Here's how George W. Bush's Skull & Bones brother Sen. John Kerry describes what happened.
As a recent report by the majority staff of the Foreign Relations Committee made clear, there is no longer any dispute over whether Bin Laden was at Tora Bora. CIA and Delta Force commanders on the scene told the staff that he was there and described intercepting his voice on radio communications. Most authoritatively, Bin Laden's presence was confirmed by the official history of the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force, the Green Berets, Navy SEALs and similar special forces. "All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9-14 December," said the unclassified version of the history, which was published with little notice in 2007.
The final assault that Bin Laden feared never came. Fewer than 100 U.S. special operations commandos were at Tora Bora, not enough to defeat the entrenched Al Qaeda fighters. Calls for reinforcements were rejected. So were requests for U.S. troops to block the exit routes to sanctuary in Pakistan a few miles away. The vast array of U.S. military power was kept on the sidelines by senior commanders who entrusted one of the primary objectives of the war to airstrikes and unreliable Afghan and Pakistani allies.
Military analysts estimate it would have taken only 2,000 or so American troops to accomplish the mission. Most would have been deployed on the southern side of Tora Bora to block escape routes to Pakistan. About 500 would have carried out the final assault from the north. We had enough troops in or near Afghanistan at the time, and they were trained for this type of unconventional fight in rugged terrain.
More than 1,000 members of two Marine expeditionary units were not far away in Kandahar, but their commander's request to move to Tora Bora to encircle Bin Laden was rejected. Roughly the same number of troops from the Army's 10th Mountain Division was split between southern Uzbekistan and Bagram air base, a short helicopter ride from Tora Bora. Instead, Gen. Tommy Franks left the job to a motley collection of Afghan militiamen and Pakistani Frontier Corps paramilitary fighters who never showed up.
Franks and his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, were determined to succeed in Afghanistan with a light footprint. They justified limiting the number of U.S. troops by saying they wanted to avoid stirring up anti-American sentiment and creating a protracted insurgency. Unfortunately, in failing to get Bin Laden, we wound up with exactly what we had hoped to avoid in Afghanistan -- and a virulent insurgency across the border in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed ally.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported in 2007 that the CIA is indirectly funding Al Qaeda. The US is funding anti-Taliban forces and at the same time indirectly funding the Taliban. The CIA created, funded and trained Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.
The Bin Laden and Bush families have a long standing relationship. They both have been a part of the Carlyle group an organization that makes money off of the arms industry.
According to Kevin Phillip’s (a former strategist for the 1968 Nixon campaign) the Bush family is oddly enough America’s first dynasty. They are a family of multigenerational liars that has had a multigenerational focus on the arms and "intelligence" industries.
George H.W. Bush has been connected to numerous Middle East scandals like the October Surprise (Where Bush and the CIA promised arms if Iran would hold the hostages until President Carter lost the election, Iran-Contra (October Surprise part II where they delivered the arms), Iraqgate (where George H.W. armed Saddam Hussein).
The full interview is worth a read, but I’m going to pull these excerpts.
The third scandal is something called “Iraqgate.”
Now most of you have probably forgotten about Iraqgate. These things got pushed aside, when George Bush was defeated in ‘92. The upshot of Iraqgate was that George Bush, as Vice President, got involved in a program of providing arms to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Not just arms, other supplies, dual use technology, biological cultures, nuclear know-how. All of the sort of things that were described as existing in the form of weapons of mass destruction in 2003. You know, funny thing, the family had an acquaintance with this somewhat earlier. Most of you won’t remember this. That’s the amazing thing. The media people mostly do remember it. They may not remember it very sharply, but you would think it was relevant. Let me read you a quote from Ted Koppel. This was the introduction to ABC news’ “Newsnight” on June 9, 1992. “It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes, through the 1980’s, initiated and supported much of the financing and intelligence and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.” It’s quite an extraordinary circumstance. First time in American history that a father, who was President, built up an enemy he had to fight, and then passed on the animosity to his son, who had the second war. If you want a dynastic element of history, you can look at that one. There was much more to what happened in Iraq than just the simple building up and the war.
After leaving office Bush becomes a part of the Carlyle group a merchant bank. Bush joins the advisory board and helps raise money for them via giving speeches and with his position as a former President. The Bin Laden family was one of 12 Saudi familys that were a part of this war profiteering organization.
Phillips takes a look back around WWI to George W. Bush’s two great grandfathers. It is worth a read.
George Herbert Walker “was a financier from St. Louis, very hard-charging and very successful, was very much involved in his earlier days before World War I in repackaging companies in the south central United States, railroads, gas companies and so forth. He became known to the Harrimans who were Union Pacific and railroad people, at very large scale in that role. Ultimately, Averell Harriman lined him up as Harriman’s partner in 1919. But before that, he and his chums from St. Louis were very much involved in the wartime finance and the relations with the allies. The United States provided huge amounts of materiel for the British and French. George H. Walker ultimately came out of all of this as a major, major player on Wall Street in the 1920’s and 1930’s.”
According to Phillips, “Samuel Prescott Bush, who was another great grandfather of the current president’s was a major steel executive in Ohio. And his connection was to the Rockefellers. Because Standard Oil of Ohio, the famous Standard Oil of the history books, owned some of the shares in Buckeye Casting, which was the business of Sam Bush.” Standard Oil became what we now know as Exxon Mobile.
Phillips argues, “during World War I, Buckeye Castings did war manufacturing, barrels for guns and casings for shells and so forth. But Sam Bush went to Washington and he was the—in charge of the section of the war industry’s board that regulated small arms, ammunition, and ordinance, ordinance being guns, basically, of an artillery nature. He was a major player in the wartime regulation of who was selling what in terms munitions. By the time the two streams converge, you get Samuel Bush’s son, Prescott, marrying George H. Walker’s daughter, Dorothy in St. Louis in 1921. What you have got is a family union that had more than a little bit to do with the emergence of the military industrial complex in the United States.”
In this interview, Phillips discusses the Bush family’s role in the creation of the CIA and the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. (The interview is worth a read in its entirety.)
“What happened was the crowd that was in with Prescott Bush and George H. Walker with W. A. Harriman, a number of them became prominent in the intelligence community and then when you get to the firm that was merged out of W. A. Harriman, which was Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the partners there was Robert A. Lovett, who was the son of one of the big cheeses in Harriman’s railroad operation. I mean it all fits together. Robert A. Lovett was the man who came up with the blueprint for the C.I.A. after World War II, which was never acknowledged and only became public knowledge—maybe 15, 20 years ago. So, he was a major player, and Prescott Bush, I have no doubt, was very close to the intelligence agencies during World War II. He was a director of two companies, one was Dresser Industries, which is now part of Halliburton, and the second was Vanadium Corporation of America. They were both involved in the atomic energy project. Prescott Bush was a friend of Alan Dulles, who went on to be the C.I.A. director, but he was also a lawyer in the 1930’s for some of the Brown Bros. Harriman international gamesmanship, so to speak. They were very tightly knit into all of this. The real thing about the Bushes is how far back they go in this loose combination of investment banking, Wall Street law, the intelligence community, the international business, the state department, and the war department.”
