hard look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report. for . a long time are going to washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on a special edition of the big picture the news of osama bin laden's death has dominated the worldwide media for nearly twenty four hours yesterday u.s. forces shot and killed the leader of al qaeda in a highly secure compound just thirty five miles north of the pakistani capital there's a lot of love the body of bin laden was secured and he was identified by d.n.a. using a sample of his brain tissue before being buried at sea in accordance with muslim

traditions president obama addressed the nation last night to say this. we will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends a balance we will be true to the values that make us who we are and on nights like this we can say to those families who have lost loved ones it's all quite as terror justice has been done. rather than being found in a cave in the remote mountainous region of pakistan been laden was found in the pakistani city of a pot of pot holed up in a multimillion dollar mansion basically hiding in plain view in fact his compound was literally just down the street from the pakistani military academy mission required years of intelligence gathering and months of planning to pull off it had to be done in absolute secrecy without even notifying the pakistani government that american forces were preparing to infiltrate their nation and take out osama. and all the pakistani government may have been in the dark about what was going on

yesterday there was one pakistani man who witnessing the helicopters flying overhead knew something big was happening nearby and he started tweeting about it joining me now from islamabad pakistan to tell his story about what he witnessed from afar in the mission to kill osama bin laden is mosharraf zaidi a pakistani i am a list and policy development advisor and regular columnist and contributor for newspapers in pakistan the united states and the middle east and scharf welcome to the program. thank you tom. not pressured to be it's great to have you with us you live in islamabad can you tell us what you saw yesterday. tom just a clarification i didn't i didn't actually see myself what was happening with. the helicopters and explosions in abbottabad which is about two and half hours away what happened was at about one thirty at night. i was sent text messages

asking me to turn on the television by a friend and when i turned it on the. most focused on i joined the rest of the country. watched. the coverage of. this event in which at the time we were being told low flying helicopter had just crashed in abbottabad close to detox the military academy. that can of itself as a factoid didn't make a whole lot of sense to military academy. equivalent of west point these young men are the future gen counties and. they are very well taken care of that city has largely been. people

who work in the military a lot of the military so the idea that it would be a helicopter at one thirty in the morning flying low. was ridiculous and of a child the fact that it crashed. suspicions. and that's what i tweeted about and in fact it was something in particular. something that was shared by many other parks too i'm curious how this news is being received in your time and do you think it's possible that pakistan or the i.s.i. or at least the local military did not know who was living in. i mean in terms of the reaction. i was in abbottabad today so i can speak about because i spoke to people there and i think there was just a general sense of will comment there was this.

shock really. this worldwide. famous you know world's most dangerous man was living in their bed and they had no idea i didn't meet anybody that some sort of at all the blame or claim to have any inkling that. they had a very significant paper. the country. of march. the radical right we can project little obviously try to milk this for whatever they think it's worth. i think the there elements of the state will look to foment a little bit of on the rest based on this craving. has been violated for people to be out of the streets and make noise but by and large i think this is the. poll numbers that i

remember seeing. never really gave them any more than three or four percent approval rating. this is a country to which. the country they're going to join american. streets because of course as much of. the united states and they do and they do like their sovereignty mosharraf zaidi thank you so much for joining us tonight. my pleasure to come back. for a how long. has me just. upon hearing the news crowds assembled in front of the white house all day and all across the united states as well as abroad. as well as other parts of the planet to celebrate the demise of the most wanted man on the planet but before we start rejoicing over

slain the terrorists giant necessary to provide a little context about what happened last night and the rise and fall of osama bin ladin and the crime of the century it was perpetrated on the american people by crime of the century i'm not referring to nine eleven. in two thousand and four former bush secretary of commerce paul o'neill contributed to a book titled the price of loyalty written by ron suskind it contains some of the explosive allegations against george w. bush in an interview that year with sixty minutes o'neill and the cat out of the bag out bush was most interested in day one after his appointment by the supreme court as president take a look. very beginning there was their conviction. so there was a payout person and he needed to go he says that going after saddam hussein was topic eight ten days after the inauguration eight months before september eleventh. again

this was just after he was sworn into office and long before nine eleven bush was telling his people to start drawing up plans to invade iraq around the same time a trial was unfolding in new york city against four men who were accused of blowing up the kenyan and tanzanian embassies back in two thousand and eight but the f.b.i. wasn't as interested in the operatives on trial they want of the big fish they want to put osama bin laden himself on trial for the bombings too but in order to do that in order to get a conviction against bin laden the f.b.i. had to prove that the four men in the courtroom along to a vast terrorist network that bin laden was at the top and at that time there was no evidence to support the existence of such an organization in fact those early videos that bin laden released to the media showing his army of armed fighters with a k forty seven s. they were a fabrication the fighters were essentially just actors told to bring their own guns for the shoot according to the b.b.c. and see bin laden was nothing before nine eleven but the f.b.i.

