The Attorney General assures sullen House GOPhers that Bin Laden will never be tried in American courts.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1972706,00.html

All my finance acquaintances are worried about the burgeoning national debt. Country cannot long endure …

I worry about the burgeoning big lie. The wages of spin are death. Truth shall set you free, etc. How long, Adonai, how long with this horseshit?

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201012415287209336.html

The point of the tape — laser focus — is Palestine. I imagine it may have been a direct response to Obama’s drivel in Time Magazine last week …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/22/obama-middle-east-israel-palestinians-settlements

… where the Prez adimitted “underestimating” the intractability of the “Israeli-Palestine conflict” and expressed deep frustration — ludicrous — about Washington’s inability to infliuence the Likud leadership.

The way to influence the Israeli government, as Bush pere and Baker demonstrated when they were dealing with Netanyahu, is to threaten to turn off the money. And to mean it.

Everyone in the world knows this. Which leaves one to gauge Obama, by his recent words, as intractably naive or, more likely, disingenuous and deceitful — betrayers of the words of the Cairo speech.

Hence the Underpants Bomber. And today’s “Osama” tape. And, I fear, the escalation of the war on terror from both sides, which after all is the plan.

I imagine, in particular, that we may see a walk-in suicide bomb go off in an American city this year, which both the CIA and the folks behind the Osama tapes will claim as a blow from Al Qaeda (which itself barely exists).

This new tape is very clear. Our dissident Obama experts — those who used to handle and decode these things for Washington before Bush-Cheney axed them — will have clear material to work with and found their opinions.

I’m curious.

QUOTE
As for the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, his response to the airliner attack and Bin Laden’s videotape was to announce that with regard to intelligence reports on Bin Laden’s whereabouts, “I’ve stopped chasing them.”

Rumsfeld helpfully explained, “We do know of certain knowledge that he is either in Afghanistan or in some other country or dead. And we know of certain knowledge that we don’t know which of those happens to be the case.”

He had ‘stopped chasing’ intelligence on Bin Laden’s location? On December 27, 2001?

END QUOTE

http://www.juancole.com/2010/01/bush-rumsfeld-responses-to-shoe-bomber.html

QUOTE

“I doubt the information which you are giving is correct because I don’t think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan,” Mr. Gilani said, echoing similar comments by other Pakistani leaders in recent years who have sometimes hinted that they believe Mr. bin Laden died of renal failure some time after trekking over the 14,000-foot shoulder of the Tora Bora mountains. The Pakistani leader did not indicate where Mr. bin Laden might be if he is not in Pakistan.

Western intelligence officials concluded long ago that the senior Qaeda leaders had taken sanctuary most likely in North or South Waziristan, some 200 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/asia/04britain.html

QUOTE

[T]here are two sides to what I think is a cultural clash here in 1999.

You have on the one side essentially the United States and to a much, much smaller degree the United Kingdom, on the other side you have, call it fundamentalist Islam.

Both sides are rallied behind what I am calling the North Star, and that’s Osama bin Laden.

For the United States, he is public enemy number one.

We’ve got a $5 million reward out for his head.

We’ve blamed him for every horrible event in our history except the grassy knoll.

And now we have, with I’m not sure what evidence, linked him to all of the terrorist acts of this year … of this decade, perhaps.

That’s what he means to us. That’s why what I say he is our North Star.

On the other side, we have given fundamentalist Islam their North Star, a rallying point.

If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, then Osama bin Laden is the North Star to every fundamentalist Muslim who goes to Friday prayers and hears a mullah condemn the United States.

So, it seems there’s that common bond, the thing that brings us together is the North Star, and we’re just viewing it from different perspectives. …
UNQUOTE

Obama, shortly before his inauguration, tells CBS it’s no longer important to get Osama.

The main point of the piece seems to be to argue against the Afghan Surge.

Where’s Osama bin Laden?

He continues to seem dead.

