Bush won the 2004 bin Laden endorsement

05 Jul
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Maybe the people running the intelligence community ain’t so dumb after all? 

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry." But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term. 

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office. 

According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... 

"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin-Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection. 

"At the five o'clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: 'Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'" 

I mean, come on people.  Dogs understand why bin Laden wants Bush in power.  He is the only one stupid enough to fight exactly the kind of war bin Laden wants to fight.  He is and has been the enabler-in-chief.  Kerry had a workable four-point plan (vs. four more years of the same) for ending the war and that just didn’t jive with bin Laden’s agenda.

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