WarSclerotic

Did Obama Inc. Block Bin Laden Doc Release to Protect Iran Deal? The Point (FrontPage Magazine), Daniel Greenfield, November 3, 2017

(Please see also, Al-Qaeda Terrorism and Shakespeare, which deals with some of the newly released Bin Laden documents:

Particularly important is Osama’s account of relations between al-Qaeda and Iran.

They were and are complex, fluctuating relations and loose ties between Sunni Osama and Shiite Iran.  What brought them together was the common hostility to the U.S. and to Saudi Arabia.  Iran supported al-Qaeda’s war against those countries.  Iran offered al-Qaeda “everything they needed,” funds and arms, and the opportunity to train in Hezb’allah camps in Lebanon in exchange for striking U.S. interests.  Iran sheltered al-Qaeda people.  Al-Qaeda opposed Saudi Arabia because it was hosting U.S. troops during the Gulf war.  Osama sent a group, the al-Qaeda management committee, to Iran while Iran enabled al-Qaeda to move funds and fighters to south Asia and Syria.

— DM)

The release of the Bin Laden files was met with a great deal of interest. There was less interest in why it took so long to release them. But this story sheds some light on that. And raises some very troubling questions.

On the penultimate day of the Obama administration, less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office. “Closing the Book on Bin Laden: Intelligence Community Releases Final Abbottabad Documents,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced. “Today marks the end of a two-and-a-half-year effort to declassify several hundred documents recovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in May 2011.” Accompanying the press release were 49 documents captured during the raid, bringing the total number of documents made public to 571.

The actual number was 440,000.

On Wednesday, November 1, CIA director Mike Pompeo announced the release of “nearly 470,000 additional files” from the Abbottabad raid. From 571 to 470,000: The “most transparent administration in history,” you might say, has just been trumped, by nearly three orders of magnitude.

So why did Obama Inc. obstruct the release of the files? The apparent answer may be that it was trying to protect its peace moves with the Taliban and Iran.

… Obama’s National Security Council hand-picked 17 documents to be provided to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point for analysis. (Obama’s NSC would later hold back two of those documents. One of them, laying out the deep ties between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, would complicate Obama administration efforts to launch negotiations with the Taliban, according to an explanation the NSC’s Doug Lute offered to West Point.)

… The new materials make clear that ODNI sought to mislead the country not only about the size of the collection but about its contents, too. The January ODNI press statement claimed that the batch of 49 documents it was then making public “mirrors the themes in previous releases,” chief among them Osama bin Laden’s “hatred, suspicion of Iran.”

… Barack Obama wanted what al Qaeda already had: a mutually beneficial partnership with Tehran. Revealing to the American people the truth about Osama bin Laden’s cozy working relationship with the Iranian government might have fatally undermined that diplomatic quest, just as the ongoing vitality of al Qaeda, amply testified to in the bin Laden documents, would have contradicted Obama’s proud claims in 2012 that al Qaeda was “on the run.” So Obama, with the eager cooperation of some in the intelligence community, bottled up the bin Laden documents and ran out the clock.

… The CIA release of the additional 470,000 documents includes a 19-page report on al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran authored by an unidentified al Qaeda operative. The author lays out some tensions between al Qaeda and Iran but makes clear those differences don’t preclude cooperation. The document reports that the Iranian regime was giving its “Saudi brothers” in al Qaeda “everything they needed.” This included safe haven in Iran, the facilitation of travel for senior al Qaeda operatives, and “money, arms,” and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in exchange for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.”

This is far from the biggest scandal to emerge from the Obama era. In some ways it’s almost routine.

And yet it reveals that Obama’s appeasement of Islamic terrorists, from the Taliban to Iran, dominated foreign policy, suppressed counterterrorism and permeated every corner of his administration. Even the Bin Laden documents had to be kept locked up to protect the narrative.

Even while Obama was using Bin Laden’s unintended death (Obama had sought to put Osama on trial to shut down the trials of terrorists in the Article III system)  to campaign for reelection, he was cozying up to Bin Laden’s allies in Iran.

And covering up the truth.

This entry was posted on November 4, 2017 at 6:20 PM and is filed under Obama and Bin Laden documents, Obama and Iran scam, Osama bin Laden and Iran, Osama bin Laden documents. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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