Our good pal Atrios just found this little nugget:
http://in.rediff.com/...
The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.
Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.
This, ladies and gentleman, is the kind of simple, undeniable connection that we can really bash Bush over the head with. The average joe may go a bit glassy-eyed when you start talking about how terrorist funding flowed through UAE banks and such, but this they can understand. I'm sure there are better framers out there than me, but my first shot at it is: "If the UAE are our allies as George Bush says they are, then why the hell are they meeting with Bin Laden? Are they with us, or are they with the terrorists?"
Here is the transcript from the 9-11 hearings, as requested by a commenter:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing8/9-11Commission_Hearing_2004-03-24.htm
MR. FIELDING: Yeah. Well, I would appreciate that on behalf of the Commission if you could do that because it seemed that this -- when the intelligence was so good, and that by the time the camp was dismantled days and days had passed.
So I would appreciate --
MR. TENET: There's also a question, I believe, as to whether bin Ladin was inside or outside the camp --
MR. FIELDING: Of course.
MR. TENET: -- it was a complicating issue in this whole thing -- and whether he was there or not. So there's a second complicating factor here.
The third complicating factor here is, you might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this.
But in any event, I would like -- I will try and reconstruct the data as best I can, in terms of what I had in my possession at the time.