Kerry's Finally asking * "What're YOU going to do about YOUR Iraq f*-up?"

[Proud2BAmurkin]

AWOL's only possible answer to the question of what his plan is for operation DESERT SHITSTORM without admitting to totally FUCKING IRAQ UP is "more of the same."

[cheshire]

1. * says things are going well. God he looks so stupid.

[cthrumatrix]

2. THAT is the question --- AWOL has blown it... let him explain!

[salinen]

3. Exactly

not Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rush, Hannity, you, you lying little sack of shit.

[cthrumatrix]

9. shrub can't hold up to scrutiny...on his actions

[ItsMyParty]

4. Exactly - the media keeps hammering Kerry on

"so what's your big solution asshole" and then mocking him. They never say "well, now let's ask the bastard who created this mess just what the fuck he plans to do about it". Indeed, Kerry needs to be the one screaming at Bush to "'splain' please".

[Nicholas_J]

5. I am glad that Kerry just pointed out

That Bush pulled CENTCOM out of Afghanistan and the Tora Bora regions at the very moment that capture of Osama bin Laden was most likely.

It amazes me that anyone beleives that Bush is doing anything about real terrorism when articles at the time firmly pointed out that he allowed Mullah Omar to escape three times, one time as a part of the deal for giving up a city, and allowed Osama to escape from the Tora Bora region by pulling out all of the Centcom leaders to Iraq just at the time that Osama was surrounded. They left a clear path for him to simply walk over the Pakistan border:

Omar flees by motorcycle to escape troops
By Martin Bentham in Kabul
(Filed: 06/01/2002)

AMERICAN and Afghan forces were renewing their search for Mullah Omar last night after the Taliban's supreme leader reportedly used a motorcycle to escape from troops surrounding his mountain hideout in southern Afghanistan.



Haji Gulalai, the head of intelligence in Kandahar, said that Omar had fled on a motorcycle from a village near Baghran in Helmand province, where he was said to have been cornered for more than two days. Four supporters were reported to have fled with him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/06/wafg06.xml

Escape from Afghanistan


by Paul Thompson


When the US originally said it would attack Afghanistan, the reason given was to capture and bring to justice the perpetrators of 9/11, and the Taliban who harbored them. The actual facts look quite different - only al-Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef was killed, and none captured (the Taliban's former Ambassador to Pakistan is the highest ranking captive so far from Afghanistan ). Remarkably, the US missed chance after chance to capture both the leadership and rank and file fighters of these groups. Was it a string of bad luck or incompetence, or did the US not want to capture bin Laden and others?

That may sound hard to believe, but consider: if the US decisively defeated al-Qaeda and rounded up all its leaders, the war on terrorism would be over, and many other objectives that the war on terrorism help bring about, as outlined by the Bush team before 9/11, would be much more difficult to obtain. Would the US be able to win support for a war on Iraq, for instance, if the war on terrorism was considered already won?

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/escapeafghanistan.html

How bin Laden got away

A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world's most powerful military machine.

By Philip Smucker | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

TORA BORA, AFGHANISTAN - All 1,000 of the regional tribal leaders rose to their feet and shouted "Zindibad, Osama!" ("Long Live Osama!").
The Al Qaeda chief placed his right hand over his heart, the ethnic Pashtun sign for being honored, while 15 of his elite guards flanked him.

In the last public speech given at the Jalalabad Islamic studies center on Nov. 10, Osama bin Laden painted the battle lines black and white. "The Americans had a plan to invade, but if we are united and believe in Allah, we'll teach them a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians," he said, according to two tribal leaders who attended the speech.

Mr. bin Laden, with that speech, was laying his plans to stay a step ahead of the US campaign. He would travel to his favored fortified redoubt in Tora Bora, as the US expected him to, but he would also pave a way out. After his rousing speech, he bestowed cash gifts on key people who could later help him escape.

Did Military Misstep Let Bin Laden Escape?

The Baltimore Sun, April 28, 2002

Michael E. O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies




Michael E. O'Hanlon
Was Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in the first half of December? And did the U.S. decision to rely on Afghan militias and Pakistani troops, rather than American forces, to seal off escape routes from those mountains permit bin Laden to escape during the intensive bombing campaign of that month?

If so, that decision surely ranks as the greatest mistake in an otherwise brilliant U.S.-led military campaign.

Well aware of the stakes involved, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has studiously denied any second thoughts about U.S. tactics during the Tora Bora campaign. He recently denied that bin Laden's whereabouts had ever been ascertained in December and expressed no reservations about relying on local ground fighters to seal off possible escape routes.

