Clearing the Air (an occasional posting)

The following passage is excerpted from Richard Behan's article, Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach! in Information Clearing House

THE WARS ARE NOT ABOUT TERRORISM

The Bush Administration's Curious Behavior

Hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush told the world the United States would take the fight directly to the terrorists and the states that harbored them. Thus the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" was born.

Less than a month later, on October 7, Mr. Bush launched a savage aerial bombardment of Afghanistan. He had the support of a shocked American citizenry and a sympathetic world, all of whom expected justice to be delivered soon to the terrorist Osama bin Laden and the harboring state embodied in the Taliban.

The incursion into Afghanistan was sold as the first action in the "War on Terror." It was a brilliantly executed charade.

Flashback to October 12, 2000, a year earlier. The USS Cole, an American Navy destroyer in the Yemeni port of Aden, has suffered heavy damage from a terrorist attack, perpetrated by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

Three weeks later officials of the Clinton Administration met with theTaliban in the Sheraton Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. To avoid a violent retaliation of furious bombing, the Taliban offered the unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden.

Before the details of the transfer were completed, however, a Supreme Court ruling gave George W. Bush the White House, and the message was passed: the actual handover of bin Laden will be deferred until the Bush Administration is sworn in.

Once in office, the new Administration asked the Taliban to delay the handover of Osama bin Laden at least until February. As winter faded into spring, and spring into summer, the Administration demurred twice more.

Then Osama bin Laden struck again, on September 11, 2001.

On September 15, Taliban officials were flown in U.S. Air Force C-130 aircraft to the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the deal was sweetened. The standing offer of surrendering Osama bin Laden was renewed, but now the Taliban would also oversee the closure of bin Laden's bases and training camps.

This time the White House simply rejected the offer out of hand. It did so again when the offer was repeated several weeks later, and days after that President Bush ordered the violence to begin.

The invasion of Afghanistan was something vastly different than a quest to apprehend a terrorist..

Sources for this section:

1. "Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand bin Laden Over," Guardian Unlimited (UK), October 14, 2001.

2. "Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Surrender bin Laden," Andrew Buncombe, The Independent (UK), October 15, 2001.

3. "Dreamers and Idiots: Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan," George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK), November 11, 2003.

4. "How Bush Was Offered bin Laden and Blew It," Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, November 1, 2004.

5. "Did Bush try to stop bin Laden in his first eight months in office?" MSNBC Countdown, September 28, 2006.