WASHINGTON – “Who knows?” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrugged last week when asked whether Osama bin Laden was still calling the shots at al-Qaida.
The man who’s prosecuting the war on terrorism doesn’t have a clue about the potency of the leader of the terrorist organization that massacred, in one fell swoop, 3,000 people in America, demolished two of its most important buildings, and blew a hole in its military headquarters – the very place where Rumsfeld works.
Nope, he seemed to say, haven’t got the foggiest notion if bin Laden ordered the well-coordinated, multiple suicide hits on American-occupied housing compounds in Saudi Arabia, and couldn’t much care. Any questions about Iraq?
Rumsfeld’s nonchalance is an insult to the families of 9-11 victims.
Bin Laden is coming after us again, and Bush administration officials are pretending he’s not a big threat, that he’s lost his “command-and-control” center, as if he’s a general with a regular army. They won’t even publicly acknowledge he’s alive. Some are still pretending he might be dead, even though he still tops the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists and his recent tape-recorded warnings have been authenticated by the CIA.
It took the administration eight days after the devastating Riyadh bombings, which killed eight Americans, to raise the terrorist threat level to high. And only after Democrats squawked: “Where is Osama bin Laden?”
Bush reacted to the bombings by trotting out his tired old line about “hunting the killers down one by one, and bringing them to justice” (without mentioning bin Laden by name) – the same hollow rhetoric he used after several Americans were slaughtered by al-Qaida in last October’s Bali blasts.
He griped once again about the “hatred” and “disregard for innocent life” that consumes al-Qaida. State Secretary Colin Powell scolded the “cowardly individuals who sneak during the night and kill innocent civilians,” including women and small children.
Yeah, yeah, we all know how evil bin Laden and his henchmen, notably Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, are. What we don’t know is what this administration is doing – specifically – to decapitate them from the body of suicidal nuts they obviously continue to inspire.
We heard for a year how the administration planned to topple Saddam Hussein. We’ve heard no such plans for taking out bin Laden – the real threat. The American people, who are still in his crosshairs, deserve to hear a concrete plan of action from their commander in chief. Prime time, live, tonight.
Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora, Afghanistan, on Dec. 9, 2001, finding new refuge in Pakistan. Everybody in U.S. intelligence knows that.
Yet our commander in chief has spent the past 18 months dodging the failure, rather than owning up to it. He could have gone on television and told the American people that the original plan in Afghanistan didn’t work (for whatever reason), and that he would have to call an audible to finish off al-Qaida. Most Americans would have said: “Thanks for being straight with us, Mr. President, and thanks for staying on task.”
Instead, he took a sharp left turn into Baghdad to distract us from that failure. With the help of shameless courtiers in the media, he turned Saddam into the 9-11 bete noire, while studiously avoiding any mention of bin Laden. (Remember when Bush said he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive”?)
A real leader would have said, “OK, we didn’t get the top bad guy in Afghanistan (when we had a rare bead on him), but we’ll find him in Pakistan, and we’ll use our troops to hunt him down.”
Oops, can’t do that. Why? Because Bush struck a deal with Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf to bar our Army from searching for, and destroying, al-Qaida camps in the tribal areas of Northern Pakistan where bin Laden is hiding. We’ve entrusted that job to the Pakistani military, which reveres bin Laden for training and funding its Kashmiri fighters.
Bush officials have also studiously avoided naming putative ally Pakistan as bin Laden’s new host. Rumsfeld last week tried to suggest he’s in Iran, another member of the so-called axis of evil conjured up by political operatives in the White House one month after bin Laden escaped.
Yet almost every key al-Qaida figure in U.S. custody has been captured in Pakistan. More than half are still at large, worst of all bin Laden, al-Qaida’s ethos and inspiration.
“As long as he is at large, we can never claim victory,” Bob Blitzer, former FBI counterintelligence veteran, recently told me. “He was and is the leader of thousands of terrorists bent on the destruction of the West.”
We ignore him at our peril.
Yet that’s what we’re doing. All because of politics.
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