Two things: One, Bush’s remarks may have been “misdirection”. An attempt to get bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives to become more careless in their movements and communications.
And two, he had to put a stop to incessant “When are you gonna get bin Laden?” questions from the press.
Bush and the CIA and military intellegence never stopped trying to locate bin Laden under Bush. Reports are coming out now which detail just how aggressively and for how long our government’s various agencies have been working to find bin Laden.
Intelligence regarding the existence of Bin Laden’s couriers (which we then trailed to Bin Laden), their nicknames, and eventually their real identies, was all gathered by 2007. (During the Bush administration, like I said).
I know that doesn’t taste as good as a brown skittle, but it’s the truth.
A report from PBS mentions that when Obama took office, he moved most of the intelligence and military assets used to hunt insurgents in **Iraq **were redeployed to the Afghanistan and Pakistan border, not only to deal with the insurgents that had gained strength while Bush was fiddling around with Iraq, but to also to hunt for Bin Laden.
The compound was built in 2005. Who was president then? I guess I missed it when Bush took him out and had the body preserved until now.
2005 nothing
\2006 nothing
2007 nothing
\2008 nothing
But 2011 Ben Laden killed.Bush did it. How dumb is that?
Claiming that the current president (Obama) “got” OBL by himself is partisan hackery, point blank. Of course, regrettably, it doesn’t matter if the fact of the matter is that this was the culmination of years of intelligence. Just as Obama is blamed for things he inherited, he’ll get the credit for this. Of course, it won’t help him any if unemployment is still over 10% and gas is $6 a gallon come November 2012.
It will not be the same in magnitude as if the ObL trash was shot if Repubs where in power, because in that case about 80% of all media, for 3 continuous months and at 24/7, would extol the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars for the pursuit and killing of one cave man. So more of the voting sheep… err… public would be swayed to keep the President that accomplished this for another term.
For Obama, all this will blow over in a couple of days and the media will start questioning why did he wait two years to shoot him and how much help did the previous administration actually provided, if they haven’t started already.
Not to mention a slew of brand new and fresh conspiracy theories from the conservative political commentators.
Is there a specific technical term for people who purport to support representative democracy (whatever that means) but who complain that most people are vicious, ignorant, petty, or stupid?
Maybe more than a few of the news reports about the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death are untrue, maybe every headline along the lines of “How Pakistan helped the US get Osama” is just a result of people trying to steal some credit for his demise, but I was not intentionally making anything up.
How exactly do you know that’s what really happened? You don’t know. Neither do I or anyone else who isn’t privy to all of the intelligence gathered and all of the operations that occurred over those 10 years.
That said, like you, I also have opinions. And I believe those opinions fit the facts better than your’s.
I’ll tell you my opinion. I find it a stretch that it takes a decade of dedicated competent intelligence gathering to find someone like OBL. I suspect that it took 8 years of incompetent, or perhaps semi-competent intelligence gathering (while being distracted by an unnecessary war and allowing politics to drive policy) followed by a couple of years of competent focused intelligence gathering and, yes, a little luck.
Can I prove that? Nope. But it makes a lot more sense to me.
