And you thought finding a FINGER in your chile or custard was bad:
US spy chiefs ordered agents to deliver Osama bin Laden’s severed head in a box of dry ice and hoist heads of other Al-Qaeda leaders on pikes, a retired field officer has disclosed.
What’s wrong with that? It just sounds like these spy chiefs wanted to get ahead in the world. MORE:
As America reeled in shock days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, former CIA officer Gary Schroen was sent to Afghanistan to help the opposition Northern Alliance to topple bin Laden’s hosts the Taliban.
He told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on Monday and Tuesday that he stopped by the office of then-CIA counterterrorism director Cofer Black for final instructions.
He said he was told: “‘your basic marching orders are to link up with the Northern Alliance and get their cooperation militarily and they will take on the Taliban.
“‘When we break the Taliban, your job is to capture bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box full of dry ice.'”
In other words, his bosses wanted a heads up from the field. MORE:
Schroen was also ordered to kill other al-Qaeda leaders suspected in the plot, which saw terrorists slam planes into the New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.
It was the first time in 30 years with the CIA he had been ordered to set out to kill a target rather than try to bring them in alive, Schroen told NPR’s Morning Edition program.
He said he told Black, ‘”Sir, those are the clearest orders I have ever received, I can certainly make pikes out in the field but I don’t know what I’ll do about dry ice to bring the head back but we will manage something.”
He was also told to make sure he had his hat on at 0800 hours. In other words: decapitate.
On a totally serious note, this certainly seems barbaric. There are other ways to confirm Bin Laden’s death. For instance, didn’t anyone ever tell these policy bigwigs in Washington about something called digital cameras?And if they had cut off bin Laden’s head, it could have sparked a batch of retaliatory beheadings that could have been even worse (if it could be) than the slew of them last year. And, worst of all, it would have turned bin Laden into a martyr.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.