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September
17, 2001
The Hunt for Bin
Laden Zeroes Out
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
world's most wanted man, now magnified in the US press to mythic
reach and wealth, has been the target of some hilariously inept
US missions, Patrick Cockburn reports from Moscow.
"Russians are astonished
by the US intelligence failure that allowed as many as 50 people
to plot and train for their attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon for 18 months. But the efforts of the US consulate
in Peshawar, in the northwest province of Pakistan on the Afghan
border, to trace and capture Osama bin Laden suggest an operation
of extraordinary amateurism. In a bid to find him, the consulate
last year distributed free matchboxes with a picture of Mr. bin
Laden on the front and a message in Urdu offering $500,000 for
information leading to his capture. It also promised confidentiality
and asylum in the US for anybody who supplied the information.
"The chances of the matchbox
ploy producing results was never high and may have been further
reduced by a serious misprint: the consulate had intended to
offer potential informants $5mbut the printer accidentally omitted
a zero, reducing the reward by a factor of ten.
"At the same time as the
matchboxes were distributed, shopkeepers in Peshawar were surprised
to discover that hundreds of 100-rupee notes written in the Pashto
and Dari languages were also in circulation, overprinted with
a message offering a reward for bin Laden. The US consulate denies
having distributed the notes."
Is
"Surprise" Ever Truly Surprising?
There's now plenty of evidence, some of it initially surfaced
by CounterPunch, that before the September 11 attacks, US intelligence
and security services knew something was in the offing.
A quick look at some other
notorious surprises confirms the fact that almost always there's
some foreknowledge on the part of the target nation, but the
information is shelved for a variety of reasons, some of them
malign.
Take the most famous surprise
in American history: Pearl Harbor. Even leaving possible foreknowledge
by President Roosevelt aside, it is beyond dispute now that US
Naval Intelligence was well aware of Japanese plans for an attack.
For example, the US ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, was told
by a Peruvian diplomat that an attack was imminent.
The so-called "winds intercept"
refers to a radio message from the Japanese carrier force in
the North Pacific, indicating that Japan was about to implement
its attack plan. Again, there is no question that US Naval Intelligence
intercepted this message. Added to other testimony we have CounterPunch's
own direct knowledge of a woman who, in World War Two, supervised
the US Navy's most secure and secret files in a Pentagon basement.
Among super-sensitive documents in one safe was a copy of the
Winds intercept, which she read. In the closing months of the
war the Winds intercept disappeared from the file.
Another supposed surprise to
America was China's sudden, devastating intervention in the Korean
War. In fact a top level Chinese Communist, Chou En Lai, summoned
the Indian ambassador before the attack and gave clear warning
of what the Chinese would do if America continued its drive north.
Frantic warnings were sent to General Douglas McArthur, directing
UN forces in Korea. The warnings were disregarded.
Nor was the Tet offensive,
so devastating to US morale in the Vietnam war, a surprise to
US intelligence officers, who sent both President Lyndon Johnson
and General Westmoreland briefings on the impending attacks,
only to be told to rewrite the reports, which contradicted rosy
assumptions of the weakness of the Vietnamese NVA and NLF.
A CIA analyst called Fred Fear
accurately predicted Yom Kippur war, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat's
stunning attack on Israeli forces across the Suez Canal in 1973.
Months earlier Fear noted heavy purchases of bridging equipment
by the Egyptians. From the orders, he deduced the size of the
Egyptian force and the number and whereabouts of the bridges.
He also drew a map. His report was filed and forgotten. When
the attack came on October 6, 1973, his superiors pulled his
report out of the files, tore out his map and sent it to the
White House, relabeled as "current intelligence".
The arrival of the Muslim suicide
truck driver who blew up the Marine barracks outside Beirut in
1983, killing over 200 was preceded by plenty of warnings. And
as for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, as the world
later learned, US envoy April Glaspie had earlier told Saddam
that possible border adjustments between Iraq and Kuwait were
not a concern of the United States. CP
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