No, President Obama Didn’t Find Osama bin Laden

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RedState:

 

No, President Obama Didn’t Find Osama bin Laden

 

Somebody Else Did That

 

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) | September 5th at 02:33 PM |

 

With few other unquestionably popular accomplishments for this president to crow about, we should expect to hear a lot at the Democratic Convention the next two days about how President Obama authorized a Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Vice President Biden, who opposed the mission, has made it a favorite stump speech line: “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

But signing off on killing bin Laden was a no-brainer; as anyone who remembers the past decade knows, the hard part was finding him. The Abbottabad raid was the culmination of many years of intelligence-gathering. And for all the chest-thumping by Obama and Biden, virtually none of that intelligence-gathering resulted from policy decisions that originated with the Obama Administration. To the contrary, several were harshly criticized by Obama and his allies, and some have been discontinued by Obama.

I looked at this in more detail based on accounts at the time (as did Ace), and little new has come to light since to change that picture; let’s review how the pieces of Bush-era national security and intelligence policy fell into place to pinpoint Osama bin Laden in May 2011:

A. Guantanamo and CIA Detention Centers

What we know, based on what’s been made public, is that bin Laden was located primarily by