IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS

Last night on O’Reilly, Chairman of the House Committee for Homeland Security, Rep. Peter King(R-NY) said that road that led the CIA to OBL's compound was paved by his most trusted aide whose name was obtained in 2005 from information coerced from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as a result of his being water boarded. But I thought to myself ‘King is a Republican politician and he is on O’Reilly, so how credible was his statement?’

So, I googled when KSM’s water boarding took place and found it was done 183 times in March 2005. Then this morning’s NYT (my favorite news rag, not!) ran an article:

Clues Gradually Led to the Location of Qaeda Chief
By MARK MAZZETTI, HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER
The raid in Pakistan was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence (Yes Martha, the NYT wrote this!)

So I skipped to the middle paragraphs of the article, because experience has taught me that the NYT buries the stuff they do not want you to know at the middle or end of its oft times tedious, in this case, 4 page screed. Sure enough, this is some of what I found hidden in the NYT article to corroborate Rep. King’s assertion:

Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the world’s most feared terrorist, the C.I.A. had begun compiling a detailed dossier about the major players inside his global terror network.


It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation (aka torture) sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on. (I guess torture can work.)

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War (maybe Bush didn’t lie...remember the NYT wrote this, not me), and the intense criticism for using water boarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics(aka liberal media, Democrats and lib Republicans) said amounted to torture.

By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations.(under Bush) The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.



With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. (in 2007) With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages (aka BUSH’S PATRIOT ACT) between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name.

Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself.


Yesterday, in a note to a friend, I wrote:

“President Obama did his part perfectly, but it was
on the shoulders of the people who came before him.”

Even that liberal rag, the NYT agrees with me.

And as much as O campaigned against and as hard as O tried to get rid of the Bush Policies, in the end, for the past two years and to the consternation of his liberal base, Obama relied upon and carried out Bush’s defense/security policies, which enabled Obama to be in a position to finally devise the mission to get bin Laden. The Pres even made the critical and courageous decision for the US to go it alone (like a cowboy) without a consensus from our allies (very presidential and I was proud of him for understanding his role as a leader), which he said he would always acquire before ordering military intervention.

In the final analysis, for the first time in his presidency President Obama acted like the President of the United States and not some ordinary slimy politician. For his effort he received his first “A.” Hopefully O likes the way getting an “A” feels, so much so that he will try to do it again with the major problems he faces domestically, the economy, gas prices, healthcare, Medicare, Social Security, etc.

Albiwan..