needed to turn him into something so this is all pretty a lot of nine eleven they sought help from a man named jamal dar a dog sees me a former associate of bin laden's back in the early ninety's and alford all thanks in large part to have a mint courtesy of we the taxpayers told the f.b.i. what they wanted to hear that bin laden was an incredibly powerful and influential figure in the arab world that he was the puppet master of the legion of jihadi he's just waiting for orders to strike america alpha delta with the f.b.i. the name of this organization was. later as adam curtis explained in his b.b.c. documentary the power of nightmares well thought it was lying and the picture you drew of bin laden was completely full. take a look. the reality was that bin ladin and i'm in the one hundred could become the focus of a loose association of disillusioned islam is militants and were attracted by the new strategy. but there was no organization these were militants who mostly planned

their own operations and looked up in love for funding and the sisters. he was not their commander. in fact al qaeda didn't exist at that time either it was another fabrication budget. some of a lot of himself would not use the term al-qaeda until after nine eleven after the united states had created the name only then did bin laden use the name al qaeda for the little organization that he ran and that was just for recruiting purposes in other words we created al qaeda before bin laden did but beyond just paying for fake intelligence to convict bin laden in the african embassy bombings why else would george w. bush want to attribute to bin laden all these hours that he didn't actually have well look no farther than hollywood any good superhero in order to be seen and known as a super hero needs an equally powerful super villain and george w. bush really no wanted to be superman in the post nine eleven bin laden he saw his perfect like sleuth or bush had

a big idea even campaigning on privatizing social security since the seventy's when he lost a congressional election for example on that topic and succeed he needed the full support of the american people he needed to reinvent himself as a larger than life character he knew to become a weird time president like f.d.r. or lincoln after all he was already trying to figure out a way to invade iraq so when nine eleven happened rather than pursuing bin laden as the criminal of he was rather than doing what clinton did with to mcveigh which was enlisted the help of interpol in the police an investigative agencies of various nations a strategy by the way that nearly nabbed bin laden when bill clinton did it with bin ladin missing him just by twenty minutes instead of doing this bush decided to go to war again what happened on nine eleven was a crime not an act of war and should have been dealt with through the global criminal justice system and in the days after the nine eleven attacks with the sympathy of the entire world behind us bush could have received as much cooperation

as he needed to bring bin laden to justice even mullah omar of afghanistan offered to arrest bin laden and turn him over for criminal prosecution. we have been so easy to accept omar's offer bring interisland bin laden dismantle the training camps track down their attendees and sponsors and launch an international effort to disassemble and render impotent al-qaeda it probably could have been done in a year or less a rove and bush realize that if they simply branded osama as a criminal as the criminal thug that he was the leader of it was steerer islamic mafia basically with fewer than a couple thousand serious members they wouldn't have the supervillain they needed so that george w. bush bush could become the superhero if bush only authorized a police action he'd miss a golden opportunity to position himself as the commander in the war against evil incarnate and so the white house began building the myth osama is the evil genius osama is the worldwide mastermind even osama is the anti-christ and we responded to

this criminal act by launching a war in afghanistan going after the very same guy miller omar had agreed to arrest right after nine eleven but once the mythology took hold in america once bin ladin became our official bogeyman bush could care less what happened in la in fact at that point the longer bin laden was alive the easier to keep the american people behind bushes superhero war campaign all around the world that made us friends so rich but bush even admitted so much back in two thousand and six the idea of focusing on one person is. really in the case to me if you don't understand the scope of the mission. terrorist bigger than one person so i don't know where he is nor do you know i just don't spend much time on him at least be honest with you that i'm a more i said being honest was there's a piece of this puzzle another component of the crime of the century that involved catapulting a relatively unknown radical millionaire to the stratosphere of evil them so bush

could become a wartime president and for that piece of the puzzle we have to go a little farther back even before two thousand and one even before bush was made president by the supreme court in two thousand we have to go back to nineteen ninety nine when bush was still governor of texas take a look at his two thousand and six war in testimony at a congressional hearing from cindy sheehan a woman who lost her son in the iraq war the leadership of this country rushed to censure an illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry picked intelligence iraq was no threat to the united states of america and the devastating things in bombing raids against iraq were working as a matter of fact in interviews in one thousand nine hundred nine with respect to journalists and longtime bush family friend mickey herskowitz then governor george bush stated one of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief my father had all this political

