Right. It’s the democratically elected leaders: here, the president, the last three of which have hardly been old men during their terms.
Since I’m more salesman than anything else, I think I’ll just drop the rope at this point.
We don’t know if they had that much sense- and nobody knew bin Laden was dead until hours later. That could be a valuable period of time.
They had been following the courier for months, tapping his phone, well before they determined to attack bin Laden’s home. I’m quite confident they had other assets in place to capture everyone he had been in contact with.
For all the shit John Kerry got for advocating pursuing al Qaeda using police methods, that is what works. This is a criminal organization, and we have excellent methods for dealing with those. The methods that work against the Mafia work against al Qaeda. And when you go after the leader, you mop up the lower levels at the same time.
I’m confident the next several weeks will be very interesting, with successful raids against al Qaeda cells in the UK, Germany and other countries.
My impression was that he was still actively involved in managing certain aspects of Al Queda. I may be wrong, but I’d make an analogy to a CEO who keeps tabs on the high level “big picture” stuff, but doesn’t bother himself with lower level decisions.
No cite handy right now, but in a recent article in “Foreign Affairs” it was mentioned that leaders of the various Al Queda “franchises” swear a personal vow to Osama. Also, if a franchise wanted to conduct an attack outside of their normal areas of operation, they had to clear it with “upper management”.
It’s starting to look like he was more involved than most people assumed- at least he had input or made suggestions. He wasn’t tactical guy in that sense.
I just saw this in my in-box:Al Qaeda plotted 9/11 anniversary rail attack
OK, now Joe Biden is pissed.