The New York Times allowed its Media section to publish on October 2, 2006 an article that discussed a new book that was soon to be published by Basic Books
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/business/media/02qaeda.html?ei=5088&en=5602aa33d340e8ac&ex=1317441600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1163905306-gCWEf6Y+BT0zlgGlrZ2m0A called “Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, A Spy’s Story,” by Omar Nasiri. This first-person narrative of Mr. Nasiri’s time in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, followed by a stint as a spy for a Western intelligence service, included the bombshell information that Al Qaeda had planned to trick the US into attacking Iraq so as to have a convenient battlefield and to have a cause that would increase recruitment.
The article said that this book (with this bombshell) was to be discussed by Mr. Nasiri on the BBC’s reward winning television program “Newsnight.” We were informed in the New York Times piece that the publisher had Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama bin Laden unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, read the manuscript before publication, plus the publisher had the key facts in the book vetted by members of various European security agencies. Well, the BBC did run the interview – and not one US Media outlet discussed the bombshell thus revealed of Osama actually planning on tricking the US into an attack on Iraq (full Newsnight program that aired on BBC TWO on this topic:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/nb_wm_fs.stm?news=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=6156946&checkedBandwidth=nb&checkedMedia=asx&subtitles=hide&alreadySeen=1 and a shorter 4 minute version:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi/newsid_6150000/newsid_6155900/nb_wm_6155962.stm )
So how hard was it to trick the US into moving against Iraq? Well, it seems al-Qaeda was unable to get the Democrat Clinton to fall for the con job, but that fact, of course, only made the Bush gang, wanting to prove they were the “not-Clinton” administration, an easy dupe for Osama’s plan. It also seems that a CIA head that wanted to please the new President allowed the CIA to be played by their caught Al Qaeda members so that the US would attack a Muslim country.
So who was this Mr. Nasiri? One wonders if the informant discussed by Newsnight on October 26, “al-Libi”, provide information the CIA deemed credible enough to get them to see the value of an attack on Iraq (of course “al-Libi” was reportedly imprisoned in a coffin-dimensioned box (apparently by the CIA), taken out periodically to be torture-interrogated, and later became clinically insane, so who would take seriously any information he planted to get us into Iraq?). Or was one of the sources for the CIA the fellow Jamal al-Fadl who was presented by the CIA to the 9/11 Commission as a "senior employee" of al-Qaeda
http://us.geocities.com/libertystrikesback/afghans.html#issue , who, after embezzling $110,000 from the organization, "defected" in 1996 to a life of being in a safe-house where he provided “a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al Qaeda", selling the idea that Osama wanted weapons-grade uranium. Al-Fadl, was considered so credible by the Bush administration that he became a key witness in the US v. bin Laden trial that began in February 2001.(Some sources: 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 2, p.62
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch2.pdf; (HTML version
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch2.htm; idem, chapter 4
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch4.pdf, p.109 (HTML version
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch4.htm); Jack Cloonan interview, PBS, 13 July 2005 (edited online version)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline//////torture/interviews/cloonan.html Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Penguin, 2005 edn, pp.336, 367.)
The BBC TWO program does not discuss just how many informants were used to plant information that tried to get the US to go to war with Iraq. The program does describe the interviewed informant and now book author and TV subject as an al Qaeda operative who also worked for European security agencies during the 1990s, infiltrating al-Qaeda both in the camps of Afghanistan and in terror cells in London. I wonder if anyone in the media will read the book to find out the details.
I wonder if any Dem will point out that there is now evidence Bush was played for the fool by Osama, making the 2004 Osama tape just before the election seem like an attempt to get Osama’s boy Bush re-elected? Or that Bush and the GOP that supported him were Osama’s favored US politicians – and how unhappy Osama must feel about the Democrats taking control of the Congress?
Indeed this makes getting out of Iraq the one thing Osama does not want us to do. - Will the Dems point this out?