Why Did Obama Announce Osama Takedown?
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WND.com - September 5, 2012
On May 2, 2011, at 4:18 PM, Washington time, the Navy Seals came face to face for the first time with Osama bin Laden. By 4:20 PM, Osama was no more. He had ceased to be. He had expired and gone to meet his maker.
What happened in the hours subsequent to the killing mystifies everyone who has reviewed the data, most thoughtfully Richard Miniter in his excellent new book, “Leading from Behind.”
A little more than seven hours after bin Laden’s demise, Miniter writes, Obama “told the world that bin Laden was dead” and, by doing so, “shocked the intelligence community.”
The shock came in the form of a lengthy speech that was written with Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, posted on the teleprompter and rehearsed. There was nothing spontaneous about it.
“The strangest thing about the speech is that Obama delivered it at all,” writes Miniter. “Why tell the world that bin Laden was gone and take away the element of surprise that would have allowed special forces to swoop in on other al-Qaeda leaders around the world?”
Although all of the intelligence analysts Miniter contacted share his puzzlement, none can answer the question of why Obama would “throw away the military advantages of secrecy and surprise.”
If political considerations motivated Obama, one former White House official mused, “I don’t know why we didn’t hold on to the news until October 2012.”
The hasty announcement also led to many misstatements of fact. So many of these errors had to be modified or retracted that they diminished the power of the speech and the glory that accrued to Obama.
Webmaster's Note: Jack Cashill's Book-TV presentation of "Deconstructing Obama" can be viewed at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1
Editor's note: For a more complete account of this phenomenon, read Jack Cashill's amazing book, "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture.
