Washington’s Blog
May 5, 2011
I’m as happy as the next red-blooded American that Bin Laden is dead.
For more than a decade, the government has said that Bin Laden is the world’s worst terrorist, a terrorist kingpin, the head of the worst terrorist group in the world.
But if we captured and interrogated him, he could have spilled a lot of beans which would help prevent future terrorist attacks.
Right?
But as the Atlantic reports today:
There’s one option the administration appears to have never seriously considered: taking bin Laden alive.
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The administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.
The White House now admits that Bin Laden wasn’t armed, so why wasn’t he captured? The government says that the Seals who entered the compound thought he was reaching for a weapon.
That might be true, although Bin Laden wasn’t exactly a healthy spring chicken. Indeed, Bin Laden was already pretty sickly by late 2001. (Don’t worry: This post won’t go down any rabbit holes regarding claims that Bin Laden died years ago.)
As CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen – who met Bin Laden and studied Bin Laden and his operation for many years – told CNN in 2002:
He’s aged enormously between ’97 and October of last year.
This is a man who was clearly not well. I mean, as you see from these pictures here, he’s really, by December he’s looking pretty terrible. But by December, of course, that tape that was aired then, he’s barely moving the left side of his body. So he’s clearly got diabetes. He has low blood pressure. He’s got a wound in his foot. He’s apparently got dialysis … for kidney problems.
I mean, this is a man who has a number of health problems, apart from the fact that anybody running around the Afghan mountains is not going to be in great shape.
Indeed, the oldest – and second-largest – French newspaper claims that Bin Laden was in the hospital for kidney failure two months before 9/11. As the Guardian notes:
Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro.
The disclosures are known to come from French intelligence which is keen to reveal the ambiguous role of the CIA, and to restrain Washington from extending the war to Iraq and elsewhere.
Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department.
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Bin Laden has often been reported to be in poor health. Some accounts claim that he is suffering from Hepatitis C, and can expect to live for only two more years.
According to Le Figaro, last year he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
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