Osama bin Laden (AP file photo)
Do you think that there are any partisan motivations in the report?JThe Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
3 Comments
Ed Nickow said:
Sure, the timing of the report is political. This shouldn't be surprising. Do you think it would be difficult to find similar cases where political considerations drove events and even policy during the Bush years?
But there are no partisan motivations in the substance of the report. What most people who read your blog post will not know is that this is old news. The reason that Kerry has "long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies" is because the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies.
CNN and USA Today reported on this in March, 2005:
"A document from the U.S. military appears to contradict the Pentagon's previous statements that it does not know whether al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden escaped U.S. forces at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. The legal document, which summarizes evidence against a terror suspect in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, states the prisoner "assisted in the escape of Usama Bin Laden from Tora Bora."
Sources:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/03/24/pentagon.binladen/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-03-22-bin-laden-report_x.htm
The San Francisco Chronicle told a simliar story more than two years earlier, in January, 2003:
"With U.S. forces closing in on him, Osama bin Laden deceived U.S. spy technology and vanished into the mountains that led to Pakistan in late 2001, according to senior Moroccan officials. A Moroccan who was one of bin Laden's longtime bodyguards took possession of the al Qaeda leader's satellite phone on the assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position, said the officials, who have interviewed the bodyguard, Abdallah Tabarak."
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2003/01/21/MN149833.DTL
Dennis Byrne said:
Of course, it's old news. I never said that it wasn't. The point is that even though it's old news, Kerry made sure that it was news and the mainstream media gladly obliged by giving it more coverage than it deserved.
Ed Nickow said:
There seemed to be an implication in your post that the claims made in the report were not accurate because of some political motivation. Sorry if I inferred something you didn't intend.
Still, I'm not surprised that the mainstream media gave it more coverage than some might think it deserved. After all, they did the same thing with the birthers, death panels, swift boaters, and those claiming that Obama was a Muslim (among other partisan hackery).
A big difference, however, is that in the other cases I listed the media was giving publicity to lies. In the case of the Senate report, the underlying claims are accurate even if the timing was political.
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