Osama bin Laden was killed in a compound hidden deep in Pakistan, President Obama announced Sunday night. Complete transcript of the president’s statement linked here. From the statement:

“Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan.  Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.  It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.  And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.  No Americans were harmed.  They took care to avoid civilian casualties.  After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Almost ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the man who served as icon for violent networks is gone.

From an intelligence standpoint, it is still regrettable that bin Laden was not captured alive. He would have been a source of useful information.

But the pursuit and its conclusion demonstrate what a rational, effective intelligence project looks like.

“Missing” White House emails retrieved from Bush administration records indicate that top Bush Justice Department officials had little interest in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar, head of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), prolonged correspondence has pursued “missing” emails between the Bush White House and Bush’s attorney general, deputy attorney general, associate attorney general, Office of Public Affairs, Office of Legal Counsel and Office of the Inspector General, in the Justice Department.

After a lengthy search, President Obama’s Office of Information Policy, which handles FOIA requests, found emails pertaining to Osama bin Laden or to Mullah Omar only in Attorney General and Office of Public Affairs records from the Bush administration. Alberto Gonzales, previously Bush’s White House counsel and then Attorney General, did not use email.

White House emails from the Bush years, often reported as missing, numbered in the millions. Thousands of emails were sent between the Bush White House and top Justice Department officials, through both government email accounts and private accounts including the Republican National Committee.

FOIA inquiries have produced two emails, totaling four pages, between the White House and Justice under the former administration relating to Mullah Mohammed Omar.

The FOIA requests produced 26 emails, totaling 119 pages, relating to Osama bin Laden.

The first internal reference to Mullah Omar, according to email records, occurred Dec. 7, 2001. White House staffer Edward Ingle forwarded a series of talking points titled “Meet Mullah Omar” from Deputy National Security Adviser James R. Wilkinson to a distribution list of several dozen government personnel in Cabinet offices and the Pentagon including Paul Wolfowitz. Omar has continued to evade capture and is believed to be living in neighboring Pakistan. There is no reference in the emails to Omar dating from the period when he was evading US forces. The next, and only other, mention of Omar’s name was an incidental reference in a Sept. 23, 2004, New York Times article on Afghanistan forwarded the same day by White House staffers.

The 26 emails that mention Osama bin Laden in correspondence between the Bush White House and Justice Department break down as follows:

There were seven email references to Osama bin Laden in 2001. Five occurred in press releases from White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer forwarded by Ingle — one Executive Order, two transcripts of press briefings and two sets of talking points — dating from Sept. 24 to Dec. 17, 2001. Kenneth B. Mehlman, then in the Executive Office Building and later chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent around a copy of Bush’s address to the Joint Session of Congress Sept. 21, 2001, in which Bush briefly mentioned “a person named Osama bin Laden.” The other mention of bin Laden in 2001 comes in an Oct. 15 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about John Ashcroft and terrorism, forwarded by David Israelite.

One email reference to bin Laden occurred in 2002, also forwarded by David Israelite. Under the heading “Do you remember?,” Israelite distributed to colleagues, including Barbara Comstock, a description of a purported 1987 video clip saying that Oliver North warned Congress about Osama bin Laden in the Iran-Contra hearings but was shut off by then-Sen. Al Gore. This claim had already been debunked by North himself (see www.snopes.com). Comstock went on to chair Scooter Libby’s defense fund in 2007 and in 2008 ran for Congress from Virginia.

There were three email references to bin Laden in 2003 — a press briefing, a forwarded newspaper article, and a December statement from Director of Public Affairs Mark Corallo criticizing a Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse study.

Fifteen emails mentioned bin Laden in 2004. Some were in response to criticism of the White House after disclosure of the famous Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” All email references are forwarded press briefings and other press releases, forwarded newspaper articles, or talking points related to bin Laden.

The Department of Justice represents the US government in enforcing the law in the public interest. According to the official definition of responsibilities printed under a photograph of then Attorney General Ashcroft, “Through its thousands of lawyers, investigators, and agents, the Department plays the key role in protection against criminals and subversion … It represents the government in legal matters generally, rendering legal advice and opinions, upon request, to the President and to the heads of the executive departments. The Attorney General supervises and directs these activities, as well as those of the U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals in the various judicial districts around the country.”

Either top Justice Department personnel under the previous administration were not a set of bloodhounds, or documents have been suppressed. The email archives contain no indication that inside circles in the Bush White House and DOJ were paying attention to capturing Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Mentions of bin Laden and Omar come strictly in the context of public relations.

