By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama has staked his presidency on winning his “necessary” war in Afghanistan. Coming into office, one of his first acts, on Feb. 18, was to boost US troop levels in that country by 17,000, bringing the total number of soldiers and Marines in the country to about 57,000, to which one must also add 74,000 private contractors who are doing jobs normally done by uniformed military, and about 33,000 other soldiers from NATO countries and Australia. That’s 164,000 foreign soldiers fighting against Taliban fighters.

Guess who Bush never mentioned at his final press conference? Eric Boehlert writes:

Noticing anything missing from that list? Like the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, which for years, we were told, was the administration's top priority since bin Laden was behind the terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 Americans.

Since the press conference though, I haven't seen or heard any press reports mention that glaringly obvious gap in Bush's list. Instead, reading off the White House play sheet, the press no longer thinks bin Laden matters.

Lapdogs to the end.

UPDATE: A check of the transcript shows that Osama bin Laden, the man who defined Bush's presidency, was never mentioned by either Bush or anyone in the press corps during the president's expansive, 45-minute farewell press conference.

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

One interesting aspect of Ron Suskind's revelations about former Iraq Intelligence Chief Tahir Jalil Habbush was the urgent need on the part of the Busheviks to keep Habbush quiet so no one would know that he told us before the invasion that Saddam had no WMD's.

Habbush did nothing wrong, and in fact cooperated completely with the U.S. But Bush kept him hidden in Jordan (even though the only person he had to fear, Saddam Hussein, was also in U.S. hands) and paid him $5 million in "hush money."

This week we also learned of another prisoner who cooperated fully with the U.S., but was also locked away - apparently for the sole purpose of keeping his story out of the media. His name is Salim Ahmed Hamdan, better known as Osama Bin Laden's driver.

By Dave Lindorff

In the category of yawn-inducing stories that we knew all about
before they happened, comes word that the jury of senior uniformed
officers sitting in judgement of Osama Bin Laden’s chauffeur in the
first Bush-league military tribunal to actually go to a hearing at
Guantanamo Naval Station found the prisoner, Salim Hamdan…

Drum roll please…

Guilty of supporting terrorism.

I pause here for gasps of astonishment.

It’s awfully silent…

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the entire Republican administration don’t seem to care about capturing Osama bin Laden but Democrats, led by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), continue to demand answers on the whereabouts of the man who claimed responsibility for the 2001 attacks on our country.

Dorgan has offered as an amendment to the 9/11 Commission recommendations, a simple bill that demands accountability from the Bush administration on bin Laden and mandates "a report to Congress on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the leadership of al Qaeda."

The North Dakota Senator pointed out that we just passed the 2,000-day mark since September 11, 2001 with Osama still at large, while listening to repeated assertions from the White House that they do not care about capturing the terrorist leader.

In a speech on the Senate floor designed to counter Jon Kyl's (R-AZ) arguments in favor of the Bush-McCain Doctrine of escalating the Iraq war, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) turned his attention to the people who actually attacked our country on September 11 and charged the Bush administration with abandoning that mission.

Citing testimony given to the Senate last week by John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, Dorgan spelled out how the preoccupation with a pointless war in Iraq has taken all focus off actually neutralizing the biggest threats to our nation. Here's an except from Dorgan's floor speech on Monday:

Robert Gates received approval from the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday on his nomination to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and will proceed to a full Senate confirmation vote. This will likely happen as soon as Wednesday's Senate session.

Here's some interesting notes from Tuesday's Senate hearings…

The closest thing to a bombshell came when Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) asked the nominee point-blank "Mr. Gates, do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq?"

In the wake of a press conference today that had George W. Bush babbling such inanities as "my view is the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done" and asserting that "Al Qaeda is on the run" despite the unknown whereabouts of the guy who attacked us on September 11 -- you know, that dude named bin Laden? -- Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) was quick to call Bush on his contrived, newly-discovered flexibility on Iraq.

“It’s deeply disturbing that it takes a close election – not in Iraq, but in America – to get this White House to even talk about flexibility and changing course," said Kennedy. "American and Iraqi deaths didn’t do it. The growing insurgency and increasing sectarian violence didn’t do it. The conclusion in April by our intelligence community that the Iraq war is a rallying cry for anti-American extremism didn’t do it. Only the prospect of losing his rubber stamp Congress and the President’s own low polls seem to penetrate the wall of denial around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

The questions I asked in the first year after 9/11 have still not been answered. (WARNING: Many of the links are no longer valid, but a surprising number still are. There’s enough information associated with each excerpt for those who have Lexis-Nexis to be able to find the articles with bad links.)

From MakeThemAccountable.com:

What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

What did George Bush himself know, prior to the attacks?

What Bush Knew Before Sept. 11, CBS News, May 16, 2002:
“President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies - but not the American public.”

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