Article

2010-04-27 Terror Networks

Bin Laden had 'no clue' about Sept. 11 retaliation

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Posted by ryuge 2010-04-27 09:21|| || Front Page|| [5 views ] Top

#1 "I'm 100 percent sure they had no clue about what was going to happen,"..

File under "Hold my beer, watch me do this".

Posted by Procopius2k 2010-04-27 09:46|| 2010-04-27 09:46|| Front Page Top

#2 ...al-Qaida thought the U.S. was a "paper tiger.

Not under a Texan.

Under a Ivy school liberal.... yes.

Posted by DarthVader 2010-04-27 09:56|| 2010-04-27 09:56|| Front Page Top

#3 "What happened after the 11th of September was beyond their imagination"

Huh? Where did this come from? The entire idea was to get the USA to hit back, hard. Then, the Muslim world would see that America was killing the faithful, and unite under Al Qaida's banner to form a new pan-Umma Caliphate. This new union would then proceed to acquire nuclear weapons and use them.

Posted by gromky 2010-04-27 10:00|| 2010-04-27 10:00|| Front Page Top

#4 "an" Ivy School Liberal, grammer!

Posted by 746 2010-04-27 10:09|| 2010-04-27 10:09|| Front Page Top

#5 al-Qaida thought the U.S. was a "paper tiger."

It would have been difficult to come to any other conclusion as the result of the tepid response by the Clinton administration to previous terrorist's attacks. A conclusion might be that the harder we hit them the better. A corollary: Jar the living crap out of them.

Posted by JohnQC 2010-04-27 10:47|| 2010-04-27 10:47|| Front Page Top

#6 "an" Ivy School Liberal, grammer!

Don't worry about grammar here, 746. Folks type fast and make mistakes. Usually, the folks who worry about grammar are trolls who can't find problems with the logic so they pounce on the only thing they can find. It's just a distraction and doesn't change the message.

Posted by gorb 2010-04-27 10:59|| 2010-04-27 10:59|| Front Page Top

#7 Bin Laden had 30-40 years of history to base his assumptions on. From Carter on. Bush had to be a nasty surprise.

Posted by tipover 2010-04-27 11:05|| 2010-04-27 11:05|| Front Page Top

#8 I think the headline writer is mistaken; I think that Bin Laden thought we'd strike back, but without being able to definately secure the country, and having to pay one enemy or another for the privelige of even supplying the troops there, in a distant landlocked country, it would bankrupt us.

I don't know if he's entirely correct, but we already have the American Gorbachev, and he's started up the trillion dollar deficits...

Remember, the Soviet Union more or less had Afghanistan under control when they ran out of money to fight the war.

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-04-27 11:30|| 2010-04-27 11:30|| Front Page Top

#9 Yes, Bin Laden, as the article said, thought we would strike back, but not with tens of thousands of troops.
I believe we got sucker-punched on 9/11. Fact is, that these guys mean us ill, but they aren't very smart.
It's just too bad we didn't tell the guy ourselves (I believe he's dead), so we could put his head on a pike as a warning to others.

Posted by Mizzou Mafia 2010-04-27 11:43|| 2010-04-27 11:43|| Front Page Top

#10 Like a degree in history from Yale? Have to agree with tipover, it may have been a more calculated risk than many would like to admit especially if money cheerleaders to plead their case - being called a paper tiger may have been a compliment...paper cat maybe from their perspective. Fortunately had a real Wildcat in office (that is the real tiger was not unchained for a number of reasons).

Posted by swksvolFF 2010-04-27 11:46|| 2010-04-27 11:46|| Front Page Top

#11 Remember, the Soviet Union more or less had Afghanistan under control when they ran out of money to fight the war.

Yes.

And also that we began supplying the Mahajadeen with stinger missiles and they started knocking out Rooskie helicopters and tanks.

Posted by JohnQC 2010-04-27 12:13|| 2010-04-27 12:13|| Front Page Top

#12 So terminally stupid they came to believe their own propaganda.

Quite common, that.

