The Bigger Story Behind Michael Scheuer’s Wish for an Attack on America

George Washington Blog | July 3, 2009

Everyone is appropriately outraged that the former head of the CIA unit which hunted Bin Laden for almost a decade - Michael Scheur - told Glenn Beck:

The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States

But people aren’t putting this in context. In fact, many Neocons have also stated a desperate yearning for another attack on America (and see this).

But there is another story here as well.

Remember:

• The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan

• A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:
  

  “We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ….Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden.”

• French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them

In other words - as demonstrated above - the U.S. did not really try to capture Bin Laden.

And remember that the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And that a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And that the CIA may have helped most of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And that CIA agents allegedly met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already supposedly wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and when it was obvious to the intelligence services that he was supposedly planning 9/11.

Given that the government shielded top Al Qaeda members, and give that one of the top guys responsible for capturing Bin Laden now wishes OBL would attack America using weapons of mass destruction, the question must be asked whether people within the U.S. government wanted Bin Laden to attack the U.S. prior to 9/11.

This is an especially interesting question since a delay of a couple of minutes would have allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed.