Obama Deserves Full Credit For Killing Osama bin Laden--Using Information Gleaned By Bush Policies

The more I am reporting on the raid that killed #OBL the more you really have to hand it to Obama. That was a risky call, and he made it.
Eli Lake

Eli Lake is of course absolutely correct: Obama is the president and he made the decision to go ahead and take out the terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.

The fact that there are people who are more begrudging in giving credit may be due to the fact that in making that decision, Obama appears to have gone against the same values that he not only claimed he represented, but also that he faulted others for not having.


Israel Matzav explains Why Obama can't take too much credit for Osama, quoting from an article back in 2009:

The president also said he was "absolutely convinced" he had acted correctly in banning tough interrogation techniques including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, and in making public the Bush administration memos detailing their use on terrorist suspects. "Not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees ... but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are."

Obama has come under heavy criticism for his actions from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans. They have urged Obama to release memos they say will show the tough methods were successful in obtaining information.

Obama told reporters he has read the documents Cheney and others are referring to but said they are classified and declined to discuss their details. In a White House exchange with House Republican leader John Boehner last week, Obama said the record was equivocal.

Who needs mere memos to show how successful those memos were when you have the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden? But the fact remains that the techniques approved by the Bush administration and deprecaed by Obama made locating bin Laden possible.

Israel Matzav is not the only one to note the questions raised bin Laden's assassination by the Obama administration. Peter Wehner has Three Questions about Bin Laden’s Killing

(a) which Bush-era policies, if any, helped lead to the death of Osama bin Laden;
(b) which Bush-era policies that Obama opposed made bin Laden’s death possible; and
(c) what would have happened to bin Laden if he had in fact been captured rather than killed and Attorney General Eric Holder had his way (a national security official told Reuters that the U.S. special forces team that hunted down bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him) [emphasis added].

That last point should be answered: wouldn't the capture of bin Laden have been "consistent with our values...consistent with who we are"? Or was the policy established by Obama himself for trying terrorists as criminals a potential risk that would have given bin Laden a soapbox and given him only more influence?

Bottom line: congratulating Obama on a job well done does not lessen debt of gratitude to the Bush administration that did the hard--and unpopular--work of making the killing of Osama bin Laden possible.

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