Busting The Ollie North and Osama Bin Laden Myth

I sure would like to trace these kind of propaganda e-mails back to their source which I Imagine as some right wing nutter and self professed superpatriot sitting in his den spinning off stuff that he KNOWS is not true so as to score political points somehow.  However, the scene that this e-mail portrays never happened.  Read it first and then the following commentary.

Do you remember 1987........ 

Thought you 
might be interested in this forgotten bit of 
information......... 

It  was 1987! At a lecture the other day they were playing an old news video of  Lt. Col. Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan Administration. 

There was Ollie in front of God and country getting the third degree, but what he said was stunning! 

He was being drilled by a   senator;

'Did you not recently spend close to $60,000 for a home security system?' 

Ollie replied,

'Yes, I did, Sir.' 

The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience,

'Isn't that just a little excessive?' 
'No, sir,' continued Ollie. 
'No? And why not?'

the senator asked. 
'Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir.' 
'Threatened? By whom?'

the senator questioned. 
'By a  terrorist, sir'

Ollie answered. 
'Terrorist? What terrorist could 
possibly scare you that much?' 
'His name is Osama bin Laden, sir' Ollie replied. 

At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn't pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn't. A couple of people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued.

'Why are you so afraid of this man?'

 the senator asked. 
'Because, sir, he is the most 
evil person alive that I know of '

Ollie answered.. 


'And  what do you recommend we do about him?'

asked the senator. 
'Well, sir,  if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team be formed to  eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth.' 

The senator  disagreed with this approach. And, that was all that was shown of the clip. 



                  By the way, that senator

 was Al Gore..
 
Also:
Terrorist  pilot Mohammad Atta blew up a bus in Israel  in 1986.

The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the 
Oslo agreement with the Palestinians in 1993,  Israel had to agree to release 
so-called 'political prisoners.' 

However, the Israelis would not release  any with blood on their hands, The American President at the time, Bill Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, 'insisted' that all prisoners be  released. 

Thus Mohammad Atta was freed and eventually thanked us by  flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade  Center . This was reported  by many of the American TV networks at the time that the terrorists were first 
identified. 
It 
was censored in the US from all later 
reports. 


If you agree that the American public should be made aware of this fact, pass this on.

Do Not Break - it is 6 years strong 


This 
is why I always say I love YOU....

This has not been broken since 9/11/01, please 
keep it going...
This has been kept alive and moving since 9/11. In memory of 
all those who perished this morning; the passengers and the pilots on the 
United Air and AA flights, the workers in the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon, and all the innocent bystanders. Our prayers go out to the friends and 
families of the deceased.

This one is false (I almost used a different colloquial expression for false here)... and has been for six plus years.  This kind of onerous, odoriferous, opportunistic, exploitative, manipulative, slime is one of the main reasons I am completely and irrevocably done with the Republican party and their willful re- engineering of truth (I never seem to get these sorts of fake e-mails from anyone on the other side of the aisle).  As Snopes and plenty of other fact checking sites declares, the scene this e-mail depicts NEVER happened:

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/north.asp

However, I can attest to the fact when I was in Sydney, Australia in October of 1999 for the 2000 Summer Olympics (it was summer there) and going through the very tight security clearances surrounding the Olympics, we definitely heard about a guy by the name of Osama Bin Laden.  It was widely known in international and mainstream news that Osama and his organization intended to fly a jetliner into the nuclear reactors upwind from the Olympics in New Zealand and thus poison the games and millions of people with radioactive fallout (this CAN be verified with a basic Google search).  So, at that time between Oct. 1999 and September 2001, Mr. Bin Laden was definitely a known threat.  Now, despite the fact that there are many that would like to lay the catastrophe of 9/11 entirely at the feet of Mr. Gore and/or Mr. Clinton, get a load of this:

The August 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing Memo

White House Fact Sheet: "The August 6, 2001 PDB Entitled "bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US", April 10, 2004.
White House Briefing on Release of the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief Excerpt "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.", April 10, 2004.
Download April 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing Memo as a PDF document.
The White House released a redacted copy of the August 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing Memo at approximately 6:15 PM (EST) on April 10, 2004.
CNN reports that the "White House declassified and released Saturday the daily intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush a month before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001." [3]

"Portions of the intelligence report dealing with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and dated August 6, 2001, have been redacted for national security reasons, the White House said.

"The memo, titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States,' had been described by the White House as a largely historical document with scant information about domestic al Qaeda threats.

"The memo includes intelligence on al Qaeda threats as recent as three months before the attacks.

"Much of the intelligence was uncorroborated, and nothing in the memo points directly to the September 11 attacks.

"Highlights of the report include:

• An intelligence report received in May 2001 indicating that al Qaeda was trying to send operatives to the United States through Canada to carry out an attack using explosives. That information had been passed on to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
• An allegation that al Qaeda had been considering ways to hijack American planes to win the release of operatives who had been arrested in 1998 and 1999.
• An allegation that bin Laden was set on striking the United States as early as 1997 and through early 2001.
• Intelligence suggesting that suspected al Qaeda operatives were traveling to and from the United States, were U.S. citizens, and may have had a support network in the country.
• A report that at least 70 FBI investigations were under way in 2001 regarding possible al Qaeda cells/terrorist-related operations in the United States.

NOW PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THIS SECTION:


In his April 8, 2004, Salon article "Weeks before 9/11, the president was "consumed" by a pressing policy matter -- but it wasn't al-Qaida", Eric Boehlert wrote:

"On the night of Aug. 9, 2001, speaking from his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush delivered his first prime-time address to the nation. It was just three days after he had read the startling President's Daily Brief titled, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,' which warned of airline hijackings planned by al-Qaida. It was one month after the administration's counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, informed senior law enforcement officials he had gathered inside the White House's Situation Room, 'Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon.' And it was three months after intelligence analysts had begun tracking unprecedented 'chatter' about a possible terrorist attack. So now, Bush looked into the camera and spoke solemnly: 'Good evening. I appreciate you giving me a few minutes of your time tonight so I can discuss with you a complex and difficult issue, an issue that is one of the most profound of our time." 

"That issue was stem cell research."

Conclusion: MYTH BUSTED