Stephen Hayes and Tom Joscelyn recently reported that after four years of “fierce internecine battles and inexplicable delays,” the intelligence community released a few documents (roughly 100) obtained in the raid which killed bin Laden. This number of documents now becoming public is far overdue and paltry, given that Tom Donilon, Obama’s then national security advisor, bragged days after the raid, that the collection was equivalent to a “small college library.” The extremely late and tiny release of what may be one million documents begs the question—what are they hiding?
Hayes and Joscelyn go on to report that no less than five intelligence sources familiar with the broader collection of documents indicate that they contain explosive details relating to al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran and their mutual collaboration in the 9/11 attacks. The papers also substantiate and give more detail to the 9/11 Commission report that found “several hijackers traveled through Iran on their way to participate in the attacks.”
The papers also offer a vindication for me personally because in my book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations – Can a Bankrupt America Survive the Current Islamic Threat?, I report that Iran provided training, money and logistical support for the 9/11 atacks,
…in a backwater US Embassy in Baku Azerbaijan, a high-level Iranian security official, Hamid Reza Zakeri, walked in. He told the receptionist that he wanted to speak to the CIA because he had information related to the security of the United States. He explained to the station chief, “Joan,” that in his capacity as a high-level security officer at Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) headquarters, he observed “Arabs” training pilots and briefing them on their appointed targets. He even described models that were on the table in the meeting room—the World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, and Camp David. He told her that the attack was coming from the air that Arab pilots had already left for America and the date for the attack was 9/11/01.
Joan called for backup. Several days later a senior CIA officer, “George,” arrived from headquarters to debrief the “Baku walk in.” He immediately decided that Zakeri was peddling lies, paid him $200, and told him to get out. The information that could have saved 3,000 lives was never passed up the chain-of-command.”
I received the above account from my friend, Ken Timmerman, who personally debriefed the Iranian defector, Zakeri, in March of 2005 for his book, Countdown to Crisis – The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. One of the findings in both Timmerman’s book and my own, is that it is folly on an epic scale for Obama to believe that he can convince the Mullahs running Iran to give up their nuclear weapons programs which have cost them billions of dollars over several decades and are central to their messianic plans for hegemony over the Muslim World.
The few Bin Laden documents released expose other Obama administration follies and falsehoods. For example, at the time of Bin Laden’s death in 2011, the world was told by the Obama reelection campaign that al Qaeda and the jihadist threat had been decimated and moreover, Bin Laden had been reduced to a powerless figurehead. Instead the documents show that he was obsessed with the details of waging terror operations and was in constant communication with his subordinates around the globe.
Obama, Hillary and company misunderstood the Arab Spring, the documents reveal. They believed that the uprisings which began as largely peaceful would bring about the death of al Qaeda which advocated for violent jihad. The exact opposite is now true. IS, the son of al Qaeda in Iraq, controls half of Syria and Iraq, the land mass the size of Britain. And ultraviolent al Qaeda affiliates control vast portions of North Africa, Somalia, and Yemen.
The documents reveal that the Obama team got it totally wrong in its appeasement of the Afghan Taliban, a close ally of al Qaeda. Hillary spends an entire chapter in her book, Hard Choices, where she details her State Department’s endless negotiations Mullah Omar’s personal assistant, Syed Tayyab Agha. In the end the U.S. released the “Taliban Five,” some of the most senior leaders of the Taliban, in exchange for an army deserter and jihadist sympathizer, Bo Bergdahl. The real back story was that Obama and Hillary thought that releasing five of the most dangerous and influential terrorist leaders back to the Taliban would induce it renounce its alliance with al Qaeda and bring to the peace table with the American-supported Afghan government. Instead neither of these happened. Obama and Hillary were played for the fools that they are.And we the American electorate are much less safe.
