marvin's in washington d.c. is with 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 was thirty five miles north of the pakistani capital of islamabad 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 and allies we will be true to the values that make us who we are and on nights like this or we can say to those families who have lost loved ones it's all quite a stir justice has been done. rather than being found in a cave in the remote mountainous region of pakistan bin laden was found in the pakistani city of about a 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 some of it

while the pakistani government may have been in the dark about what was going on yesterday there was one pakistani man who witnessed seeing 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 as musharraf as i.e.d. pockets dani i analyst and policy development advisor and regular columnist and contributor for newspapers in pakistan the united states and the middle east and shop welcome to the program. mike huckabee are great to have you with us you live in islamabad can you tell us what you saw yesterday. tom just just a clarification i didn't i didn't actually see myself what was happening with the helicopters. in abbottabad which is about two half hours away

what happened was at about one thirty at night. i was send text message asking you to turn on the television by a friend when i turned it on the most most about this time i joined most of the rest of the country. as we watched. the coverage of. this event in which at the time we were being told that a low flying helicopter had just crashed in abbottabad close to the pakistan military academy. well that in and of itself or the of the factoid didn't make a whole lot of sense. military academy is best army to equivalent of west point these young men are the future general kiani is general posture of the park. they are very well taken care of that city which has largely made up of. people

who work in the military loyal to the military so the idea that it would be a helicopter at one thirty in the morning flying low. was ridiculous in and of a child for the fact that it crashed. very suspicious and that's what i tweeted about it and in fact it was something. that was something that was shared by many other parks but i'm curious how this news is being received in your town 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. ok so the i mean in terms of the reaction i think. i was in abbottabad today so i can speak about because i spoke to get worse before and i think there was just

a general sense of bewilderment there was this. shock really. this worldwide world famous world's most dangerous man was living in their bed. and they had no idea i didn't meet anybody this or sort of at all the deputy claims out of me and saying that. they had a very significant paper. to the rest of the country i think number. march. the radical right. trying to milk this for what it's worth. i think really there are limits. to foment a little bit of on the rest based on this craving. for people to be out of the streets and a. large. part of

popular to. the poll numbers that i remember. never really. four percent approval rating. at the same time it's not a country that's going to join american kinetic or wild celebrations of the streets because of course much of progress probably dislike. exactly. what the united states and they do and they do like their song sovereignty mosharraf as any thank you so much for joining us. my pleasure tom thanks. for how long. and i'm just. upon hearing the news crowds assembled in front of the white house lawn and all across the united states as well as other parts. 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 is necessary to provide a little context about what happened last night and the rise and fall was on the lawn and the crime of the century that was perpetrated on the american people and i 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 with the cat out of the bag on what bush was most interested in on day one after his appointment by the supreme court as president take a look. in the very beginning there was a conviction that saddam hussein was a bad person and that 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 which 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 into gaza eight the f.b.i. wasn't as interested in the operatives on trial in one 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 ladin f.b.i. had to prove that the four men in the court room alone through a vast terrorist network that bin laden was at the top of 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.

you see been wadden was nothing before nine eleven but the f.b.i. needed to turn him into something so this is our create a lot of nine eleven they sought help from a man named jamal. the doll excuse me a former associate of bin laden's back in the early ninety's and alf it all thanks in large part to a heavy amant courtesy of we the taxpayers told the f.b.i. what they want to hear of bin laden was an incredibly powerful and influential figure in the arab world and he was the puppet master of a legion of jobbies is waiting for orders to strike america now if it all told 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 el fadl was lying and the picture he drew of bin laden was completely fictional take a look. the reality was that i mean someone who could become the focus of a nuisance censorship of dissolution is to dismiss of this who were attracted by the news for. it was no organization these militants who mostly prime their own

operations. for funding and assistance he was not the commodity. in fact al qaeda didn't exist at that time either it was another fabrication budget . and some of it london software 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 but not in the african embassy bombings why else would george w. bush want to attribute to bin laden all these powers 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 knew wanted to be superman in the post nine eleven bin laden he saw his

perfect life sleuth or who had a big idea he'd been campaigning on privatizing social security since the seventy's when he lost to 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 a new to become a weird time president like f.d.r. 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 would see mcveigh which was enlisted the help of interpol in the police and 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 which 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 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 will all more 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 into slot 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 the road and bush realize that if they simply branded osama as a criminal for as the criminal thug that he was the leader of it was secure or islamic not via basically with fewer than a couple thousand serious members they wouldn't have the supervillain they needed so that george w. bush wish he could become the super hero if bush only authorized the 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 me again building the myth i was some as the evil

