Did We Let Osama Get Away on Purpose?

[mubs]

Article here comments on a NY Times report.

The New York Times reported this weekend that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew he was in Tora Bora. By contrast, we sent nearly 150,000 soldiers to get Saddam Hussein. In case you're keeping count at home, we got Saddam and we didn't get Osama. What does that tell you about this administration’s priorities? This goes beyond incompetence. If you send only 36 soldiers to get somebody in the middle of Afghanistan, it means you don’t want to get him.

It gets worse. The piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine also says there was an American commander with 4,000 marines standing by within striking distance. Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis requested permission to join the fight. He was denied.

<snip>

Your guess is as good as mine as to why they didn’t want to get the man who ordered the deaths of close to 3,000 Americans and took down the World Trade Center. A caller on our radio show posited that if we had caught Osama, then it would have been harder to justify an invasion of Iraq. At that point, it would have seemed like we got our man and the mission was accomplished. That’s the best guess I’ve heard so far.

If people inside the administration actually held back from capturing Osama bin Laden when we had him cornered, it borders on treason. This leads to the next set of questions. Who ordered Brigadier General Mattis to stand down and not send his 4,000 troops in? Who made the decision at the
Pentagon that the entire United States military should only use 36 soldiers to try to capture the world's biggest terrorist?

<snip>

 

[Mercutio]

I've strongly suspected that Osama will show up about the same time someone in the current administration gets in trouble - or maybe the next presidential election.
Osama bin Laden is a type 1 diabetic. He needs dialysis regularly. He's 6'6" and, while he's a brown person, he's not the same kind of brown person that populate Afghanistan or Pakistan. In short, he shouldn't be THAT hard to find.

 

[Santilli]

Mercutio:

I've NEVER heard he was diabetic. Where did you get that little tidbit?

GS

 

[Mercutio]

I'm fairly certain I heard that from some CATO-institute talking head who was being interviewed on NPR.
A check of Osama's wikipedia entry suggests "kidney disease" rather than diabetes, but the outcome - dialysis - is much the same.

 

[i]

My guess is that, if the claim is even true that 4,000 troops were prevented from following up on a strong lead as to where OBL was, it's because it would have sent them into Pakistan.

 

[jtr1962]

Maybe he died of natural causes a long time ago. Anyone here remember the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in the 1980s? IIRC he was dead, having lived to well over 100 (and looked it too), but for many years they paraded his preserved corpse and even motorized it to make it seem like he was waving to followers. The morons there actually fell for the ruse, too. With today's computer imagery it wouldn't be too hard to have OBL give "live" messages. I'm sure the US intelligence knows he is dead also, but maybe will pretend he died during a raid on some terrorist training camp when it politically suits them. My guess is for this to happen when the political cost of rebuilding New Orleans starts to hit home, or maybe when the economy starts to stagnate again.