✚ The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings - NYTimes.com

As I've always suspected, heard from officials in the know — a must-read by Kurt Eichenwald in NYT on the Bush administration's scandalous negligence of the Bin Laden threat because it was obsessed with Saddam:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

And then people laugh when you suggest Bush should have been impeached. In fact, it's him and his senior team (Rice, Cheney, Hadley, Rumsfeld etc.) who should be held to account. It's still not too late, 11 years after the attacks.

Max Rodenbeck:

News cameras may zoom lustily into Middle Eastern crowds that vow vengeance. Pundits can cleverly parse the praise for a fallen warrior voiced by the usual Islamist hotheads. Cooler analysts will fret over the uses of assassination as a tool of policy, or over the finer points of Muslim doctrine regarding burial at sea. Yet for the most part the demise of the world’s most wanted man has been met, across the Arab and Muslim worlds, with a very untelegenic shrug of indifference.

It is not just that the denouement to this long-drawn-out western—with the UScavalry scouring Islamic badlands for fully a decade before dispatching the outlaw—lacked the visual immediacy that the Middle East’s drama-saturated audiences have come to expect. Nor is it simply that the Arab public’s preoccupations are very localized right now, what with revolutions—few of which seem connected to radical Islam—bursting out across the region.

Long before the choppers dropped into Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden himself had faded from relevance. His messages to the world had grown fewer and increasingly divorced from the concerns of ordinary Muslims. The last audiotape attributed to him, released in November, singled out France for attack because of its strictures on the veil. Earlier last year he had blamed the West for global warming. blasted Pakistan’s efforts at relief following deadly floods, and railed against cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad—five years after the images first provoked Muslim protest. Few bothered to listen to such predictable bluster. Bin Laden’s words failed to rate highly even in the jihadists’ own patch of cyberspace, which tends to he dominated by techie talk on weapons and tactics. or equally arcane exegesis of musty Islamic texts.

Read the rest at Bin Laden’s Death: Why the Arab World Shrugs by Max Rodenbeck | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

I had just woken up when I wrote the earlier post on Bin Laden's death, after a long flight from New York back to Cairo yesterday, so I just commented on the news. A few hours later — and after receiving some calls from journalists — there some other things worth pointing out with regards to Osama Bin Laden's place in the Arab political imagination.

There's no need to ignore that, for a time, Bin Laden had a superficial role to play as a symbol of resistance to American or Western imperialism. So did Saddam Hussein or Muammar al-Qadhafi or the Assads at various points. But I never thought that feeling ran very deep for the vast overwhelming majority of Arabs, or indeed Muslims. But the sentiment Bin Laden evokes today is probably indifference. Bin Laden simply wasn't an important figure in recent years, and was particularly irrelevant to the Arab uprisings.

Al Qaeda could have been important, perhaps, if it had scored some major military victories against the West, particularly after the Iraq war when anti-Western sentiment ran its highest. Indeed, Bin Laden's greatest achievement may have been to enable the neo-cons to carry out their loony agenda, which has done more than anything to discredit the US in the region. Between Iraq '03, Lebanon '06, Gaza '09, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib there were plenty of occasions in which the US (or its allies) discredited itself.

The radical-theological option that Bin Laden represented as a solution to the state of the Arab world has long been discredited. It was discredited before it even began, in that it was a result of the failure of the violent Islamist movements of the 1970s-1990s era. Also discredited, or at least on the ropes, are the pro-US "reformist" option of the "moderate" Arab regimes. Moderate, in the way Saudi Arabia or Mubarak's Egypt was, and reformist, because they are interested in changing to survive, not making a radical break. But the people spoke and they don't want reform, they want rupture.

The trends that are winning out in recent years are the radical-resistance ideologies of Hizbullah (and to a lesser degree Hamas) and the radical-centrist view that fueled the uprisings. And in the longer-run, it is the latter rather than the former that have a vision of societies that are not constantly mobilized towards an external (or internal) enemy. The views of Hamas and Hizbullah address the problems of war and occupation, but not those of these societies beyond those problems. Bin Laden never really addressed either, his fight was for the glory of the impossible and in the hereafter. 

A bittersweet moment: he deserved to die, but it took so long  to track him down, despite all of the billions spent in intelligence and high-tech defense gear, that by the time he died it seemed almost irrelevant to the wider problems of the region. Also, to think of all the time and lives wasted, and the unnecessary, criminal ventures like the war on Iraq that were justified in the name of fighting Bin Laden. But I'm a believer in revenge, and symbolically this is important for the US, and for the families of the victims of 9/11. Let's hope this might be used as an occasion to turn the page in US foreign policy. 

Several things do strike you, though. First, outside of Pakistan and the US this won't be much of a big deal — and it probably wouldn't have been either at any point in the last decade, which goes to show how the alarmism about Bin Laden being some kind of popular figure in the Muslim world was misplaced. Secondly, where's Ayman Zawahri? And thirdly, the amount of Pakistani complicity with Bin Laden really seems beyond the pale. From the NYT:

The strike could exacerbate deep tensions with Pakistan, which has periodically bristled at American counterterrorism efforts even as Bin Laden evidently found safe refuge on its territory for nearly a decade. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has ordered significantly more drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, stirring public anger there and prompting the Pakistani government to protest.

When the end came for Bin Laden, he was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army.

Mr. Obama called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to tell him about the strike after it was set in motion, and his advisers called their Pakistani counterparts. “They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations,” Mr. Obama said.

. . .

Mr. Obama said Pakistan had helped develop the intelligence that led to Bin Laden, but an American official said the Pakistani government was not informed about the strike in advance. “We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” the official said.

Mr. Obama recalled his statements in the 2008 presidential campaign when he vowed to order American forces to strike inside Pakistan if necessary even without Islamabad’s permission. “That is what we’ve done,” he said. “But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”

Relations with Pakistan had fallen in recent weeks to their lowest point in years. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly criticized the Pakistani military two weeks ago for failing to act against extremists allied to Al Qaeda who shelter in the tribal areas of North Waziristan. Last week, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, said Pakistan had broken the back of terrorism on its territory, prompting skepticism in Washington.

There was a nice edition of the short BBC World Service radio program Witness today, about Osama Bin Laden. It focuses on Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, who met him in the late 1990s.

Listen here for the next seven days. Atwan's book about al-Qaeda — The Secret History of al Qaeda —includes many of the vignettes he talks about here, and is a pretty interesting non-academic, non-CT oriented, account of Bin Laden and friends. Atwan is funnily self-deprecating as a pampered "five-star journalist" when served "soggy potatoes and rotten cheese." I wonder if the gebna qadima was al-Zawahri's contribution.