Cheat Sheet

He is dead.

G-Dammit. B. Hussein Obama let Bin Laden go again? Impeach! Impeach!

Karzai worked for Union 76 Oil Co., When I hear Oil I think Bush not Kerry!

Plant, this report is just another democratic hate Bush circle jerk.

robby, very disingenuios comment as usual, keep up the good work.

He moved to Texas melpol

I would say he's a pretzel vendor in NY City.

Osama is windsurfing with John Kerry.

The New World Order is the religion of the worldwide Green movement and the IPCC. Are you smoking?

Former President Clinton had several decent chances to either kill or capture Bin Laden in the late-90's. Funny how that wasn't mentioned in the NYT article.

If we had gotten Bin Laden then, would it have prevented 9/11? I don't think so and nor do I think it would if have changed President Bush's response to 9/11.

Is the idea that if we captured or kill Bin Laden, then al Qaeda would quit and change their ways? That's rich.

Certainly, capturing Bin laden alive might yield some useful intelligence. But, then again maybe not since he'll be read his Miranda rights and refuse to talk without his lawyer present.

Nice try. The Times has a standard for the way they handle names in stories. The first time you're mentioned, it's your full name. Every time after, they cut it down to Mr./Ms, etc.

Get over yourself.

You're spot on Jojo12.

The bin Laden family was flown out of the USA to protect them from retribution on the part of pissed off Americans (really, it was a sop to PC). However, we don't hold a person's family responsible for his criminal acts, so what would you have done? Waterboarded them?

Re not taking out OBL at Tora Bora, yes, the USA blew it. We should have put our troops around Tora Bora and sealed off the area. We didn't do so due to a reluctance to take casualties, not so we could keep the War on Terror going until Bush could whack Saddam. I do fault Bush and Rumsfeld for this. They should have listened to the troops on the ground. But to say they deliberately let OBL go is totally unsupported by the facts. After the rest of Afghanistan had fallen so easily, they were overconfident that they could crush the remnants of the Taliban with airpower and SF-supervised Afghan troops. Oops.

I have never heard a coherent explanation either.

The pass on taking out OBL at Tora Bora out of concern for causalities seems highly implausible as is the suggestion that we would have water boarded the OBL family... As Bu$h said at a press conference... he is not concerned with OBL... To me, it seems, that the administration had a demeanor that was consistent with the fact that OBL has nothing to do with 9/11.

Zevon, you laid it out there alright.

I would like to just add one thing to your insightful train of logic.
The timing of the piece suggests a propaganda-softening up
angle to help the delicate American psyche accept the troop
surge currently underway in earnest.

It does not really matter, whether or not this entity called "Osama Bin Laden" actually exists, either alive or dead, because the name has become the worldwide symbol of the
"organized terrorist".

Bin Laden is the Lex Luthor threatening 21st century civilization. Since all the civilized countries of the World are threatened, who in their right mind would question the on-going expense of paying Superman to keep us all safe?

Indeed, while we are looking upward to see if it is a bird, or a plane, the very economic structure of the World is in collapse. I tell you what, I certainly am not going to worry my pretty little head over something as abstract as "Dubai", or even consider whether or not the U.S. Federal Reserve money has somehow greased its way into that debacle.

No-siree-boy ! Not when I might catch a glimpse of the red cape flying in to the rescue.

Bravo, marvinknight.

The only flaw in your point is that its too simple and too-logical for it to gain any currency in the media (as part of the deliberate reasons in, ahem, "failing" to capture Bin Laden).

With satellite technology and all the modern military tools, why indeed could a net not be drawn around his location (when radio intercepts showed Bin Laden was still in a mountain cave later than the armed forces first reported)? Or has global-positioning become more difficult since the Italians were in Libya?

But does anyone on "This Week with George Stephanapolous" or Chris Matthews ever ask why the net couldn't be patiently drawn and encircled?

Nope. Too busy deflecting blame on Castro for Kennedy's assasination (as Sam Donaldson carried water for Cokie Roberts, on this issue, a year ago).

Gee, however did Castro manage to get a Secret Service agent to wipe off the forensic-evidence from the back-seat of the Presidential Limousine outside Parkland Hospital that day (as a famously-overlooked photograph clearly shows the agent, with a bucket of soapy-water, doing)?