Yet those local fighters lacked night-vision technology, warm clothes for spending long hours watching possible exfiltration paths, tactical battlefield mobility (except for their feet or donkeys) and, most of all, the same motivation to stop al-Qaida fighters that American soldiers would have possessed.

http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/20020428.htm


http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0304/p01s03-wosc.html

How Bush let bin Laden escape


In late November 2001, the United States had a unique opportunity to get rid of Osama bin Laden. The tide had turned in the war in Afghanistan, and the remnants of the Taliban were largely cornered in Tora Bora. Osama bin Laden was headed there, too. Unfortunately, through a combination of mistakes and misunderstandings on the part of the Bush administration, CENTCOM was distracted, and bin Laden got away. Clearly, Bush did not intend to distract CENTCOM (Central Command for the Middle East, South-Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa). It is even possible Rumsfeld did not understand the effect, on CENTCOM's ability to execute the war in Afghanistan, when he made an urgent request for an updated Iraq war plan. It is likely General Tommy Franks - not used to failure - did his best to fulfill both missions with the same staff. He could not ignore an order from his superior, the secretary of defense. Some of the details are still unclear, classified, or unknown. Yet, what is clear is that CENTCOM was preoccupied with Iraq, at exactly the moment when they had a real chance to kill or capture bin Laden.

http://www.topdog04.com/000598.html

The last link is most interesting as it has an in depth set of links to other sources that indicate that it was within very resonable possibility for the special forces to capture Osama bin Laden just at the time Bush decided to divert troops from the Tora Bora region and send them to the Gulf to prepare for Iraq. Not just any troops, but those specifically involved with hunting down Al Qaeda and who had spent the most amount of time attempting to do so.

[cthrumatrix]

6. he said this on Imus....

[oasis]

7. "That's a wonderful question", said Lou Dobbs, who was on the Imus show

following Kerry.

[bigpathpaul]

8. Attack Dog Cheney Keeps Fiction of Hussein Al Qeada Connection Alive

I received an email yesterday from www.Misleader.org (which is a MoveOn project, and a great email list to be on) with the following:

"Displaying a brazen disregard for the facts, Vice President Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati Thursday that Iraq had "provided safe harbor and sanctuary...for Al Qaeda."<1> There is no evidence to support Cheney's claim. The 9/11 Commission - which spent months exhaustively studying the issue - concluded there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.<2>"

"After the release of the report, Cheney claimed there was "overwhelming" evidence of a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq and that he had "probably" seen evidence that was not shared with the commission.<3> After investigating the matter, the 9/11 Commission found "it had access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks." The commission also reaffirmed its position that it had not discovered a "collaboration-cooperation between al-Qaeda and Iraq."<4>"

I put together a couple of ads on this subject. If you're interested, see the note below the low-resolution samples below:







The ads above, as well as others, are available as free, full-size, high-resolution JPEG or PDF downloads on my web site at http://www.bigpath.net. I hope you'll find them useful, and if you do, please forward, print, post, handout, carrier pigeon them to as many people as you can. I welcome all comments and criticism. I'm just one guy here working in a vacuum, so objective feedback is very helpful.

[michigandem2]

10. "stay the course"

I am so happy he is asking this question it was making me so angry to hear "well what is Kerry's plan on Iraq" WTF??? He actually HAS a plan unlike the guy who got us in the mess to begin with...I am so happy this is being asked now! lets watch how fast that comment gets dropped???

[cthrumatrix]

12. translation - he has no plan to leave...doesn't bother him

[gratuitous]

11. That's it -- good job, Mr. Kerry

It's like the scene in Silver Streak (the analogy isn't perfect by any means, but the line from the movie is) where the guy in charge of the investigation gets on the phone to the Assistant Operations Manager at the Chicago railyard (Fred Willard). He tells Fred that there's a runaway train on its way into Chicago, and Fred is very blasé: That couldn't happen, we'd know about it. Subtext: Ya dumb cop.

After a little back and forth, Fred finally checks the big board and acknowledges that the Silver Streak is indeed a runaway. The police guy barks into the phone, "Now what are you going to do about it, you idiot?"

We're still in the stage where most of the country is la-de-dahing away, persuaded that if Iraq really was in a state of total chaos and civil war, we'd hear about. Subtext: Ya dumb libruls. It's Kerry's job (and ours) to get them to look at the big board, and recognize that Iraq is indeed an unholy mess, and it was George W. Bush who created it.

We don't have to call people idiots, but the germane question is, "Now what are you going to do about it?"