Tag: Osama bin Laden

Ten years later, Obama and McRaven discuss the meaning of the mission to kill bin Laden

Washington Post logo

Ten years have passed since a team of Navy SEALs and Army helicopter pilots flew 162 harrowing miles into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, a daring mission that represented perhaps the U.S. military’s only pure victory in 20 years of mostly unsatisfying war.

Earlier this week, the two men at the center of ordering and overseeing the raid — former president Barack Obama and Ret. Adm. William H. McRaven — gathered at Obama’s Washington, D.C., office to reflect on the operation ahead of its 10th anniversary, which falls on Sunday.

For both men, the meeting was an opportunity to recognize those who had made the mission successful. “The number of people who operated at the very highest levels for a sustained period of time; that’s something I appreciate even more a decade later,” Obama said. Continue reading.

Trump’s Obsession With Diminishing Obama’s Role in Killing Bin Laden Isn’t New

Let’s look at the tweets.

As President Donald Trump announced the death of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi this morning, it was impossible to avoid comparisons to President Barack Obama’s May 2011 announcement that Navy SEALs had killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Trump was clearly thinking about that key moment of his predecessor’s presidency as he asserted that Baghdadi had been a threat “long before I took office” and that the ISIS leader had been “the biggest one we’ve ever captured.” He also repeated the false claim that he had identified bin Laden as a threat before 9/11.

Trump’s attempts to diminish Obama’s role in taking down bin Laden aren’t new. In the years following the raid, he frequently took to Twitter to suggest that Obama was taking too much credit for getting bin Laden. The very first mention came in November 2011, in which Trump appears to sanction the waterboarding of al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed for the sake of gathering intelligence on bin Laden. (The Obama administration had banned this form of torture; Trump has since tried to resurrect the practice.)

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Waterboarding KSM gave us the intelligence that lead to Bin Laden.

42

Twitter Ads info and privacy
224 people are talking about this
Later that year, Trump went on CNN to talk about why Obama didn’t “deserve credit for killing bin Laden.” In the spring of 2012, he reiterated that point on CNBC and in a tweet that cited an article from Breitbart.
View the complete October 27 article by Kara Voght on the Mother Jones website here.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders uses a debunked story to blame the media for damaging the hunt for bin Laden

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website August 1, 2018:

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Aug. 1 called insults shouted at CNN reporter Jim Acosta by President Trump’s supporters “freedom of speech.” (Reuters)

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders just accused the media of hindering the American government’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden just a few years before 9/11. But she may want to check her evidence.

While defending Trump supporters’ vulgar treatment of a CNN reporter at a rally Tuesday night in Florida, Sanders argued that the media has a responsibility to report accurately because the stakes are so large. But rather than dwell upon recent examples of supposedly shoddy reporting, like she usually does, she went back 20 years, to 1998.

“The media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger and risk valuable national security tools,” Sanders said, clearly reading a prepared bit of gaslighting. “One of the worst cases was the reporting on the U.S. ability to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late ’90s. Because of that reporting, he stopped using that phone, and the country lost valuable intelligence.”

View the complete article here.