The CIA wasted numerous opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden before September 11, 2001, because the former al-Qaeda chief was essentially working for the US government, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003.
Dr. Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday, after the US intelligence agencies declassified tens of documents seized in the 2011 raid on bin Laden's alleged hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The documents – the second tranche from the raid to have been declassified since May 2015 – show bin Laden was a "hands on" boss of al-Qaeda until the end.
"Bin Laden was very hands on with al-Qaeda's day-to-day operations," a senior intelligence official familiar with the documents said on Monday, "but he seemed somewhat out of touch."
Dr. Barrett said “the problem with this particular story is that ... well there are so many possible problems that it’s hard to know from where to begin, but we could begin with the Seymour Hersh revelations of last year that the story of the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a fairytale, that nothing happened remotely close to what we were told happened on the day he was supposedly killed.”
“The upshot of the Seymour Hersh story is that it was absolutely clear according to what Hersh explicitly said that the Pakistani government was fully aware of everything bin Laden was doing for many many years, and that essentially bin Laden was under house arrest by the Pakistani government,” he added.
“Hersh implied that – of course was not allowed to say, even if he was published over in London – was that this was all obviously done – assuming this is true, which is a big assumption – with the connivance of the United States government, that is… bin Laden was a prisoner of the Pakistani and US government for at least four or six years before he was killed. Now this is the same period that these new supposed documents had bin Laden completely running so-called al-Qaeda.”
In an article published on the London Review of Books in May 2015, investigative US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that high-level lying “remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.”
Hersh wrote that Pakistani intelligence officials played an important role in the bin Laden operation, despite the Obama administration’s assertion that the assassination was done without their knowledge.
The report claims that Pakistani military officers helped US helicopters enter the country and that a Pakistani security official led the American troops directly to Bin Laden without any resistance from guards.
Bin Laden, a CIA asset
“Now assuming that Hersh’s information is correct, and it certainly is far more plausible than anything remotely close to the US government version and the US mainstream media version of events, that means that we have to really readjust our perception of who bin Laden was, and what he was really doing?” Dr. Barrett said.
“And we already know that bin Laden was working for the US government ... He was created by essentially by the US government and its intelligence agencies to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. That was al-Qaeda meant – the CIA database,” the researcher noted.
“We know that right before 9/11 – in July 2001, bin Laden was being treated by a CIA-linked American physician in Dubai, Dr. Terry Calloway, and he was visited by the head of the Dubai CIA station, a certain Mr. Larry Mitchell. This was repeatedly confirmed by many European news outlets which all stand by that story,” he stated.
“We know that on the eve of 9/11, actually on September 11th, 2001, bin Laden was in a hospital being treated for a terminal kidney disease. And he could have easily been captured at that time had they wanted to, and of course there were numerous, numerous opportunities before that as well,” he pointed out.
“So essentially the picture we have gotten is that bin Laden was an American agent. And this has been confirmed by many, many sources, like Veterans Today where I work, people with an intelligence community background,” he said.
“So what we’ve learned from these most recent documents, assuming that they are authentic, is that bin Laden would have been running so-called al-Qaeda on behalf of Western intelligence. And they were keeping him under virtual house arrest, allowing him to do his work, right next door to the Pakistani military headquarters, all those years,” the analyst observed.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account, saying it was a false-flag operation and that bin Laden was just a bogeyman for the US military-industrial complex.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
With PressTv
