WASHINGTON — It seems to me that our government had vastly more
intelligence on what was going on in Osama bin Laden’s ghastly
hideout before sending SEAL Team 6 in last week than they are
telling us. President Barack Obama told CBS that the odds in favor
of Osama being in the compound were “at best” 55 percent. My guess
is that they were closer to 100 percent. We know that from
satellites overhead our intelligence officers thought they had bin
Laden spotted in the complex. A man that they concluded was Osama
was seen pacing regularly inside the compound grounds. Called “The
Pacer,” he was tall, and they figured he might very well be the
6’4” terror leader. So the order was sent to our SEAL Team to go
in.
Yet why did they need a second helicopter? They were only
after one man. They could have popped him or snatched him, and been
off. The answer is obvious. They wanted to take his entire
entourage with him and they knew who composed it. Instead after one
of the choppers suffered some sort of difficulty the SEAL Team was
left with just one chopper to take some two dozen warriors and the
body out. So they left bin Laden’s family for the Pakistanis to
debrief. Now we shall be squabbling with this insufferable ally
interminably over our lost baggage. The mission was a great
success, but it was not perfect.
Today our intelligence community is dribbling out just the
information it wants the world to know, and I am all for it. The
amateur show we saw last week orchestrated by the White House was
what one would expect from the presidency of a community organizer
with almost no executive background. It was embarrassing, but now
the professionals are back in charge. The revelations over the
weekend are eerie, but somehow satisfying.
The man who enlisted a team of terrorists agents to get on
four commercial jets a decade ago and turn them into missiles
cruelly killing 3,000 people lived his last days like a cult leader
with a pretty mangy cult. He sat in robes and blankets peering at
himself in an old television atop a broken-down piece of furniture.
The audio was withheld by our intelligence people lest bin Laden
get his message out to the outside world, but I do not think it
would have raised his stature in the minds of most viewers, at
least most civilized viewers.
It is said that he was a “hands on” leader even in the
end. He sent his courier out — we are led to believe he had only
one — periodically to deliver orders and home videos of himself
groaning on. On the videos he dyed his beard for with time it had
whitened. What do you suppose his agents hunkered down in various
hideouts throughout some of the least inhabitable parts of this orb
thought of him? If you were his number two in command you might be
too busy hoofing it from one hideout to the other. His lieutenants
have a way of being vaporized. Others might feel they had received
a celestial order from a prophet, but are apparently not real quick
to execute such orders. The fact of the matter is that al Qaeda is
not doing too well these days. Kaboom, there goes another
one.
Not much is known about the workings of bin Laden’s mind
except that he liked things to blow up, smash into things, and go
up in flames. Presumably, he could have directed action films
brilliantly in Hollywood had his life taken a different turn. Oddly
he seems to have come to Al Gore’s position on “climate change.”
This makes him the second dubious figure in two months to come to
Al’s side. Last month Charles Manson broke years of silence and
from California’s Corcoran State Prison — no relation to
Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art — rumbled, “Everyone’s God,
and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather
because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things
to the environment.”
I do not know if bin Laden had any helpful hints lately on
the environment because intelligence officials blocked out the
audio, but I do know that in October he urged his followers to get
active in the Pakistan flood relief for, “We are in need of a big
change in the method of relief work because the number of victims
is great due to climate changes in modern times.” Mr. Gore could
not put it better, but what al Qaeda might do to improve relief
work I do not know. Maybe they could blow up a bridge.
Actually bin Laden sounds like just another American
progressive in talking about Iraq and “big corporations.” In 2007
he chided our Democratic Congress for not concluding the war in
Iraq, which he attributed to the massive influence of “big
corporations.” In another bull he lauded Jimmy Carter for his book
advancing Palestinian rights and commented knowledgeably on the
works of Noam Chomsky, whose books I had not known are apparently
available in Arabic. Congratulations Jimmy and Noam.
Yet in the end, Osama was a lonely has-been — a leader of
a cult with only three women and some goats, and the women he had
to marry. Somehow even the Rev. Jim Jones of the People’s Temple
exited more gloriously.
