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Posted on Monday 15 February 2010


Liz Cheney: Civil terror trials led to 9/11
Raw Story
By David Edwards and Gavin Dahl
February 14th, 2010

The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney said today on Fox that she believes military tribunals, instead of civilian trials, following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, would have produced intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. "What you have is a situation where unquestionably we did go through a period in this nation’s history where we dealt with terrorism as a law enforcement matter," Cheney explained to Fox News’ Chris Wallace Sunday.

"As Attorney General (Michael) Mukasey has pointed out recently, when we prosecuted and successfully convicted people after the ’93 World Trade Center bombing, after the East African bombing, what it got us was 9/11 and 3,000 dead Americans"…
This is a remarkable line of thinking, this Cheney-think. For this to be true, the 1993 bombers would have had to know that in 2001, eight years later, al Qaeda would attack in the way they did on 9/11 – actually a pretty absurd premise. But more to the point, Cheney and his cohorts back then were adamant that Clinton was off base focusing on al Qaeda. They [AEI, PNAC, neocons, Laurie Mylroie, Wolfowitz, Libby, Bolton] were arguing that bin Laden was a diversion and that Clinton was dead wrong to be worrying about him. In their view, the Terrorists were sponsored by Rogue States. They were sure they were right about that.

So when they got in the White House, they ignored al Qaeda and hunted around for a way to go after Hussein in Iraq. They ignored Richard Clarke. They ignored the C.I.A. Even after 9/11, they focused on Iraq and put Afghanistan on the back burner with disastrous results on both counts [as this article correctly points out]. And this business of Military Tribunals and "Enhanced Interrogation" is beginning to sound like a broken record of a very old song. They never got around to the Military Tribunals, and their Enhanced Interrogation [AKA Torture] was no great success either. They got one guy to tell them that Iraq was involved with al Qaeda by sending him [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi] to Egypt for Torture [he later recanted], but they used the info in the lead-up to invading Iraq anyway.

Liz seems to be the only other person talking about some of the old Cheney-isms: American Exceptionalism, Unitary Executive, Enhanced Interrogation, etc. But not all children of despots follow their parents so closely as Liz:
Osama Bin Laden’s Son Warns His Successors Will Be Worse
Omar Bin Laden Says the U.S. Will Never Catch His Father
ABC News
By LARA SETRAKIAN
Feb. 11, 2010

From Omar bin Laden’s up-close look at the next generation of mujahideen and al Qaeda training camps he says the worst may lie ahead, that if his father is killed America may face a broader and more violent enemy, with nothing to keep them in check.

"From what I knew of my father and the people around him I believe he is the most kind among them, because some are much, much worse," Omar bin Laden, who was raised in the midst of his father’s fighters, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. "Their mentality wants to make more violence and to create more problems."

Omar has turned his back on his father’s philosophy, a remarkable step for a man in an Arab culture where it is a sin to disobey his father and taboo to openly criticize him. It was doubly significant for Omar bin Laden because his father had picked him to succeed him as the leader of jihad…

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