BDBoop
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Barack Obama’s decision to go after Osama Bin Laden: how the president overruled his advisers in ordering the assassination - Slate Magazine
I don't want to drop this at the tail end of Mud dude's thread (sorry, name escapes me) because I feel it's more newsworthy than that.
I don't want to drop this at the tail end of Mud dude's thread (sorry, name escapes me) because I feel it's more newsworthy than that.
Far from the no-brainer that Romney depicts, the secret, high-level discussions leading up to the raid were fraught with intense debate and uncertainty—and Obama’s final decisions, on both whether and how to attack, went against some of his top advisers’ recommendations.
Vice President Joe Biden revealed a few months ago that he had urged Obama not to mount the assault. Bergen and Allison report that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates joined him in the dissent—and they explain why.
In the weeks leading up to the decision, a group of counterterrorism officials, after conducting a “red-team” exercise of what could go wrong in such an attack, estimated that there was only a 40 percent chance Osama Bin Laden was actually in the compound. The CIA put the odds at 60 percent. Bergen quotes Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, as telling the president that “the circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.”
Faced with these uncertainties, a president could have been forgiven for holding back. Certainly, a decision to go ahead was no “slam dunk.” More to the point, if Obama had given the order, and it turned out that Bin Laden wasn’t there, it is an absolute sure thing that, one year later, Romney and his allies would still be lampooning Obama for his foolhardy recklessness and accusing him of letting the world’s No. 1 terrorist slip through our fingers, perhaps this time for good.
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