Winning The War On Terror™?
McClatchy reports the latest from the trial of Osama’s chauffeur: Guantanamo testimony: U.S. let bin Laden’s top bodyguard go
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Soon after Osama bin Laden’s driver got here in 2002, he told interrogators the identity of the al Qaeda chief’s most senior bodyguard — then a fellow prison camp detainee.
But, inexplicably, the U.S. let the bodyguard go.
…
Michael St. Ours, an agent with the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS, provided the first tidbit. He testified for the prosecution that his job as a prison camps interrogator in May 2002 was to find and focus on the bodyguards among the detainees.
And Hamdan helped identify 30 of them — 10 percent of the roughly 300 detainees then held here. They had just been transferred to Camp Delta from the crude compound called Camp X-Ray, and U.S. intelligence was still trying to unmask them.
Chief among them was Casablanca-born Abdallah Tabarak, then 47, described by St. Ours as “a hard individual,” and, thanks to Hamdan, “the head bodyguard of all the bodyguards.”
St. Ours said he was eager to speak with Tabarak. But the Moroccan was “uncooperative,” and St. Ours moved on to other intelligence jobs — and never learned afterward what became of him.
It would appear that Abdallah Tabarak was never charged with anything and shipped back to Morocco. There are basically two ways of looking at this: either Tabarak was innocent and Hamdan was simply saying whatever he thought the interrogators wanted to hear, or the US released one of the most hardened members of al Qaeda.
In either case it shows a totally screwed up process that is not producing anything worthwhile as it drags the formerly good name of the US through the slime of torture and Star Chamber tactics.
6 comments
…I heard about this little tidbit tonight on NPR. Given the charges they’ve laid on Hamdan in light of the fact that the person who was essentially his boss is walking free in Morocco, Bushco is lucky that they have this thing going down in the setting it’s in. They wouldn’t have a prayer for a conviction in a civil court setting…
Considering that Bush allowed the entire Bin Laden family to leave the USA within a fortnight of the attack, you are surprised? 😉 LOL
The Bush Cartel And the Bin Ladens have had a relationship stretching back quite a while. Bushco *NEVER* had any intention to capture Osama or any of his close friends. There is ample proof of this.
I still think and always have, that the attack on the WTC was a setup. And I don’t care what anyone else thinks, unless I see incontrovertible and verifiable proof. And I have seen none so far, just a lot of speculation, guesses, and a lack of facts.
You know very well how it works, and you know what picture you get when you put the pieces of the past 20 years together, and where the threads go. Everything Bushco have done since taking over the USA has been to cause distractions , sew confusion, and destroy any *facts* or potential evidence. There is a very good reason the Justice and Intelligence systems have been systematically corrupted by Bushco. The fact that he is a moron, is just a good cover for the players. 🙂
I don’t care if anyone believes me or not. 🙂 I know what I know! I was there on a fact-finding mission for a reason. I know how things work. More and more people are realizing that just maybe what people like myself have been saying constantly for the past 7 years, might be something they REALLY don’t want to know! LOL It isn’t just the righty wingnuts that don’t like the truth. 😉 Most people around the World prefer their illusions. I don’t have that luxury, sometimes I envy them.
Time, as always, will tell. 🙂 I’ll yet get to say “I told you so!” LOL
Hamdan’s prosecutor says that Flight 93 was shot down. But at least the WTC7 mystery has been solved.
The first thing he did when he entered the White House was to craft an executive order preventing the release of documents from the Office of the President after 12 years.
He didn’t want people looking through records from the Reagan administration that were due for release. He hired a lot of Reagan’s people, no doubt at the urging of Cheney, and they don’t want the facts out in public.
I would think that everyone who drops by here knows that the US made the Taliban and al Qaeda possible. They are our out of control lab experiments created as surrogates for the Cold War. The record of our true level of involvement is buried in White House records.
The Bin Laden family was part of that and spent their own money at the request of the US, as did other major Saudi donors.
I have to believe, given that we never seem to capture any of the main players, that the stories that those players could tell is not something the Hedgemony wants made public.
The Brits, the Germans, the Pakistanis all seem to be able to capture important people, but we get chauffeurs, barbers and travel agents, or people who are in obvious need of mental health assistance.
‘Tis a puzzlement.
I’m kind of waiting for the argument, “we can’t catch the bigger fish because the liberals have hamstrung our ability to do so.”
Or
“If you give us more power, *then* we’ll deliver”
It echoes oddly with how the Democratic controlled Senate and Congress says, “Well, give us a veto-proof majority, *then* we’ll get things done.” Not that I’m against more and better democratic representatives, but there’s an awful lot of dry powder lying around.
As long as the House leadership keeps supporting Blue Dogs, nothing is going to happen. They get a mandate and they don’t change, so what’s the point.
No matter what they get, they can’t do their jobs, but most people don’t understand that because the media and Democrats refuse to hold the Hedgemony responsible for anything.
No matter how many times McCain shows that he’s losing it, people refuse to notice. Reagan was already displaying the symptoms of Alzheimer’s when he was running for a second term, but no one would mention it.