It is well-established that President Bill Clinton more than once in the 1990s refused to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when we had him in our grasp—a fact that Clintons and their retainers have go to great length to deny or obfuscate, including their frantic efforts first to edit and then suppress the TV movie “The Path to 9/11.”
This afternoon NBC News reports Obama’s equivalent dereliction in a bombshell story:
by andThe CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says. . .A former senior intelligence official said Laux’s ideas—many of them shared by other members of the CIA’s Syrian task force–were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama.But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.
I’ll bet they decline to comment.
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