There are no records of emails to or from Alberto Gonzales, presumably because he did not have an email account.

Email records searched under FOIA include those of previous Attorney General Ashcroft; Michael Chertoff, previously assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division and later secretary of Homeland Security; former Deputy Attorney General James Comey; former Deputy Attorney Paul McNulty; Philip J. Perry, acting associate attorney general and son-in-law of Vice President Dick Cheney; former Associate Attorney General Jay B. Stephens; and David Ayres, Ashcroft’s chief of staff.

After leaving Justice, Ayres co-founded The Ashcroft Group. His corporate biography describes Ayres thus:

“After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Ayres managed the Department’s crisis operations and restructuring of the FBI to focus on preventing terrorist attacks. As the Attorney General’s principal counter-terrorism advisor, Mr. Ayres oversaw numerous counter-terrorism operations, program reorganizations and policy reforms to prevent additional terrorist attacks.”

Many persons in the Department of Justice and the executive offices of the White House had responsibilities in the “war on terror,” at least according to public pronouncements. Given all the public emphasis on “information sharing” and cooperation among law enforcement and security entities, and the speechifying against a purported “wall” between domestic and foreign information gathering, one would think there would have been extensive correspondence about bin Laden and Omar among others.

Again, either there was such extensive correspondence, and it is being suppressed; or there was no such interest in bin Laden at the highest levels of government, meaning that indeed the previous administration viewed bin Laden chiefly as a public relations tool.

What did they know about bin Laden that they did not share with the public? Were they confident, for undisclosed reasons, that he posed no threat? Why are there no expressions of concern about his whereabouts?

With this plate handed to him, it is a wonder that President Obama’s hair has not turned white already.

Margie Burns is a Texas native who now writes from Washington, D.C. Email margie.burns@verizon.net. See her blog at www.margieburns.com

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2009

With thousands of Afghanis, Iraqis, and U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, the fugitive icon of terrorist networks, was finally tracked down and killed in Pakistan. And not just in Pakistan, either, but in the city of Abbottabad, in the neighborhood of Pakistan’s military academy.

Let’s say this clearly, just once: Part of the unnecessarily prolonged failure to catch bin Laden, and a very large part of the tragic diversions of two bloody wars, can be laid to the account of the large media outlets in this country. Foreign policy under the Bush administration was dictated by selfish concerns, and corporate media outlets almost entirely went along. Foreign policy was influenced—to put it nicely—by politics, and politics was influenced—again, to put it nicely—by money, and the big media almost entirely went along.

Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that foreign policy, like domestic policy, was determined by political advantage—in simplest terms, money to get position, position to get money. Thus the previous administration (like others before it) bound the full faith and credit of the American public, largely without its consent and often without its knowledge, to a series of repressive regimes in the Middle East perpetually at odds with their own populations.

That this strained and upside-down affiliation was not in the best interest of the American public was spectacularly demonstrated by the official response to 9/11. Just a few outstanding and (by now) widely known facts in the public record reflect the discrepancy between Bush policy and public interest:

• Most of the skyjackers were Saudis, yet members of the Saudi ruling family were permitted to fly out of the U.S.—actually, helped to fly out of the U.S.–immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
• Foreign affairs experts and security experts knew that the Saudi regime was financing terrorism, yet the Bush administration enabled some of these special flights with Saudis aboard, just after 9/11, to leave from Las Vegas. Their luggage and cargo were not even searched, according to people I have interviewed.
• Similarly, anyone with expertise in pertinent fields knew that training for violent Islamist partisans took place in Pakistan, with collusion in the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its secret service. Furthermore, some of the money that went to skyjacker Mohamed Atta was quickly traced to an account in Pakistan. Yet Gen. Musharraf, Pakistan’s dictator, was swiftly photographed sitting next to President Bush in the White House, a “partner” in the ‘war on terror.’
• There were no Afghanis among the skyjackers. Yet in spite of the key facts of Saudi finance and Pakistani training, White House emphasis and rhetoric in late 2001 was all about “harboring.” Pitiful Afghanistan, whose people had little to no say in Osama bin Laden’s having been harbored there, bore the brunt of a massive U.S. assault ostensibly in response to 9/11—until the Iraq war.
• There were no Iraqis among the skyjackers, and there was no affiliation between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Islamist partisan networks. Quite the contrary. Yet from at least 2002, the Bush-Cheney was obsessively focused on invading Iraq.

