Forget Iraq and Saddam, and find Osama

Okay, so we’ve recently seen the third anniversary of the start of the war with Iraq. It was sold to us as a war on terrorism, as part and parcel of the 9/11attacks.

Despite my other feelings about this war, right now I have only one question...

WHAT HAPPENED TO OSAMA BIN LADEN!?!

Granted, Saddam Hussein was pretty far from a nice guy. But, he constituted no threat to Americans, and he’s already in custody being tried. No WMD’s have been found in Iraq. No nuclear capabilities were found. Thousands of our own troops are dead. Tens of thousands of our troops have been maimed. An untold number of Iraqi civilians are dead, and we’ve made an enemy out of nearly every man, woman and child in Iraq. (And can you blame them? What do you suppose the average Pennsylvanian would do to folks who invaded us on the terms we’ve invaded Iraq? Think like a true American patriot now, the old-fashioned kind, not the new neo-con, chicken-hawk, we’ll-trample-the-Constitution-with-jack-booted-feet-in-the-name-of-“freedom”-imposed-at-the-point-of-a-gun kind...)

But I digress, and I really want to know. WHAT HAPPENED TO OSAMA BIN LADEN?

We have satellites that can read a license plate from space! And, in nearly five years, we can’t find one religious maniac who depends on regular dialysis treatment in a hospital-like setting several times a week to live?

Last I heard, and this comes from a CIA commander in charge at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen (who was so frustrated and felt so betrayed by our government that he’s been blowing the whistle on this ever since, though you won’t likely see him on Fox or CNN, or any other major media outlet that profits more from war than truthful news), he was hiding in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We knew exactly where he was. And we let him go.

Yes, we let him go. Instead of doing it right and getting the murderous bastard who killed a few thousand innocent civilians on American soil, our troops were ordered to allow the locals to get him, and they either failed or let him go.

But when our armed forces were told to stand down, as far as I’m concerned, we let him go. With that went a great opportunity to see justice done swiftly, to put to rest once and for all the pain of 9/11. To see justice done and the American name that used to ring so proudly around the world, upheld. And, save the U.S. from the quagmire that has been the “war on terrorism.”

Instead, we have a trumped-up war that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of our own sons and daughters.

We have a war that has abused the oath of every soldier in our armed forces. They swore to defend the United States, not extend empirical neo-con dreams.

We have a war with documented atrocities, including widespread torture and abuse of detainees.

We’ve used chemical weapons against civilians. (White phosphorous, to be exact. I saw the pictures, and they literally made me cry. How could the America I know and love and believe in do that? To children? For what? And in my name and the name of every other U.S. citizen!) This is documented fact, not propaganda put out by our enemies. It was documented by our allies overseas, Germany, Britain, Italy and France, to be specific.

We’ve got a war that is poisoning the air and soil in Iraq for countless generations with the depleted uranium used in “conventional” weapons shells. Birth defects, cancer rates and other radiation-related maladies in the area have already soared, and our soldiers are already paying the price of that, too. (These facts have also been documented by our allies overseas.)

I’d like to see the American public start asking, in the face of the lies we’re being told: Where’s Osama bin Laden? Every time they spin another TV lie, it should be answered with, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” A flood of letters to the president and his cabinet, and to Congress, all asking, “Where’s Osama bin Laden?”

We still have troops in Afghanistan (which is almost easy to forget with what’s being shown daily from Iraq). With so many other troops in the Middle East, if he’s not in Afghanistan, finding him and getting him shouldn’t be too hard.

We have to demand an end to the war in Iraq and demand real justice. And until that day, I plan on continuing to ask, “What happened to Osama bin Laden?”

I just hope others will too.

To find out more about the US using chemical weapons, particularly white phosphorus on civilians in Iraq, go to www.csmonitor.com/2005/1108/dailyUpdate.html or do an Internet search of “white phosphorus civilians Iraq”

To learn more about Gary Berntsen, go to: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/ or search “Tora Bora bin Laden”

To learn more of the complex relationship involving hundreds of bin Laden family members, go to www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3

To read about some of the effects of depleted uranium, search “depleted uranium Iraq” on the Web or go to: seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

(Originally published in The Easton News, March 23, 2006)