George Bush's Dirty Little Secret

While ABC/Disney gives George Bush a free pass on the hunt of Osama Bin Laden, the real facts continue to emerge. Before 9/11, George Bush ignored all warnings that Bin Laden was planning a massive attack on US soil. He blew off a briefing with that very title and stayed on vacation in Crawford, Texas.

After the 9/11 attacks, Bush did something. He went after Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda organization and its Taliban enablers in Afghanistan. But, within weeks of tossing the Taliban out of power and, with the net closing around Bin Laden, Bush, encouraged by his neocon advisors turned his eyes from Bin Laden and his terrorist network and began planning to become an historic war president.

Bush abandoned the hunt for justice and pursued the hunt for political glory and geopolitical dominance of the Middle East, per the plan developed by the neocon cabal at the Project for the New America Century. Bush moved quickly from the idea of protecting America to the idea of projecting American power into the very region of the world where that projection of American power and influence would be most likely to validate Bin Laden's arguments about America and the Western/Modern world.

Bush who vowed to get Bin Laden "dead or alive," reneged on the promise before the words had finished echoing around Ground Zero in New York. After all, if Bin Laden were captured, how strong would public sentiment be for military adventurism in the Middle East?

The Washington Post compiles the history of Bush's reluctance to find Bin Laden and his ultimate abandonment of the search.

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Six months after 9/11, Bush calls off the hunt for bin Laden.

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said he thinks bin Laden kept close to the border, not wandering far into either country. That belief is still current among military and intelligence analysts.

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Although the hunt for bin Laden has depended to a large extent on technology, until recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were in short supply, especially when the war in Iraq became a priority in 2003.

In July 2003, Vines said that U.S. forces under his command thought they were close to striking bin Laden, but had only one drone to send over three possible routes he might take. "A UAV was positioned on the route that was most likely, but he didn't go that way," Vines said. "We believed that we were within a half-hour of possibly getting him, but nothing materialized."

In 2003, Bush removes the tools and resources required to hunt down Bin Laden and Al Qaeda because he needs them to attack Iraq.

Do you think that this information will show up in the yet to be filmed ABC/Disney special, "The Path to the Next 9/11?"

I doubt it, too.