NEW YORK, July 4: CIA analysts have surmised that Osama Bin Laden’s taped message on the eve of the 2004 presidential elections helped incumbent George W. Bush win the elections, according to a passage in a new book.
This stunning CIA disclosure was made in a brief passage near the end of writer Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders, says a report released on consortiumnews.com website on Tuesday.
Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why Osama wanted Bush to stay in office.
“On October 29, 2004, just four days before the US presidential election, Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as ‘Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry’. But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that Bin Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term,” said the report.
According to Suskind’s book, CIA analysts had spent years ‘parsing each expressed word of the Al Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that Bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons’.
“Their [the CIA’s] assessments, at days end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today’s conclusion: Bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection,” says the book.
