I've heard him say many things about al Qaeda, nowhere do I see him saying they're "done".
Most of the usual responses are something like they're "on the road to defeat", "on the run", or "decimated". Perhaps by looking at the definition of "decimated" you'll see he's not really that far off.
dec·i·mate
ˈdesəˌmāt/Submit
verb
past tense: decimated; past participle: decimated
1.
kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.
"the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness"
Most recently,
this is what he's said. In context, not word parsing like the right likes to use:
“We’ve decimated al Qaeda’s top leadership in the border regions around Pakistan, but in Yemen, in Libya, in other of these places – increasingly in places like Syria – what you see is these elements that don’t have the same capacity that a bin Laden or core al Qaeda had, but can still cause a lot of damage, and we’ve got to make sure that we remain vigilant and are focused on preventing them from doing us any harm.”
Jay Carney had
this to say before that:
“There is no question that al-Qaeda the core leadership, the leadership that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 has been decimated, al-Qaeda core in the Af-Pak region has been greatly diminished and is on the run...We have brought continual pressure to bear on both al-Qaeda core and al-Qaeda affiliates. And we have, for a number of years now, made clear that our objective in terms of threat in terms of al-Qaeda has shifted to some of these affiliates.”
It's pretty clear Obama has never said al Qaeda is "done", regardless of how many times the right wants to think he has.
btw...the quotes above are from a right wing rag back in August.
Has Obama done nothing wrong since then that the right has to dredge it up again?
and remember...Obama has succeeded in capturing or killing 7
5% of al Qaeda's leaders, including Osama bin Laden, which has effectively decimated the leadership of the group.
al Qaeda is, fortunately, a loose grouping of affiliated terrorist groups now, as opposed to say...
2006, when someone named
BUSH declared them decimated after the killing of al-Zarqawi.
