Beinhart’s Body Politic: What Now? After Bin Laden

by Larry Beinhart and photographs by Dion Ogust, May 26, 2011

The United States gives Pakistan lots of money, nearly $12 billion in military aid, and over $6 billion in economic aid since 2002. This is “understood” to be payment for Pakistan being on our side in the War on Terror.

A week since Osama Bin Laden’s discovery, living under the noses of the Pakistani intelligence services and some US lawmakers are threatening to suspend billions of dollars in annual aid.

Since we’re spending so much, we have a right to ask: incompetence or complicity? As long as we think we should ask based on the fact that we’re paying, who is it we should be asking about? Them or Us?

The US government spent $2 trillion combating bin Laden over the past decade, more than 20 percent of the nation’s $9.68 trillion public debt. That money paid for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as additional military, intelligence and homeland security spending above pre-Sept. 11 trends, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

We spend somewhere between $40 billion a year (best guestimate, 2008) and $80 billion a year (official statement, 2010) on intelligence. We have the CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, the military intelligence services, Homeland Security, State Department, Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and presumably agencies so secret they’re not even listed on
www.intelligence.gov/about-the-intelligence-community.

The Bloomberg study looks back 10 years. Actually, the intelligence services have been looking for bin Laden in order to capture or kill him for at least 13 years.

Bin Laden was indicted for murder in American courts in 1998. By August of that year he was on the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” exclusive list.