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one side note. Obama didnt have to spend trillions in the manner he has done. Japan is a good example of how that doesnt work.
on point, Obama gets credit for his part in getting UBL. He made a command decision to make this a priority. He made a command decision to go in when the intel panned out. He made the command decision to launch an attack in Pakistan without any real help or much notification to the Pakistani's. All of those things are credits to Obama.
Lets just not slight the others who played a role here. It was rendition and waterboarding that got the intel. and it was a 6 year investagtion that got us to the house where UBL was hiding.
Really? If that was what got us the Intel,then they would have caught him when Bush was in power.
It is a victory shared by all of the USA as a whole, with every citizen taking credit for this event to happen.
From the determined volunteer men and women fighting on the lines, to the citizens here at home, with a hatred for Osama.
so any small error as commander in chief is 'HIS" error, but any success is NOT HIS? wow. So basically he can DO NOT RIGHT? even if he does right?
It is a victory shared by all of the USA as a whole, with every citizen taking credit for this event to happen.
From the determined volunteer men and women fighting on the lines, to the citizens here at home, with a hatred for Osama.
And what was President George W. Bush Jr. doing prior to Septemerb 11th, 2001.
In an otherwise dry day of hearings before the 9/11 commission, one brief bit of dialogue set off a sudden flash of clarity on the basic question of how our government let disaster happen.
The revelation came this morning, when CIA Director George Tenet was on the stand. Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked him when he first found out about the report from the FBI's Minnesota field office that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic jihadist, had been taking lessons on how to fly a 747. Tenet replied that he was briefed about the case on Aug. 23 or 24, 2001.
Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, "I was not in briefings at this time." Bush, he noted, "was on vacation." He added that he didn't see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. "You never talked with him?" Roemer asked. "No," Tenet replied. By the way, for much of August, Tenet too was, as he put it, "on leave."
And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn't talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.
Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.
And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn't with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice—as she has testified—wasn't with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.
A USA Today story, written right before Bush took off, reported that the vacation—scheduled to last from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3—would tie one of Richard Nixon's as the longest that any president had ever taken. A week before he left, Bush made a videotaped message for the Boy Scouts of America. On the tape, he said, "I'll be going to my ranch in Crawford, where I'll work and take a little time off. I think it is so important for the president to spend some time away from Washington, in the heartland of America."
These are President Bush's POLICIES that are still in effect that got Bin Laden. President Bush DOES DESERVE most of the credit. If the liberals and Obama got their way, we would have NOT been in a position to get Bin Laden.
The only thing that Obama did WRONG with this attack was using Navy Seals instead of 100 cruise missiles. Bin Ladin was SURROUNDED by retired military people who AIDED AND GAVE COMFORT to a known terrorist. The entire area should have been vaporized as a warning to countries that harbor terrorists.
You assesment is totally wrong is was PRESIDENT OBAMA that stepped drone attacks and the use of CIA and military special operators in Pakistan.
George Bush Jr. went very easy on the Paskistanis is terms oif seeking cooperation and supporting President Mustaruff even when IT WAS KNOWN THAT ELEMENTS OF THE ISI, PAKISTANI'S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE WAS AIDED AND ABETTING TERRORIST GROUPS.
President Obama has taken a much more aggressive stance in terms of military operations in Pakistan even if that meant pissing off the Pakistani government.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
Islamabad: Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani has demanded United States officials that reduce CIA operatives and special operations force working in Pakistan, besides stops drone attacks in northwest Pakistan, New York Times reported.
The demand that the United States scale back its presence is the immediate fallout of the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a CIA security officer who killed two men in broad daylight during a mugging in January, Pakistani and American officials said in interviews.
In all, about 335 American personnel — CIA officers and contractors and Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a Pakistani official closely involved in the decision. The cuts threatened to badly hamper American efforts — either through drone strikes or Pakistani military training — to combat militants who use Pakistan as a base to fight American forces in Afghanistan and plot terrorist attacks abroad.
The reductions were personally demanded by the chief of the Pakistan army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, said Pakistani and American officials, who requested anonymity while discussing the sensitive issue.
SAD/SOG has been very active "on the ground" inside Pakistan targeting al-Qaeda operatives for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Predator strikes and along with USSOCOM elements they have been training Pakistani Special Service Group Commandos.[144] Before leaving office, President George W. Bush authorized SAD's successful killing of eight senior al-Qaeda operatives via targeted air strikes.[145] Among those killed were the mastermind of a 2006 plot to detonate explosives aboard planes flying across the Atlantic Rashid Rauf and the man thought to have planned the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing on September 20, 2008 that killed 53 people.[146][147] The CIA Director authorized the continuation of these operations and on January 23, SAD/SOG successfully killed 20 terrorists in a hideout in northwestern Pakistan. Some experts assess that the CIA Director Leon Panetta has been more aggressive in conducting paramilitary operations in Pakistan than his predecessor.[148] A Pakistani security official stated that other strikes killed at least 10 insurgents, including five foreign nationals and possibly “a high-value target” such as a senior al-Qaeda or Taliban official.[149] On February 14, the CIA drone killed 27 taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in a missile strike in south Waziristan, a militant stronghold near the Afghan border where al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri were believed to be hiding.[150]
MQ-9 Reaper
In a National Public Radio (NPR) report dated February 3, 2008, a senior official stated that al-Qaeda has been "decimated" by SAD/SOG's air and ground operations. This senior U.S. counter-terrorism official goes on to say, "The enemy is really, really struggling. These attacks have produced the broadest, deepest and most rapid reduction in al-Qaida senior leadership that we've seen in several years."[151] President Obama's CIA Director Leon Panetta stated that SAD/SOG's efforts in Pakistan have been "the most effective weapon" against senior al-Qaeda leadership.[152][153]
These covert attacks have increased significantly under President Obama, with as many at 50 al-Qaeda militants being killed in the month of May 2009 alone.[154][155][156] In June 2009, sixty Taliban fighters were killed while at a funeral to bury fighters that had been killed in previous CIA attacks.[157] On July 22, 2009, National Public Radio reported that U.S. officials believe Saad bin Laden, a son of Osama bin Laden, was killed by a CIA strike in Pakistan. Saad bin Laden spent years under house arrest in Iran before traveling last year to Pakistan, according to former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell. It's believed he was killed sometime this year. A senior U.S. counter-terrorism said U.S. intelligence agencies are "80 to 85 percent" certain that Saad bin Laden is dead.[158]
If the people abroad could vote in U.S. presidential elections maybe we'd care. Since they can't....not so much.
Trust me when I tell you: We could not care less about the opinion of people from insignificant little speck on the map countries like Denmark.
Don't worry though....next time you have any kind of disaster and need help the most powerful country in the world will be there for you.
I cannot put into words how much this small minded, short sighted attitude angers me. It is so reminiscent of the town bully and braggart who talks big until his ass is against the wall and all the "insignificant little specks" aren't around to save it. What a ****ing joke.
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.
The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.
Quote:
Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."
The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.' "
Now this is truly "Walking Softly And Carrying A Truly Big Stick"
Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.
His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.
With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.
Famous Quotes
<a href="http://www.1-famous-quotes.com">Famous Quotes</a>
Now this is truly "Walking Softly And Carrying A Truly Big Stick"
First, I'm not trying to play politics with this. I credit Obama for how he handled it. Secondly, do you really think President Bush would have said not to go after him?
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