Finally Bush admin is serious about seeking out Bin Laden from his hideout in Pakistan. Atleast that's what one would think from the draft plan to authorize the Special Ops to launch operations to get Bin Laden and other Al Qaida leaders like Al-Zawahiri. However Special Ops are waiting for the green light from the Bush administration for the past 6 months. NYTimes and its international subsidiary IHT is reporting this news.

 Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to authorize the Pentagon's Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden's terror network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was designed to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave an easier path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was "mounting frustration" in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

For more follow these links.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washin gton/30tribal.html?_r=1&hp=&adxn nl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1214795 217-ry2KEzh3N8qVpymUOus3WQ

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/30/a merica/30tribal.php

Drudge is reporting that Bush is furious with NYT for the Pentagon leak...umm maybe because it shows how incompetent Bush admin is...
http://www.drudge.com

On the other hand Seymour Hersh is reporting in New Yorker that Bush admin already had Special Ops conducting covert ops in Iran. This has great significance in coming years.  

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of "high-value targets" in the President's war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Please read Seymour Hersh's expose in the following link. It is a long article, but your patience in reading it would be rewarded with increasing awareness of what's going on around the World especially in Iran in terms of US policy.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/ 07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=al l

Could this be the attack if Hillary is nominated?

Here is one example from when Guilian and Clinton were the likely fall nominees:

"Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday accused former President Clinton of not responding forcefully enough to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or later terrorist attacks."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory ?id=3318833

Since Barack Obama has been in the lead this entire primary season maybe Hillary Clinton is the one not vetted for the fall campaign.

A loaded question for you all from me an Obama supporter.

And raise you a "Bin Laden's terrorist network is all your fault."

I kid you not.

With Al Qaeda having already stated it's plan to entangle us in the Middle East and thus bleed our economy white, it's clear that the expansion of the war into Iran would suit that goal nicely.  Bin Laden and his lieutenants understood the strategy of avoiding set-piece battles and bleeding the Russians in a 10-year war of attrition, the only way to bring down a superpower.  So a vote for the Kyl-Lieberman declaration of war on Iran is a vote for Al Qaeda.

This Al Qaeda strategy also includes American support of corrupt Middle Eastern regimes, which fuels popular resentment and eventually causes them to fall.  With worldwide revulsion at 9/11 taking its toll on bin Laden's popularity, it was up to George Bush to overplay his hand.  

This he did nicely.  Now bin Laden is taking advantage of our being bogged down in Iraq, and the inflamed anti-American climate the occupation has caused.  It's time for Osama to send Bush a big rum-soaked fruit cake for allowing him to go forward perfectly according to plan in Pakistan, even as we contemplate war with Iran.

Three years ago the New Republic detailed what a Kerry master plan to fight Al Qaeda might look like, had he been elected:

"One, we want to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't  again become a sanctuary [said a senior Kerry advisor.]  And two, we want to  ensure that the fundamentalists who have gained political power in the Northwest Frontier  Province and who have some degree of allegiance to bin Laden don't become a more dominant  political movement in Pakistan more generally."

Bin Laden's new call for his fighters to focus their efforts squarely on Pakistan, where Musharaff is tottering like a Weeble, is the strongest vindication yet of the scenario that the CIA's Michael Scheuer warned us about.  Scheuer said the invasion of Iraq was the "gift" to bin Laden that he wouldn't have hoped for in his wildest dreams.

"And then, dreamed bin Laden wildly,  things would get bad for the Americans.  They  would stay too long in Iraq, insist on installing a  democracy that would subordinate the long  dominant Sunnis, vigorously limit Islam's role in  government, and act in ways that spotlighted their  interest in Iraq's massive oil reserves. - Scheuer in "Imperial Hubris"

Bin Laden envisioned a U.S. "over-reaction" to the 9/11 attacks, which would dry up world sympathy and cooperation in the wake of the attacks.  Bin Laden's hope was that enough anti-American fuel would be produced to keep the war going long after he, and even Bush, were dead, which would eventually result in the overthrow of "apostate" regimes, like Pakistan's.  It required but one true ally: an American president incapable of grasping anything but the sole use of force as the solution to all problems.  

In the same New Republic article, (republished in of all places, FreeRepublic, as scary a bunch of rightwing knuckle-draggers as you'll find), Joe Biden hinted at the foreign policy competence that might have been shown by the otherwise politically incompetent Kerry:

"What I think you would see is John  Kerry doing everything he can to build a greater  consensus worldwide that will allow us, if need be,  to even consider using force in conjunction with  the Pakistanis against Al Qaeda in Pakistan."

In other words, the post-9/11 capital squandered by Bush in Iraq might have been used to build the unified international front required to employ massive force in southern Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas, in pursuit of bin Laden and the surviving Al Qaeda leadership.  Combined with a diplomatic offensive to address grievances with America in the region, Al Qaeda's head of steam would be deflated.  But of course, such a strategy would require us to confront the lie, as Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has confronted, that "they" hate us for our "freedoms."  If they hate us for "who we are" instead of "what we do," in Scheuer's words, then any attempt to address grievances is pure appeasement.

How do we get back to safety, and a war on terrorism that does not last into our grandchildren's time?  Unfortunately, at this stage in the game the battleground is the world's fundamental perception of the previously beloved American character, untouched since World War II, even throughout the CIA's history of bloody Third World coups.  No one blamed us for George Bush, or even Iraq, as long as he was substantially the product of a corrupt pre-9/11 election.  It was by re-electing him that we told the world we are in accordance with Bush's myopic, murderous world views.  

Only by forcing him out of office, through impeachment, can we outsmart bin Laden, whose plans are going swimmingly.  George Bush is playing checkers, while bin Laden is playing chess.  Only by impeachment can we put enough distance between Bush and the rest of us to cause Muslims who have not yet taken sides to ponder whether Bush and America are one and the same.  Once positions have hardened in the wrong direction, warns Scheuer, we are in for "a hundred years war drenched with blood on our own soil."

The topic below was originally posted on my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal as well as The Peace Tree, the Independent Bloggers Alliance and Worldwide Sawdust.

Foreign Affairs published a sobering article by Bruce Riedel in their May/June issue entitled, "al Qaeda Strikes Back." Riedel, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution retired last year after 29 years with the CIA.

[Apologies for "bending" any rules, but I posted this at Kos, and got 20+ hits in 5 minutes.  Then the database went down.  When it came back up i was more than 75 stories down the list, and it was dead, so I'm trying it here.  I think I make an important point (not that I don't always...). Thanks for understanding.]
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In his September 12, 2006 press briefing, Tony Snow, Press Secretary to President George W. Bush explained that while there is not an explicitly direct operational relationship between President Bush and the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, there are "links."

He did not expressly say this was true, but using his inductive logic proves that there is undisputable evidence: Bush is hand-in-hand ("there was a relationship") with the terrorists.

Truly, truly, sometimes I amaze myself.

I was surfing the internet for news this morning while listening to the pundits on television discuss what had happened in the last week and suddenly it occurred to me.

I know how to catch Osama Bin Laden.