Who Lost Osama Part VII

by digby

As we gird our loins for “Fantasia Redux” tonight in which the public will be throroughly brainwashed into believing that Clinton outright refused to kill bin Laden because he was too busy schtupping interns and didn’t give a damn about terrorism, it becomes more and more obvious that even after 9/11, the Bush administration didn’t take terrorism seriously.

The most galling thing about this entire episode is that aside from the ridiculous rightwing slant toward Clinton, which isn’t surprising, the wingnuts have been going on and on about how the problem was “the wall” (which they also misrepresent) and that the bureaucratic Clinton administration wouldn’t allow the various agencies to communicate. Fine. If that was a problem, everyone can agree that, in accordance with the law and the consitution, that should be fixed.

But guess what:

Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.

In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

“How did they get the intel?” he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

“Why aren’t you giving it to us?” Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, “The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous.” The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.

[…]

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. “There’s nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!” one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. “Nobody!”

But then, it’s not surprising, is it?

I certainly hope that after this “Path To Propaganda” debacle somebody decides that the real story of the Bush administration should be made. It will have to be a farce, of course. Too bad Jerry Lewis is too old to play George W. Bush. Maybe Gilbert Godfried is available.

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