capital built up when he drove there iraqis out of kuwait and he wasted an effort i had a chance to invade if i had that much capital i'm not going to waste i'm going to get everything passed that i want to get past and i'm going to have a successful presidency and. it looks like george bush is ready to lead this country and so on and voidable war even before he became president. from that's because they have the downing street memo and the conversations with george bush from one thousand nine hundred nine it seems like the invasion of iraq and the deaths of so many innocent people were preordained it appears that my boy casey was given a death sentence even before he joined the army and may of two thousand. so as you write it was iraq war all planned out back in one thousand nine hundred nine and it was solidly on do just exactly what president george w. bush so badly needed when he attacked us on nine eleven for more on this i'm joined by russell baker editor of who what why dot com and author of the book family of

secrets the bush dynasty rush russ welcome thank you. for first of all first question cindy sheehan's quote i believe that you were the guy who talked to mickey herskowitz and had that information was that accurate or her testimony before congress. yes in fact they asked me to come to washington when they were having some informal hearings to talk about my reporting i document this in great detail in my book family of secrets basically in two thousand and four when i was working on the book i was able to meet with mickey herskowitz a well known and well respected texas journalist who had been george w. bush's writing partner on a book project when bush was running for president make he had never before spoken to a member of the press of what transpired back then he did speak with me and in essence what he told me was that when they were writing partners and they were trying to

put together what bush was going to do as president bush really didn't have any ideas at all what he hoped to do as president he was really stumped in mickey kept pushing him to provide something that they could use in a book and finally in an unguarded moment bush turned him and said i'll tell you one thing i'm going to do he said if i get a chance i'm going to invade iraq and mickey told me that he was stunned by this and he said to bush why do you want to do that what's your thinking and he might have thought he would say something about the story that saddam wanted to take out his father but instead he simply said look i've realized that you cannot have a successful presidency unless you have a war when i was an advisor to my father when my father was vice president and president we were hearing all the time that this was absolutely critical we looked at people like margaret thatcher with the falklands islands and we looked at reagan with grenada and my father with panama and we saw boy do those poll ratings go up

and we need to do that to. that's an absolute credible so arguably what bin laden did on nine eleven was the very best thing that could happen to bush's his credibility was down people questioning the legitimacy of his presidency they were still counting the ballots actually in florida the newspaper consortium was his poll ratings were in the toilet it's it seems to have helped him tremendously i'm curious two trillion dollars later doesn't this now prove that or at least indicate that what bin laden did was the crime of the century rather than an act of war and the bush miss reacted to it in order to get us into a war well you know i mean i think the whole as you pointed out in the preamble that the whole question of who osama bin laden is and what al qaida is and so forth is enormously more complicated i think the press of this country has done a terrible job or perhaps they should say a nonexistent job of investigating what any of this means and i think

a perfect indication of that is that that this story that i tell in family of secrets all of it documented with footnotes with direct quotes from mickey herskowitz that all tape recorded and so forth the american mainstream media has refused to cover this story at all the this the story the george bush was planning on having a war so that he could get political capital so that he could private social security and other things that were on his list that he'd run for congress but the seventy's. that's right and i mean you know if this of course in itself i think would be caught would constitute a crime in other words creating a war under false pretenses and then this explains perfectly we see from donald rumsfeld's new memoirs where he says he claims i'm not sure we can trust him but he says he couldn't figure out why bush kept pushing him to look at iraq when they wanted to look at afghanistan so bush clearly had this on his mind and it's so you know staggeringly cynical and again i mean for the failure of the american media to

tell this story to the american people the real reason that we're in those places it's a huge issue it is it truly is ross baker thanks for the great investigative reporting you've been doing for being on the program with us tonight thank you tom in the last ten years of his life was home in la one from a religious nut millionaire with a few thousand loosely connected followers and shared his vision to take down america to an immortal icon arch enemy of the world's mightiest empire all thanks to one lucky attack on a fateful september day and a corrupt response planned by the george w. bush white house to leverage that attack into political capital bin laden is dead today paid the ultimate price for his crime against america but the bigger crime the crime that george w. bush would wink us all into is still going on the wars are still raging americans and innocent civilians are still dying and now that the super villain is dead and

the superhero is long gone and enjoying retirement in texas frankly there's no reason to continue this absurd morality play there's no reason to keep up the orchestrated good versus evil fight there's no reason to let the crime of the century persist let's end these wars now for good. coming up where does the united states stand now in our relationship with pakistan how will this affect our future actions and perceptions in the middle east on our own question of one small. incident american military mechanisms and do the work to bring justice and accountability. i have every right to know what my government's doing you want to know why i pay taxes. well i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. twenty

years ago largest country in. the sense of crisis of. course how did. you get insurance. where did it take to.

