Barbara Bodine, who helped thwart FBI veteran John O'Neill back when he was hot on the trail of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11, has been named Governor of Baghdad. Surprised to hear it? Little wonder - this story was swept as far under the rug as the Bush administration could sweep it. I saw one story - in FOX news online, but that was quickly scrubbed. Why? Because within this story was a link to an article I wrote in 2001 detailing Bodine's role in derailing the hunt for Bin Laden aftern the USS Cole tragedy. So, while we hear about "retired General Garner" (who is, in fact a very un-retired CEO of a huge defense contracting company, SY Coleman), we haven't heard the name Bodine mentioned until now.

Yet Bodine arrived in Um Qusar on April 8. Here's a link to the story citing her position as "mayor of Baghdad" from a US Embassy site (as long as it remains unscrubbed) - scroll down to Question 10. www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/press/2003/april/041104.html
(Note: as of 4/24, Jay Garner was referring to Bodine as "the coordinator of Baghdad". Same office. Different name on the door - the classic corporate shell game).
Choosing a woman governor in a Muslim country was calculated to foment trouble with the conservative Shiites - worse, a woman skilled in coverups for rightwing bosses. There is alread a conflict brewing between Bodine and Iraqi Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, who says HE is the Governor of Baghdad. This story was in the Washington Post today...but notice how extremley vague all references to Bodine are. The reporter does not come right out and say Bodine is, in fact, the designated Governor of Baghdad.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16995-2003Apr22.html

So, here below is the story the FOX article linked to. The entire "Smoking Gun" series can be read at News Insider

SMOKING GUN THREE: Was Bin Laden hunter John O'Neill a Casualty of the Bush Administration?


Until he resigned, in August of 2001, John O'Neill was the director of antiterrorism for the FBI's New York office. O'Neill had worked on the investigations of the first WTC bombing in 1993 and the attacks on the American embassies in Africa in 1998. He became one of the world's top experts on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. O'Neill believed that "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia." Yet the Bush administration blocked O'Neill's efforts to investigate the Saudi ties to bin Laden. The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism, asserted O'Neill, were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.
For example, Bush blocked an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family and kept his family's business ties to the bin Ladens as secret as possible. Among these business dealings were bin Laden investments in the Carlyle Group and connections between bin Laden and George W. Bush's first oil companies. It must have truly enraged O'Neill if he knew that Osama bin Laden had flown to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by local CIA agent Larry Mitchell on July 12.
O'Neill was very well aware of the warnings that came out in the summer of 2001. But it was obvious that he was considered more of a liability than an asset to the oil-obsessed Bush administration.

Back in 2000, O'Neill had been investigating the bombing of the SS Cole, for which he was sure bin Laden was responsible. However, the US ambassador to Yemen, one Barbara Bodine, hamstrung FBI efforts at every turn, publicly calling O'Neill a liar, refusing to allow his men to be armed with more than small handguns and, in general, crippling the investigation. Although Bodine claims she was trying to keep diplomatic relations running smoothly, her history shows otherwise.

Barbara Bodine has served primarily under rightwing old boys and in areas where their oil interests are being served. Under Reagan she served as Deputy Principle Officer in Baghdad, Iraq. Under Bush, Sr., she served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait and was there during the Gulf War. She has also worked for Bob Dole, and far more ominously, for Henry Kissinger. Now, under Bush, Jr., she is in Yemen impeding an FBI investigation that focused on the son of a Bush family business associate.

What makes Bodine's actions toward O'Neill particularly despicable is that she was said to be in part to blame for the Cole disaster. Even though she had been warned that the risk of attacks on Americans in the Yemen area were extremely high at that time, the Cole entered port under the lowest grade of security permitted in the Middle East with no warning to the destroyer. A top military analyst for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency quit in protest the day after the bombing because of Bodine and General Anthony Zinn's decision to allow the Cole to come into the port.

In July, Bodine had O'Neill and the FBI barred from Yemen.

About that time, O'Neill's name had been proposed by Richard Clarke as Clarke's successor as terrorism czar at the National Security Council. But a very mysterious incident that had happened nearly a year before was dredged up and used to blow that possibility out of the water. In November of 2000, at a retirement seminar in Tampa, O'Neill left his briefcase for a few moments in the convention room to go around the corner to use the phone. When he returned in a few minutes, the brief case, containing some papers considered classified, was gone. It soon turned up, but the incident was seized upon as an excuse to guarantee O'Neill would not get promoted. Was it a real theft? Or a set up to squeeze out the man who asked too many questions about Saudis and oil? O'Neill had finally had enough and quit.

Meanwhile, from February through August, the entire time that the danger from bin Laden was the greatest, Bush was focusing most of his efforts on persuading the Taliban to allow him and his oil pals put a pipeline through Afghanistan. Bush wanted to swipe the oil-rich Caspian region from Russian control. Back when Bush thought he could cut a deal with the Taliban, he did not consider them "evil." In fact, back when he smelled an easy deal in the wind, Bush described the Taliban's repressive regime as "a source of stability in Central Asia" that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline. So, in Spring of 2001, in Texas oil wheeling-dealing style, Bush handed $43 million in taxpayer dollars over to the Taliban to sweeten the pot. Still, however, there was no deal.

Laila Helms, the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms, worked as a public relations coordinator for the Taliban at this time. According to Helms, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden or provide the coordinates of his whereabouts. However, apparently under Bush's orders, the State Department refused this deal –a deal that would have removed Bush's best trump terrorist card from his stacked deck. Instead, on August 2, State Department officials met with Taliban reps in Islamabad and there delivered this ultimatum: give us what we want for the oil companies and we will "carpet your with gold." If you don't, "we will bury you beneath a carpet of bombs." The Taliban still held out.

Four days later, Bush was given the warning that could have, if acted upon, saved 3,000 American lives and the thousands of civilian lives lost in Afghanistan since October. Instead, he chose to ignore it.

In early September, O'Neill took a job at the WTC as head of security there. Right before the disaster, he told friends he felt sure an attack was imminent and that he feared that terrorists would try to finish the job they had begun in 1993 to destroy the WTC. John O'Neill was in the first tower when it was hit. He was on his way into the second tower to help evacuate people when he was killed.

O'Neill must have sensed –the best detectives have that uncanny "sixth sense"– that something very big, very horrendous might go down and that he might not survive. In June and July, 2001 he met with French intelligence analyst Jean-Charles Brisard (in June in Paris and in July in New York City). O'Neill confided much of what he knew about the bin Laden situation and Bush to Brisard –a fellow intelligence officer, but one who was not under the Bush administration's thumb. Brisard and his associate Guillaume Dasquié, an intelligence analyst and the editor of Intelligence Online, dedicated their book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth" (released in France in November 2001) to O'Neill. The book has been vigorously avoided by US publishers and everyone in the mainstream US press except Paula Zahn, who has presented excerpts of it.

History will be kind to John O'Neill. It will not be kind to George W. Bush