http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-real-scandal-of-the-declassified-osama-bin-laden-trove-implicates-obama-and-the-cia/article/2639389
The real scandal of the declassified Osama
bin Laden trove implicates Obama and the CIA
by Michael Rubin | Nov 2, 2017, 11:18 AM
The CIA has released the bulk of the Osama
bin Laden documents, which show just how deep Iran-al Qaeda links are. (AP
Photo/Mazhar Ali Khan, File)
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The Central Intelligence Agency has
finally declassified and released hundreds of thousands of documents it seized
when it liquidated al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Initially, the
Obama administration released only a handful of documents which, divorced from
the context of the larger trove, appeared to support its narrative that the war
on terrorism was largely won.
Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, has now
rightly released the bulk of the bin Laden cache. There’s no reason why he
should not have: As soon as Obama announced bin Laden’s death, the clock toward
the expiration of their operational relevance began counting down.
The new documents, so far, reveal few
surprises. The documents show just how deep Iran-al Qaeda links are. The close
operational relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al Qaeda is
well-known. The 9/11 Commission, for example, detailed tight relations between
the two on several occasions. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iranian
officials acknowledged sheltering senior al Qaeda operatives when they sought
to use their presence to compel the United States to turn over all Mujahedin
al-Khalq members at the time present in Iraq.
The real scandal now seems to be how Obama
and his CIA heads Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, John Brennan, and acting head
Mike Morell released only what upheld and affirmed Obama’s tenuous theories
about Iran. Had the U.S. public known about the Iranian leadership’s outreach
and association with al Qaeda, even Democratic congressmen might have been far
less willing to tolerate the trust which Obama and Secretary of State John
Kerry placed in their Iranian counterparts. After all, Iranian President Hassan
Rouhani was secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the coordinating
body for Iran’s security and defense policy, at a time when Iran was developing
its al Qaeda outreach.
Indeed, the refusal to declassify
documents not out of fear that sources and methods might be exposed but rather
to enable the White House and State Department to avoid calibrating their own
policy goals with reality and in pursuit of Obama and Kerry’s goals appear to
be both an abuse of classification and textbook intelligence politicization.
It’s time to ask under oath and in public
hearings what senior officials — including every former CIA director from the
time bin Laden was killed — knew about the Iran-al Qaeda partnership, when they
knew it, and why they believed they needed to cover up that information.
To purposely bury proof of an enemy’s
culpability with a terrorist group, to leave that rogue regime with an
industrial-scale nuclear program capable and enough centrifuges to build an
arsenal, to provide billions of dollars in untraceable cash under the guise of
sanctions relief and ransom payments, and to acquiesce with a nod and a wink to
a no-inspections policy in the same military bases which sheltered al Qaeda
operatives is, to put it mildly, policy malpractice.
Just as with the release of the bin Laden
documents, truth should be the goal, not a liability. Indeed, there is no
better foundation than reality for U.S. foreign and defense policy.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-real-scandal-of-the-declassified-osama-bin-laden-trove-implicates-obama-and-the-cia/article/2639389
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