First, on Wednesday, November 12, came a slew of insider tidibts, e.g., from former CIA mideast activist Robert Baer:

told CNN he’s talked to “a dozen CIA guys who’ve been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don’t know.”

But the same story (fair and balanced) also looks on the bright side:

QUOTE

Cooperation from Pakistan’s military has been touchy, and most experts agree finding bin Laden is not a priority for Pakistan’s troops.

[Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora Bora], says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden. Intelligence officials do not believe he is playing an operational role and so has no reason to move around or communicate.

“I think it’s important to understand that bin Laden had his chance at martyrdom. He was in the mountains of Tora Bora, he ran away. In my opinion, I think we ought to promote this,” Fury said.

He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he’s relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him. …

“I don’t think the American people will accept him surviving and us leaving. We will be the laughingstock of the world,” Fury said.

UNQUOTE

The next day, Thursday the 13th, when the laughter had died down, General Michael Hayden — former head of the NSA and now CIA director — sallied forth suddenly to talk in public at length about the War on Terror and Bin Laden — in other words, about Pakistan:

QUOTE

“He is putting a lot of energy into his own survival, a lot of energy into his own security. In fact, he appears to be largely isolated from the day-to-day operations of the organisation he nominally heads,” said Hayden, referring to the al-Qaeda network.

He suggested that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in the remote Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, where he said al-Qaeda has regrouped and bolstered its organisation.

Mr Hayden described “the sheer challenge of surveying every square mile of that inhospitable and dangerous region.”

“I can assure you, although there has been press speculation to the contrary, I can assure you that the hunt for bin Laden is very much at the top of CIA’s priority list,” he said claiming that killing or capturing bin Laden would deal a severe blow to the terror network blamed for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

“Because of his iconic stature, his death or capture clearly would have a significant impact on the confidence of his followers, both core al-Qaeda and these unaffiliated extremists … throughout the world.”

He also claimed that US pressure in Pakistan’s borderlands was succeeding in knocking al-Qaeda “off balance.

Mr Hayden said several al-Qaeda veterans had been eliminated “by violence or natural causes” in the past year but he said that the hunt for Osama bin Laden was still “at the top of CIA’s priority list.”

END QUOTE

Terence this is stupid stuff …

I’ll get my 1984 and type out some of the press clippings there. Re the fiend Goldstein. Then we’ll compare to General Haydn’s fare.

AND NOTE that Hayden’s comments may have been provoked by stories earlier in the day out of Camp Obama that Getting Osama was indeed going to be a high priority for the new regime.

CONCLUSION:

I take all this to mean, alas, that a full scale NATO invasion of the northwest territories of Pakistan — the autonomous (anarchic) Tribal Areas — is on the books for early next year, to be staged from Afghanistan, in cooperation with the ailing Islamabad government and its considerable army, the latter which will be coming up from the south.

The CNN segment signage?

The HUNT for OSAMA …

Everything is now clear.

Unless clear as mud …

QUOTE

Former CBSNEWS anchorman Walter Cronkite believes Bush adviser Karl Rove is possibly behind the new Bin Laden tape.

Cronkite made the startling comments late Friday during an interview on CNN.

Somewhat smiling, Cronkite said he is “inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”

Interviewer Larry King did not ask Cronkite to elaborate on the provocative election eve observation.

END QUOTE

1.  A new Al Qaeda video is released — starring Adam Gadahn, the silly fellow from Orange County, California for whose skin Uncle Sam has offered a cool million dollars.

He scopes out the global situation and struggle.

But where’s Osama?

2. Also note that the “Blotter” at ABC News online (linked twice above) — where this and other War on Terror stories are archived — is managed by (non) journalist Brian Ross — who perpetrated the hoax that the anthrax attacks in the U.S. in 2001 were sourced in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad.

Folded in with the Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax, Ross’s campaign helped sell the Iraq war and get it off the ground.

Ross (that is to say) is a Mossadist in deed if not name.