Giving Osama Another Pass

Via Crooks and Liars, a link to one Col. David Hunt at (insert the Imperial March, aka Darth Vader’s theme) Fox News:

Besides, these things are of little consequence when you realize how we missed, squandered, screwed up, made a mess of and were massively risk adverse — again — when we did not kill Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan just two short months ago.

We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it. Nice job again guys — now, pull the damn trigger.

Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden.

You cannot make this crap up; truth is always stranger and more telling than fiction. Our government, the current administration and yes, our military leaders included, failed to kill bin Laden for no other reason than incompetence.

The current “boneheads” in charge will tell you all day long that we are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to stop terrorists there so they do not come here. Nice talk, how about — just for a moment — acting like you mean what you say? You know walk the walk. These incidents, where we displayed a total lack of guts, like the one in August, are just too prevalent. The United States of America’s political and military leadership has, on at least three separate occasions, chosen not capture or kill bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri. We have allowed Pakistan to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda. We have allowed Al Qaeda to reconstitute, partially because of money they (Al Qaeda in Iraq) have been sending to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

I’d love to hear the details of this one. If this isn’t just another example of someone on Fox News making up nonsense (but why make something up that makes GW look bad – shouldn’t they be putting the blame on Hillary?), my guess is that nobody was around to give the go-ahead. GW was probably out mountain biking in the habitat of some endangered species, and Dick Cheney was in a secure location, listening in on someone’s phone conversations. Since the Dark Lord strikes me as the kind of guy who isn’t big on his underlings taking matters into their own hands, with both he and GW out of the loop nothing can happen.

Remember back in 2004 when they told us you shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a stream? I wonder if the folks who bought that argument ever considered that the horse’s tendency to roll over onto its back in deep water wasn’t going to go away.

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I think this story dovetails nicely with Dan’s post about Fox, Al Qaeda, and the fires CA.