THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained this new political ad that knocks President Obama for saying the al Qaeda terrorist attack in Libya is a bump in the road:
A central tenet of President Obama’s foreign policy platform is that al Qaeda is “on the path to defeat.” The death of Osama bin Laden, drone strikes in northern Pakistan and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, and Obama’s more conciliatory approach to the Muslim world have all supposedly come together to sound the death knell for al Qaeda.
During his acceptance speech last night, President Obama claimed, “I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and we have.”
Yesterday, when introducing President Obama at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, said that the president "led the mission that brought Osama bin Laden to justice":
Pakistani officials have reportedly captured Naamen Meziche, an al Qaeda operative with an extensive dossier. Meziche plays a significant role in an article (“Al Qaeda’s Network in Iran”) that I co-authored with my colleague Benjamin Weinthal earlier this year. Reading through the articles describing Meziche’s capture that have been published so far, at least two aspects of his story are being either missed entirely or underreported in the American press.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Bill Gertz has a piece about Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Rodriguez warns that the CIA is “out of the business” of interrogating senior al Qaeda terrorists and this will eventually lead to a hole in America’s counterterrorism efforts, if it hasn’t already. Time will tell if Rodriguez is right. The Obama administration is betting that he isn’t, and that by killing select al Qaeda leaders in drone strikes the terrorist threat is fully neutralized. There are significant problems with the Obama administration’s approach, even absent the prickly debate over interrogations.
Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, reportedly blasted the national security team in the Obama White House for blabbing about the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. "Shut the f--- up," Gates told Tom Donilon, who is now Obama's national security adviser, according to a book by New York Times reporter David Sanger.
Even before the celebrations a year ago had ended, terrorism experts were debating the strategic significance of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs. Some argued that bin Laden would prove irreplaceable to al Qaeda; others claimed he had been in hiding so long he was operationally and strategically irrelevant to the war on terror. Of course, it was too soon to know for sure.
We have been anxiously awaiting the release of the documents captured in Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan compound. According to informed U.S. intelligence officials, thousands of documents were captured in bin Laden’s lair, as was video and other types of media.
Jose Rodriguez, a former National Clandestine Service chief at the CIA, recently made the case that the search for Osama bin Laden was long, hard, and full of twists and turns.
A 101st Airborne Vietnam vet writes to me about the controversy over the Obama campaign ad which suggested that Mitt Romney wouldn't have gone after Osama bin Laden:
I really don't want this to just be a bitchfest by an old fart about the good old days. However ...
There was an ethos among the men of our childhood that:
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen tells NBC that he's worried the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden will now be "spun into election politics" this "political season."
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