In 2000 and 2001, the CIA began using Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Afghanistan. “The idea of using UAVs originated in April 2000 as a result of a request from the NSC’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism to the CIA and the Department of Defense to come up with new ideas to go after the terrorists in Afghanistan,” a 2004 document summarizes. The Pentagon approved the plan for surveillance purposes.

And yet, simultaneously, the CIA declared that budget concerns were forcing it to move its Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit from an “offensive” to a “defensive” posture. For the CIA, that meant trying to get Afghan tribal leaders and the Northern Alliance to kill or capture bin Laden, Elias-Sanborn says. “It was forced to be less of a kinetic operation,” she says. “It had to be only for surveillance, which was not what they considered an offensive posture.”

- New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims Jordan Michael Smith Salon.com

For years, highly respected writers have stated unequivocally that they do not believe Osama bin Laden was connected to the 911 attacks, as he clearly said at the time.

Osama denied responsibility, the U.S. launched attacks in Afghanistan, and that is when this man disappeared from real existence, and then reappeared as a timely and convenient terrorist there to frighten the American public into a series of terrible wars. Credit for these years of color coded paranoia are the product of the George. W. Bush administration.

In order to believe that bin Laden was responsible, as Bush contended, you must believe that he initially said he had nothing to do with the biggest attack on America in history, thus 'giving up the big claim' and that he then turned around, and said he did do it.

It went so far, that Iraq was drug into it and now a million and a half human lives have been snuffed out over "bad intelligence" and don't believe it for a second, the Bush team knew Iraq was completely innocent in the matter. The number of Iraqi people killed, amounts to one fifth of the number of Jewish people lost during the Holocaust. Iraqi people died for a simple reason; George W. Bush wanted to be a 'war president'. Citing this is not a democrat/republican matter. I am seeing a pattern of lies in this story that begin with one political party and ends with another. It is not political, it is about truth and not having people die in a cloud of lies and rubble.

His end probably came in 2001 thanks to reactionary forces from the U.S. that invaded Afghanistan and worked with the Northern Alliance to take the Taliban out of control, something which obviously did not a have a lasting affect.

What we know about bin Laden is simple:

• As a Mujaheddin leader, he helped bring about the end of America's staunchest Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.

• Usama bin Laden was slowly dying from kidney failure prior to 2001.

• He allegedly lived in a cave and then a Pakistani house with a several million dollar price tag on his head.

• Residents of Abbottabad, Pakistan, who lived in the neighborhood for years- expressed serious doubt over his existence there.

• His image and name were used multiple times by the Bush administration to raise and adjust the (color-coded) 'terror level' in America.

That is what we know, along with the fact that bin Laden clearly and unequivocally denied having any involvement in the U.S. terrorist attacks.

In his statement from 2001, bin Laden said:

"The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons."

"I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations."

From: Bin Laden says he wasn't behind attacks - CNN

We also know that the Taliban offered to hand bin Laden over to U.S. authorities if they could simply demonstrate his complicity with 911, back when all of this began.

It didn't happen, Bush rejected the plan, he never cared about catching bin Laden and he said as much; he cared about using the man's name and image to start a new round of the crusades and with this bloody idea, Bush had great success.

From the Guardian UK 14 October 2001:

President George Bush rejected as "non-negotiable" an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban "turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over."

He added, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty". In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime -

Jalalabad military base in Afghanistan where bin Laden was located during the war against the Soviets. Salem-News.com photo by Tim King

told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country".

From: Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over - Guardian UK

I've been to Jalabad, I have seen the places bin Laden called home, and I have talked to many people in Afghanistan who can tell you all about the Taliban, a very real organized force that has been actively fighting the U.S. for a decade, but nobody in Afghanistan seems to know anything about 'al Qaeda' which is actually a name given to an operation in the 1980's to fund bin Laden and other resistance fighters in Afghanistan, who were in the process of defeating the Russian invaders.

Salon.com did the world a real service today by publishing information proving conclusively that George W. Bush had zero interest in bin Laden after former President Bill Clinton tried very hard to take him out of existence. The full truth is that Bush killed the program to hunt bin Laden when he was in our gun sights, before 911. Think about that for a moment... could killing bin Laden have been the death of the Bush/Cheney 911 attacks?

The 'bin Laden death' is a reelection move for Barack Obama, I shudder to think that he knows the truth; our forces who went to Afghanistan in 2001 were effective and allied with strong Mujahideen fighters, they killed bin Laden in cave attacks. Only after his death did the 'new bin Laden' emerge with all of the claims of having attacked the United States.

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Tim King in 2008, covering the Iraq War

Tim King: Salem-News.com Editor and Writer

Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine.

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