Osama Re-emerges

While the world has been focused on Saddam Hussein and a possible 'regime change' in Baghdad, our previous main target – Osama bin Laden – has flown back to center stage. Just look at the events of the past two weeks:

A new audiotape purporting to feature Osama's voice is broadcast on al-Jazeera TV.

Newsweek reports that CIA voice analysts confirm that the voice on the tape is indeed Osama – and that the tape was made within the past two months.

Another audiotape emerges featuring Osama's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. (This SOB was convicted 20 years ago of the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat.) This tape, too, is broadcast across the Arab/Muslim world.

A 'signed' written statement allegedly from Osama is published praising this spate of recent attacks – and promising more against "the Americans and the Jews."

Now one more piece of information: Yesterday in New York City Arnaud de Borchgrave, longtime war correspondent and editor of UPI and the Washington Times, told a fascinating story. A Pakistani warlord whom Arnaud has known since 1964 knows where Osama is. After the siege of Tora Bora last December, Osama and his chief lieutenants escaped on horseback into Pakistan, where they were picked up in SUVs and driven into Peshawar, a city of 3.5 million passionate fundamentalist Muslims who adore Osama.

Arnaud's friend, the warlord, knows all this – and where to find Osama in Karachi. In August in meetings in Washington, Arnaud personally told CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz about this. He saw both men write down the warlord's name.

As of last week – two and one half months later – not one USG official has spoken to this warlord. Not one!

The CIA has spread money around Pakistan like candy, but no one has even bothered to talk to this fellow.

Could it be because the United States government is afraid to capture Osama inside Pakistan because of the ramifications?

Pakistan's male population – all that counts in that type of backward society, apparently – is overwhelmingly pro-Osama. Eighty-three percent in a recent study believe Osama to be a "freedom-fighter and a hero."

Can you imagine what would happen to the Pakistani government if it captures Osama and turns him over to Washington – or allows the USG to seize him? It would have a major revolt on its hands, and the government – and its nuclear arsenal – might very well fall into the hands of a new fundamentalist state patterned on Iran under the ayatollahs.

And maybe that also explains the Bush pivot away from capturing or killing Osama – "we're going to hunt him down and get him dead or alive" – to the sudden focus almost exclusively on Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration needs to tell us the truth about why we've shifted priorities.

And why this mass murderer of Americans is re-emerging to kill even more – and we're not going after him.

I too have thought he was dead, but Pakistan is a very populous nation with a lot of places for him to blend in and he would also have a lot of supporters there. It's not inconceivable to me that he is alive in Pakistan.
I would rather he be alive than dead, I want him captured...then killed , public stoning in the pit at Ground Zero New York City. Or hang him from a rope like a friggin pinata and hand out aluminum baseball bats to the people of New York.

Newsweek reports that CIA voice analysts confirm that the voice on the tape is indeed Osama –

Well LeBoutillier, you Dumb A, number one..its Newsweek, number two....

they can't confirm the voice was recorded after we splattered his guts

all over the walls Tora Bora.

A sniper here and a bomb thrower there is not reason to go into panic mode. The Al Qaeda who are willing to take an active part are apparently a finite number. So, we hunt them down and deal with them one by one.

Iraq is a separate issue. There are ties between the two, such as the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, which evidently included elements of both Al Qaeda and Iraqi intel. This could suggest a larger coordination between the two (all very deniable of course, as intel operations are expected to be). But this is not the only or even primary reason to go after Saddam.

Saddam's Iraq is the mother-load of Islamic fascism and anti-American Arab nationalism. It is a thirties-style dictatorship with an aggressive foreign policy and an army the size of perhaps all of Europe's armies combined, and a secret police apparatus that would be the envy of Stalin's NKVD... except where Stalin's graveyards alternated with gulags, in Saddam's Iraq there are only graveyards.

If we have learned anything at all from the history of the 20th century, it is that you do not wait for these powers to come to full bloom before confronting them. We waited until British soldiers were running screaming into the surf to take notice of Hitler's Germany, we waited until our Pacific fleet was fifty feet under water before we started paying attention to Japan's fascists.

We spent most of the 20th century apologizing to the Soviets for the ill-fated US intervention against Lenin, when the sorry truth is that a little more muscle would have saved the lives of 20 million Russians. Stalin once said that one death is tragic, but a million was only a statistic. Apparently, we could add, 20 million merits not even a shrug.

Saddam is another one, like a shout from the past, a despot who uses mass murder as an instrument of policy. He has hundreds of thousands of deaths on his resume, and an army that is designed for conquest and intimidation. He dreams of being the next Hitler, and we are fools if we don't take him out now. The previous administrations left him in power, hoping things would come right in the end. We now have the last decade to show us that things are not going to come right while he is in Baghdad.

And why this mass murderer of Americans is re-emerging to kill even more – and we're not going after him.

"Personally, I find this inexcusable."

What in the world makes you think we're still not attacking Al Queda elements?

Just because Geraldo isn't there?

I would think our Delta Force & Special Forces are still hunting the scum.

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