UK backed ‘whacking’ bin Laden months before 9/11 attacks
Newly released documents show London was aware of the threat posed by the al-Qaeda leader in December 2000
The UK was in favor of “whacking” Osama Bin Laden months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, newly released confidential government documents from that time reveal.
The comments were made in December 2000 by Sir John Sawers, then-British prime minister Tony Blair’s foreign affairs adviser, who went on to become head of the country’s MI6 intelligence service.
Sawers, briefing Blair ahead of a meeting with then-US president Bill Clinton, noted that Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror organization was suspected of the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in October of that year (a suspicion which proved to be true).
“The Americans don’t yet have proof that [Bin Laden] was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole,” Sawers noted in his document. “They won’t launch airstrikes until they have a smoking gun, and that may not be until after 20 January” when Clinton’s elected successor George W. Bush was set to take office.
“We’re all in favor of whacking [Bin Laden], but need a bit of notice and a chance to influence the timing,” he said.
Born out of the 1980s war against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan, the terror group al-Qaeda under bin Laden grew into a generational threat to America that culminated in its Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that brought down the World Trade Center in New York.
Al-Qaeda, or “the Base” in Arabic, organized as the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Hoping to capitalize on the support the mujahedeen, or the “holy warriors,” received during their war against Moscow, Saudi-born bin Laden formed al-Qaeda and became its leader.
Bin Laden declared war against the US in 1996. But it wasn’t until trucks loaded with explosives detonated outside of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people on Aug. 7, 1998, that the threat became real.
The al-Qaida suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Aden, Yemen, followed in 2000. Seventeen people died. Then came the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden fled the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, only to be hunted down in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a decade later.
In August 2001, mere weeks before the 9/11 attacks, a briefing to Bush from the CIA warned that bin Laden was “determined to strike in US.”
CIA officials have since said they explicitly warned administration officials in the months prior to the attacks that significant attacks were coming but that little was done.
The 9/11 attacks, which saw the World Trade Center and the Pentagon struck by commercial airliners hijacked by the group’s terrorists, led to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the start of America’s longest war that ended last summer with the military’s frantic airlift from Kabul.
In August of this year a CIA drone strike in Afghanistan killed al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, the latest leader of al-Qaeda and bin Laden’s one-time deputy who was an architect of the 9/11 attacks.