Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’

The Weekly Standard

In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, an elite team of 25 American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the walls of a compound just outside the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. CIA analysts had painstakingly tracked a courier to the compound and spent months monitoring the activity inside the walls. They’d concluded, with varying levels of confidence, that the expansive white building at the center of the lot was the hideout of Osama bin Laden.

They were correct. And minutes after the team landed, the search for bin Laden ended with a shot to his head.

The primary objective of Operation Neptune Spear was to capture or kill the leader of al Qaeda. But a handful of those on the ground that night were part of a “Sensitive Site Exploitation” team that had a secondary mission: to gather as much intelligence from the compound as they could.

With bin Laden dead and the building secure, they got to work. Moving quickly—as locals began to gather outside the compound and before the Pakistani military, which had not been notified of the raid in advance, could scramble its response—they shoved armload after armload of bin Laden’s belongings into large canvas bags. The entire operation took less than 40 minutes.

The intelligence trove was immense. At a Pentagon briefing one day after the raid, a senior official described the haul as a “robust collection of materials.” It included 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives, and a dozen cell phones—along with data cards, DVDs, audiotapes, magazines, newspapers, paper files. In an interview on Meet the Press just days after the raid, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, told David Gregory that the material could fill “a small college library.” A senior military intelligence official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on May 7 said: “As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”

In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden documents were primary source material, providing unmediated access to the thinking of al Qaeda leaders expressed in their own words.

Continued Reading

 

Obama To Resign January 1st Amid New Benghazi Revelations

Devvy Kidd

“According to several senior-ranking White House officials, President Barack Obama will resign from office on January 1st 2015, after learning that a so-called “Smoking Gun” story regarding the Benghazi scandal will soon be revealed. Those sources claim Obama will announce his resignation shortly after the midterm elections in November.

“The decision to resign came after reporters from Fox News were allegedly contacted in August by a survivor of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, who came forward with shocking video evidence that Obama, then- White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew, and then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew that an attack on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya was “imminent,” and intentionally ordered key security personnel to leave the facility and travel eight blocks away.

“Sources at Fox News say that the unidentified survivor allegedly recorded a video teleconference on his cell phone in which Lew gave the orders, while Obama and Clinton watched on. “You don’t want a guy like Mitt Romney deciding your budget,” Lew supposedly states in the video, which Fox News has not yet released. “We need to win this thing, and that means we need to make some sacrifices. Let me be clear, no one will be harmed in this. We’re sacrificing a few buckets of paint, that’s all. We just need a little nudge in the polls.”

Andrew Tahmooressi’s Imprisonment Is Something We Should Be Ashamed Of

The American Spectator

What to make of the peculiar situation unfolding just across the border in Tijuana, where U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi languishes in solitary confinement for the crime of mistakenly crossing the border with his personal weapons in his truck on March 31?

Nothing to inspire confidence, for certain. In fact, Tahmooressi’s ordeal might just confirm many of our worst fears about the Obama administration.

The Tahmooressi story sounds more like a schlocky Hollywood script than a real-life tale. Its protagonist is a decorated Marine veteran of two tours of duty in Afghanistan, honorably discharged in 2012 and diagnosed with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); he was moving to the San Diego area specifically for treatment of his PTSD. And Tahmooressi’s ordeal is mind-bogglingly unjust; he mistakenly crossed the border from San Ysidro, California, into Mexico because he missed an interstate exit that would have taken him to dinner with friends. Instead, the twenty-five-year old war hero wound up at a Mexican border station driving a pickup truck full of his possessions, which included two rifles and a pistol, plus ammunition.