But don't ask our leaders to ever share these and many other secrets with us common-plebes. That's their privilege and political-currency (kept from the rest of us to supposedly defend the nation's interests and reputation).

But, as historian Garry Wills writes in "Jefferson and the Slave Power."

"Modern Americans have become used to the argument that classified information gives the President the knowledge that mere citizens cannot challenge. But this idea was new enough to look like a monarch's claim in 1808. Pickering called it 'the doctrine of passive obedience' that Sullivan was endorsing when he said 'we are wrong, if we quarrel with our political existence.'

Adams had sent his own pamphlet off before he saw Pickering's, but he had to respond to this damaging quotation. He did so in an appendix to a new-edition to his pamphlet printed in Baltimore. He used the classic claim that he was quoted out of context and not exactly, though Adams grandson-- no admirer of Pickering-- believed Pickering in this case."

Ah, to think that the resistance to what was then a controversial "doctrine of passive obedience" was much more apparent, popular and enshrined in our national-character 200 years ago, truly sums up the passive way that we citizens have slowly allowed the "big lie's" to fester and grow (with the end of investigative-journalism most assuredly claiming the lion's share of the blame).

I'm not saying I know all these "conspiracies" to be true. But the failure to stop Hurricane Katrina from inundating New Orleans, the failure to capture Bin Laden, the "accidental" fratricide that even the most recent Pat Tillman book by Jon Karkauer doesn't investigate a step farther-- besides wondering how Gen. McChrystal could have knowingly signed off on the paperwork for Tillman's "Silver Star" for such a well-known figure-- the Ohio 2004 results, the Kennedy and King Assasinations, as well as some of more recent vintage cannot all be the way they are portrayed.

What citizens need to do is piece together all of these and ask themselves a simple question.

To wit: what are the odds that all of these are really they way they are portrayed? For if just one of them can be fairly-investigated and finally disclosed, perhaps it won't be as easy to pull them off in the future (and, concurrently, wouldn't be so precariously reputation-damaging for "credible" figures to even raise questions about them in the first-place).

But that would take accomplished and well-known figures to speak out and risk their own profit-making potential for a larger and more-patriotic cause. For no one cares what we commoners truly believe these days on comment threads like these.

One must be blog-worthy on "The Huffington Post," like Candy Spelling apparently is, to address questions about America's character and destiny these days (as she most recently posted).

Oops. Forgive me my facetiousness. At least, Richard Belzer has the cujones to raise the still never-vacated June 4th 1963 Executive Order 1110, on a recent "Real Time with Bill Maher" (albeit to much snickering when he mentioned how Kennedy signed it to strip the Federal Reserve of undue-power).

So, I guess the cause of uncovering-truth and asking uncomfortable questions, among the famous and newsworthy, isn't yet totally lost from our "national conversation."

Hell! The USA couldn't even build a fence on their own southern border, so there is no way they could do it in Afghanistan.

dun%u22C5der%u22C5head
%u2002 -noun
a dunce; blockhead; numbskull.

I was wondering if you would expalin this : "BarBar-Blackguard Obama and the Traitorcrats"

Is it humor? Just what is this?

No explanation?? Well I guess that proves you are just another garden variety simple minded racist.

Oh, leave the Zircon encrusted tweezer alone...
She is plagued by that whistlie sound every time the wind blows.

Ahh, DIAMOND. Your ignorance and hatred runneth over. Intellectual insect. Playing, of couse, "The Patriot Card." Old. Dead. Except to minds like yours. Tiny people who wouldn't know a Clitoris from a Catechism! Yup. Onward Christyun Soldiers!!

diamondgrl, that is the most ignorant post I have seen in a long time. Bush is the one who is buddy of Bin Laden family, letting them fly out of US while all flights were grounded right after 9/11. Obama wasn't even dreaming of being president at the time this went down. Bin Laden escaping is all on the Bush Administration, they had 7 years to get him, but he wasnt important anymore.

give me a break! as aldous huxley was quoted as saying, "facts do not go away because they are ignored." 9/11 under cheney et. al; tora bora under cheney et. al, ft. hood shooter stability under cheney et. al, TARP under bush/cheney, laissez faire government under bush/cheney, tax cuts for the wealthy, even if left to expire in ten years, costing this government $3.9 trillion under bush/cheney, torture under cheney et. al.

Thanks there, NEVER. Intellectual words straight from the GOP Vomitorium!

Which Clinton?