Posted by Bulldog 2010-04-27 12:29|| 2010-04-27 12:29|| Front Page Top

#13 "No man". "Be not man".

Maybe I'm a little obtuse here, but if the guy is using a pseudonym, how is it that he can be "openly campaigning against organizations like al-Qaida"?

Posted by lex 2010-04-27 13:45|| 2010-04-27 13:45|| Front Page Top

#14 I understood they Assassinated the leader of the Northern alliance to prevent the alliance from being effectively used agains them by the US. They certainly suspected a response and tried to blunt it prior to the attacks.

Posted by rjschwarz 2010-04-27 16:07|| 2010-04-27 16:07|| Front Page Top

#15 "I would like to believe that bin Laden was shocked and dismayed by what we did after 9/11, but I come hard up against an awful lot of evidence that that's exactly what he wanted," says Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit. Scheuer questions whether Benotman is speaking out freely. "Clearly, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is holding a hammer over his head," Scheuer says, noting some of Benotman's ex-LIFG colleagues are in prison and Benotman still has relatives in Libya.

Michael Scheuer is the guy who recommended pinprick attacks against al Qaeda, on the premise that if we hit them hard, they'll only hit back harder. If Scheuer had been the decision maker, the US would have mounted a token response to 9/11. Unfortunately for al Qaeda, Scheuer was not in charge. Scheuer's whole schtick is to say that Westerners need to repent and avoid further antagonizing jihadists, rather than retaliate against jihadist attacks. He is the definition of an intellectual, in the sense that only an intellectual could be such a retard.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2010-04-27 16:37|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com 2010-04-27 16:37|| Front Page Top

#16 in the sense that only an intellectual could be such a retard.

Indeed. Higher intelligence simply means that one gets to stupid faster. Carefully choosing the starting premises matters.

Posted by trailing wife 2010-04-27 18:37|| 2010-04-27 18:37|| Front Page Top

#17 Stop thinking of the war as being between us and a bunch of guys in caves and start thinking of it as being between us and a bunch of guys who occasionally _fund_ a bunch of guys in caves, and things don't look too good, IMHO.

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-04-27 18:45|| 2010-04-27 18:45|| Front Page Top

#18 As one whom helped OSAMA fight + defeat the Soviets in the Afghan war, I was going to post a mighty "YEAH-H-H RI-I-I-G-H-T", but methinks I'll instead go wid **** Cough **** cough ****..@

Posted by JosephMendiola 2010-04-27 19:31|| 2010-04-27 19:31|| Front Page Top

#19 *** cough *** cough ***... D **** NGED HOWEVER-YOU-PRONOUNCE-IT ICELAND VOLCANO ASH!

Posted by JosephMendiola 2010-04-27 19:33|| 2010-04-27 19:33|| Front Page Top

#20 JOE!12... idk i jus dk

o/Nittany!

Posted by Shipman 2010-04-27 19:54|| 2010-04-27 19:54|| Front Page Top

#21 Setting aside the implausibility of the tale for a while, I have long pondered a peculiar anecdote alleged to have taken place in the July before 9-11. It was originally published in Le Figaro.

Osama is believed to have long had kidney problems.

At the time he could travel pretty freely around the Middle East, and while he was at the "American Hospital" in Dubai receiving about 10 days worth of care, he was allegedly visited for a length of time by a CIA man who knew him personally.

The CIA had been in contact with him since 1979.

What was said between them is unknown, but at this point, the story usually wanders off into conspiracy theories. However, if you just take the story at face value, there may actually be some possibilities that are not entirely laughable.

The first is that he had not yet been cut off from his important family in Saudi Arabia. This alone might have been a good enough reason for a contact, the idea of cultivating someone who might eventually be influential.

If, again, if the story is true, bin Laden should go down in history as being like William the Silent, listening to someone yabber at him for an hour while saying to himself, "I know something you don't know."

http://www.emperors-clothes.com/misc/lefigaro.htm

Posted by Anonymoose 2010-04-27 20:48|| 2010-04-27 20:48|| Front Page Top

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