As someone said, “Why didn’t we lash out at Saudi Arabia?”

Instead, we got a narrative from the then-White House that was all about a Dr. No-type ‘mastermind,’ later enriched with anthrax—until the source of the anthrax mailings was determined to be domestic rather than exotic—and spiced up with ‘caves’ and mountain wilderness impenetrable to anyone but National Geographic photographers. And the largest media outlets, with few exceptions, went along with this Aladdin-influenced narrative every step of the way.

This is a spectacular demonstration of what can happen when news outlets (television) pay more attention to production values than to research, evidence and investigation. I said in a radio interview years ago that if just one, just one, of our three traditional television networks had had a division dedicated to research, data and investigation, the entire history of America following 9/11 would have been different. (Ted Koppel, then at ABC, soon afterward at least devoted an hour or so to reading the names of American troops killed in the war.)

This whole bloody, tragic exercise in futility is also a demonstration of what can happen when news outlets (print) pay more attention to who’s who than to research, evidence and investigation. I have always loved newspapers, but there was remarkably little appetite in the political press in our nation’s capital for close scrutiny of the Bush administration or of its policies, domestic or foreign. Access uber alles.

It’s not like they didn’t have some hints, either. Back to Pakistan and some known facts about Pakistan:

• Gen. Musharraf, universally regarded as a dictator by any standard, attained his office in the first place through a coup d’etat.
• Pakistan’s military and ISI openly supported partisan networks during and after the Afghani ouster of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, receiving CIA support to do so.
• Pakistan’s Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed resigned his position at the ISI immediately after 9/11. So complete was the ISI’s lack of oversight and lack of help (for the U.S.) regarding the 9/11 attacks that Ahmed had been in the United States, visiting members of the Bush administration, on Sept. 11.

But in the major media outlets, virtually none of the information above was allowed to dilute the central Bush-Cheney narrative “We’re at war”—first with Afghanistan, next with Iraq, next if they’d been able to manage it with Syria and Iran. The narrative remained almost unquestioned, and of course actively supported by neo-cons in PNAC and elsewhere, even when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan.

Things could have been different. I am far from being an expert on the Middle East and have spent only one month there, but even I could provide a short overview in 2001 on Pakistan’s sponsoring terrorism.* Strange how little we heard of that from Bush or Cheney, I always thought. But anyone who mentioned it in Washington was persona non grata.

Needless to say, we all make mistakes. So completely did Bush-Cheney obviate bin Laden’s existence that even I thought at one point that bin Laden was dead. Gen. Musharraf was among those who said bin Laden had been killed at Tora Bora:

“Musharraf, a Bush ally, made some of his comments on CNN. The FBI speculated openly around the same time that bin Laden was dead. So did the Pentagon.

According to “The News,” Islamabad’s main newspaper, “Fed up by the questioning [about bin Laden], the U.S. military authorities announced finally that they would stop chasing shadows and instead focus on other aspects of the so-called war on terrorism.” (“Musharraf Advised to be Less Forthcoming While Commenting on bin Laden,” Jan. 20, 2002).”

A security and intelligence expert I interviewed, Theodore Pahle, thought the same, and said so. Shortly after that, bin Laden surfaced in another video, all but explicitly displaying as an icon. This was immediately before the 2004 election. (I have thought for years that bin Laden was reading his own press. Current news on information cached at bin Laden’s hideout is reporting some heterodox schemes for attacks on anniversaries, etc.)

Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated when she returned to Pakistan, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan. Yet the focus was always on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran—anywhere, anywhere but Pakistan (and Saudi Arabia). Follow the little bouncing ball. President Zardari of Pakistan also speculated publicly that bin Laden was dead.

And in connection with the Bush-Cheney never-ending war, those imaginary glittering caves in Afghanistan—“poor as field mice” said a man who was kidnapped there, describing the actual inhabitants of that terrain–were replaced only with imaginary rustic huts in the mountainous border region. Aladdin replaced by Indiana Jones. This although the production values in bin Laden’s videotapes made it highly unlikely that they could have been produced in such a venue.

*A version of this article ran in the Prince George’s Journal. It, like the other Journal newspapers—a local chain in metro D.C.—no longer exists. The chain was bought out by the barking-dog rightwing Examiner company in 2004. (All the columns I had published in various Journals from 1996 to 2004 disappeared except in some sheets I saved. I was barely able to print out most of the titles before the web site was wiped by the publishers.)