the foreign policy implication of osama's bin ladin will be enormous are a lot of questions being raised today on pakistan's role in the death of bin laden or more importantly pakistan's role in the compound of enron was living and was literally just down the street. from the pakistani military academy meaning it was highly unlikely that pakistani intelligence didn't know what was going on right under their noses which would explain why u.s. special forces swarmed the compound without notifying anyone within the pakistani government or the military meanwhile upon learning that bin laden was killed in pockets not in not afghanistan afghan president hamid karzai renewed his call for withdrawal of american troops miss country saying the war on terror is not in afghanistan osama was not an afghanistan they found him in pakistan the war in terror is not an afghan villages the war on terror is not in the houses of innocent afghans but in the safe havens of terrorism outside afghanistan so does this mean it's time to get out of afghanistan and go home and just how tenuous is the

relationship now between pakistan and the united states for answers on these questions jordan thomas joins me now he's the truman national security project fellow and professor at american university's school of international service and author of the book terrorism and national security reform jordan welcome thanks for having me on the show dr tara who we all heard him call the above was pakistan hiding bin laden. it looks that way at least to the extent that some people in pakistan knew that he was there probably it's too early to know that for sure and i can't make a definitive conclusion on that point but. this has been. a very troubling issue for the u.s. for years the role of pakistan in supporting the taliban and possibly having ties with al qaida it looks like and it's very troubling if they were if some members of the pakistani military were knowingly hiding from police shaikh mohammad the guy

who planned not all of them previously worked for i.s.i. the pakistani intelligence service as i wired i mean this is all the stuff it's in the nine eleven commission report it's not like this is conspiracy stuff. aside why are one hundred thousand bucks to mohamed. the pilot of one of the planes two weeks before a week before nine eleven. is it possible that the pakistani military or i.s.i. is that was actually behind nine eleven and no i don't think i think that's extremely unlikely so there's a there's a ton of evidence and the nine eleven commission. found this definitively that nine eleven the nine eleven attacks were planned by. led by bin laden with khalid sheikh mohammed as the mastermind i think so how did i get inside pakistan with the mind that you know were the what's the deal with one hundred grand. i'm not an expert on that particular piece of information but there's no evidence that i've seen that

suggests that pakistan's government or military was behind nine eleven it would be a disaster if it was it right well i don't think we're going to we're going to find out but there's a broader concern where pakistan is not a reliable partner with us and. we as a result have to do things unilaterally sometimes and that's why we've had to send our own intelligence and military forces into parts of a stand at times as we as we just did and i think that's appropriate will the death of bin laden change of a significantly. it's an important blow to al qaeda and it's an important blow in a. stream of events that has been good for us and bad for al qaeda we've had some really important mentum against al qaeda over the past couple years we've. killed a large number of al qaeda leaders in pakistan thanks to the obama administration's very aggressive campaign involving intelligence personnel and drones and this has really. dismantled

a large portion of the central leadership in pakistan but al qaeda remains very dangerous globally the most dangerous part of al qaeda now may not be in pakistan but in yemen and in other places where there are i don't want to germany spain and the united states i mean. i think they might be less vague. so as those guys are on . right there anyway fortunately i think we've been pretty effective at keeping. outside of united states or europe of course certainly should be people in the united states but what is this what does this mean for our relationship with pakistan and frankly with afghanistan karzai and does this it seems to me that this is going to speed up the probability of our speeding up our departure from afghanistan i think that would be a mistake i think that we need to keep up the pressure on al qaeda in particular and on their on their allies their taliban and other militant allies in afghanistan and pakistan are gateways there's only one hundred al-qaeda guys in afghanistan but

they're in there we are in pakistan and our presence in afghanistan helps us get them in pakistan and it's our state we couldn't have. captured or killed bin laden if we hadn't deployed the resources we've deployed and in terms of intelligence as well as military forces in that in that region we can't just shoot people from the air without having the people on the ground to gather intelligence for us so i don't so the conclusion that we should withdraw i think would be a mistake i think we need to keep up the pressure outside is on the defensive now and we should take advantage of that and try to further weaken them you think it's naive to think that if we backed out of the region be out of the way that. they would no longer see us as the enemy and they'd say ok we've got to you know let's get back to let's go back to work and build our communities i don't think they would do that because al qaeda has been committed to attacking the united states since before nine eleven since before we went into afghanistan and we should keep in mind that the first attacks of al qaeda going to the united states were before nine eleven in one thousand nine hundred eighty. was responsible for the bombings

of two u.s. embassies in africa in two thousand they were responsible for the bombing of a u.s. destroyer according to one f.b.i. informant well no according to all the serious investigations of it including the nine eleven commission so i think. there it would be naive to think that al qaeda will now change its ideology when it's been committed to attacking the us since before we even went into the i think i understand jordan thank you for coming out ok but you're never going to see clearly bin laden's death will be a game changer the region figuring out just how that game is going to change it's going to get hard. coming up there was joy and celebrations in the streets across the nation with news of osama as osama's death broke a little party continue with a possible threat of going. into the military make amends and do the work to bring just the sort of kind of good.