Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to Make up his Mind about Bin Laden Mission

"Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to make up his mind about Bin Laden mission"

Monday morning, I had a quote queued up by Jay Leno:
"Donald Trump says he’s President Obama’s worst nightmare. That’s not true. Having to make a decision is Obama’s worst nightmare.”


And I felt a little bad about that, seeing as how he must have made a decision over the take down of bin Laden, right? That quote seems almost prescient, according to the Daily Mail:

Barack Obama kept military commanders hanging by declaring he would 'sleep on it' before taking 16 hours to give the go-ahead to raid Bin Laden's compound.

Hit squads of specialist Navy Seals - who were not even told who they were preparing to capture - had practised the mission at two reconstructions of the terror chiefs sprawling compound.

The mission looked set to be given the all clear last Thursday when analysts confirmed beyond doubt that Bin Laden was in busy town of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan.


"Mr. President, we need a decision."

"Lemme think about it and get back to you!"

But the president stunned officials when he told a national security meeting that he wanted more time to think - and disappeared out of the room.

'I'm not going to tell you what my decision is now - I'm going to go back and think about it some more,' said Obama, according to the New York Times. He then added 'I'm going to make a decision soon.'

The head of the CIA and other senior intelligence officers who were keen to proceed were left tense as they waited for the president's decision.

But the next morning after 16 hours, Obama summoned four top aides to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could speak, the president put his fist on the table and declared 'It's a go'.


Catch that decisiveness? Sixteen hours after he was asked, and with special forces poised to go, he finally is able to pound his fist on his desk, as if he'd just made a leadership decision, rather than what was in all likelihood a consensus of his real advisers!

Whether it was Michelle, or Jeremiah Wright, or Bill Ayers or whom,ever else he trusts, when he left that room to "sleep on it", he demonstrated a variation of "When the going gets tough, the President gets going!" I think Barry wanted to get a consensus of how this would affect him personally and politically.

And did you hear the self serving bit of claptrap from one of Obama's staff? John Brennan, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser:

"We were able to monitor [the operation] in a real-time basis. It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled times in the lives of the people gathered [in the White House] yesterday. The minutes seemed like days."


Poor babies! While men of honor put their lives on the line, a handful of policy wonks sat in cushy chairs in the White House and probably had to subsist on only the White House mess for coffee instead of Starbucks. Such privation! And "the minutes seemed like days."

Now, I want you to compare the remarks of John Brennan to the experience of the men trained, staged and ready to go into battle:

"The minutes seemed like days" to wonks in their comfy chairs. What do you think the minutes felt like for SIXTEEN HOURS while the fighting men who were ready to go at a moments notice, were faced with the reality that the worse thing they were going to encounter was not a traffic jam on the beltway home, but maybe a longer trip in a flag draped coffin?

Funny how Obama never mentioned the sixteen hours it took for him to make a decision, in his "Look at Me, Ain't I wonderful, I got Obama" speech?

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.

8 comments:

  1. So I wonder how much polling data they can get in 16 hours?

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  2. Small? AFCSME or AFL-CIO?

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  3. Sounds like you're working with inside information. You really are a Dem aren't you?

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  4. I'm willing to cut him more slack, Proof.

    If this had ended in failure (thank God it didn't!) can you imagine the enraged shitstorm that would have rained down on Obama's head? Not to mention the guilt...

    But back on the same page as you, yeah, I though the whole "drama of the situation room" was way overplayed. We get it. It was so gripping that even Biden was unable to fall asleep.

    Reminds me of the time I returned to Al Udeid from Iraq, ears still ringing from a mortar attack I got caught in, and listening to someone talking to a loved one on the phone about how nerve wracking it was to be in a war zone (with a pool and a Dairy Queen)

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  5. For the uninitiated, the "R.E." stands for "Rear Echelon". You can figure out the rest!

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