genius osama as 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 mullah 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 what in fact at that point a lot of bin laden was alive the easier it would be to keep the american people behind bush's superhero war campaign all around the world that made us prince or 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 me if you don't understand the scope of the mission. chair is bigger than one person so i don't know where he is nor you know i just don't spend much time on it i would be honest with you i'd come. i said be honest with us 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 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 had to go back to nineteen ninety nine when bush was still governor of texas take a look at his two thousand and six sworn testimony at a congressional hearing from cindy sheehan a woman who lost her son in the iraq war the leadership does this country rushed us into 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 same chanson bombing raids against iraq were working as a matter of fact in interviews in one thousand nine hundred nine with respect to journalists and long time bush family friend mickey herskowitz then governor george bush the. 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 if i had the 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 passed and i'm going to have a successful presidency and. it looks like george bush is ready to lead this country into an voidable war even before he became president. from that's because they have the downing street memo and the conversations with george bush spend 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 in may of two thousand. so as you write it was iraq war all planned out back in one thousand nine hundred nine and osama bin laden 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 ross 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 her 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 mickey 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 to 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 this 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 look at people like margaret thatcher with the falklands islands and we looked at reagan

with grenada and my father with panama and we saw a 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 is his credibility was down people were 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 that 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 and all tape recorded and so forth the american mainstream media has refused to cover this story at all the this the story of the george bush was planning on having a war so that he could get political capital so that he could private social security and the other things the run his list that he'd run for congress and the seventy's. that's right and i mean you know if this of course in itself i think would be cut would constitute a cry 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 of solomon on one from a religious nut millionaire with a few thousand loosely connected followers who shared his vision to take down america to an immortal icon arch enemy of the world's mightiest empire thanks to one lucky attack on a fateful september day and a corrupt response planned by the george w. bush white house and leverage that attack into political capital bin laden is dead today and 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 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 of the middle east the number one question everyone's going. into that american military mechanisms do not work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government's doing you want to know why i pay taxes. i would characterize obama as the charismatic version of american exceptionalism.

twenty years ago largest country. sometimes races with. one. gender. where did you take.

the foreign policy implication of osama bin ladin stuff will be enormous are a lot of questions being raised today on pakistan's role of the death of bin laden or more importantly august on the role in that lot count on the bin laden was living in 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 government or the military meanwhile upon learning that bin laden was killed in pakistan and not afghanistan afghan president hamid karzai renewed his call for withdrawal of american troops from his country saying the war on terror is not an afghanistan osama was not an afghanistan they found him in pakistan the war on 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 or dr tara who we all heard in all of the above was pakistan hiding. it it looks that way at least to the extent that some people in pakistan knew that he was there . 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 a were if some members of

the pakistani military were knowingly hiding from police shaikh muhammad the guy who plans nine eleven previously worked for i.s.i. the pakistani intelligence service i a so i wired i mean this is all the stuff that's in the nine eleven commission or force it's not like this is conspiracy stuff. i wired one hundred thousand bucks to muhammad. the pilot of one of the planes what 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 just as 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 but instead it was behind 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 that was it right so 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 pakistan at times as we as we just did and i think that's appropriate will the death of bin laden change al qaeda significantly if 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 their bomb administration's very aggressive campaign involving intelligence personnel and

drones and this has really. just mantled a large portion of al qaeda 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 they might be in las vegas. as well as guys who are. right there anyway fortunately i think we've been pretty effective at keeping . outside of united states where there are of course certainly would be people in the united states but what does this what does this mean for our relationship with august on and frankly with afghanistan on cars 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 their on their allies their taliban and other militant allies in afghanistan

and pakistan again there's only one hundred al qaeda guys in afghanistan but there and there are more in pakistan and our presence in afghanistan helps us get them in pakistan so it's our state we couldn't have captured or killed bin laden if we hadn't deployed the resources we've applied on 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 on the defensive now and we should take advantage of that and try to further weaken them you think it's naive. we've got to think that if we back out of the region and get 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 get 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 against united states were before nine eleven in one thousand nine hundred eight. 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 of the serious investigations of it including the nine eleven commission so i think. it would be naive to think that al qaeda will now change its ideology when it's been committed to attacking the u.s. since before we even went into i think i understand jordan thank you for coming out ok think again what i see clearly bin laden's death will be a game changer in the region figuring out just how that game is going to change it's going to be hard. enough there was joy and celebrations in the streets across the nation when news of osama was osama's death broke the little party continue with a possible threat of the public are going. into the only military making them.