Gateway Pundit Fail: So Much for that Gutsy Call
Oh dear lord. Well, I don’t need to tell you that Jim “Dim” Hoft is at it again. Anything he can do to defame Obama for making the call to send in a team of highly skilled military operatives into a compound that may or may not have been occupied by Osama bin Laden, he most certainly will. He quotes an article from The Australian which reads:
Hovering over the compound, heavily armed US Navy SEALs scrambled expertly down ladders on to Pakistani soil as Pentagon officials in Virginia watched the events unfold by video link from a camera in an unmanned drone flying over the site.
But this did not happen last week, and the target was not Osama bin Laden.
It was 2006 and the man in the American’s sights was bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is still believed to be hiding within or close to Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The little-known operation in Pakistan’s remote Bajaur Agency near the Afghan border, ultimately unsuccessful, is rarely talked about and was never publicly claimed by the US administration.
…He said yet another operation occurred in 2008 just over the Afghan border in South Waziristan, in which three US special operations officers raided a madrassa suspected of being used as a base from which insurgents were firing on coalition forces.
Let’s take the first incident. It occurred here. The middle of nowhere. The courage it takes to send a stealth helicopter into a remote mountain is minimal. To then fail is worse. The second operation took place in Waziristan, on the other side of the border, still in a remote, generally unpopulated area.
So, what about the OBL compound? Not only was it in a Military Center of Paskitan that is well populated, there was nothing known about it. In Obama’s 60 Minutes interview, he said there was no line of sight into the compound, nothing was known about how it was built. There could have been fake walls, triggered explosives, etc (not that it couldn’t be true for the other cases as well). The point is, we didn’t even know OBL was there. It could’ve been a Saudi Prince for all we know, and the ramifications for breaking into his compound would have been horrific (I mean imagine Jim’s wailing if THAT happened). The point is, he took a risk, and he came out right.
And, it likely didn’t take Bush 5 months before he made the decision to run the operation.
Well, Jim, when it’s your perogitive to send our military’s best with minimal info about the possible location of an international terrorist, take as little time as you want. I’m glad Obama collected as much intelligence as he did so that he could be sure we were right, and not just lucky.