So it took ten years to find him?

[quinnox]

I don't see why this is such a great and astonishing achievement. We have the most ridiculous military budget every year that runs into hundreds billions, we have spy satellites roaming the earth constantly, we have the most sophisticated military hardware and intelligence gathering machine, and we couldn't find this guy, the number one terrorist, for ten years.

Sorry but I don't see how this is some great victory. We should have got him a loooong time ago.

[villager]

1. it's a good question -- I wish the inevitable unrec wasn't so predictably sad

...and telling.

[Bluebear]

2. On the other hand, it took Obama 2 years to do what Bush could not in 8 years.

[Drunken Irishman]

3. Technically, it only really took two...

Because we all know Bush wasn't looking for him.

[kenny blankenship]

4. You have to consider the possibility that we weren't looking all that hard for several yrs

Bush pronounced himself uninterested in OBL's whereabouts just a few months after deposing the Taliban, and just before turning his laser-like incompetence towards Iraq.

[FrenchieCat]

5. More like 2.4 years....well, they had to get their sea-legs.

and stop the economic collapse first.

[speedoo]

6. There was no competence in the White House for 8 of those years.

So it really took two years.

[rabs]

7. Actually it was more than 10 years

Bill Clinton tried to kill OBL on Aug. 20, 1998 when he ordered cruise missiles fired at a compound near Khost, Afghanistan. OBL was not there. The same day cruise missiles struck a pharma plant linked to OBL in Khartoum, Sudan.

Clinton had been trying to off OBL since 1996, after al Qaida was connected to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

------- snips -----------

Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

Within days of the August 1998 embassy bombings, the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency pinned responsibility on bin Laden's organization.

With only Attorney General Janet Reno dissenting, Clinton directed two retaliatory strikes on Aug. 20. One, near the Afghan town of Khost, was timed to kill bin Laden and his associates in their beds at 10 p.m. local time. It missed, the CIA said afterward, by a few hours. The other demolished a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that the CIA had linked to attempted production of chemical weapons for bin Laden.

Domestically and globally, Clinton National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lamented recently, the missile attack came to be regarded -- wrongly, they argued -- "as the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton presidency." Apart from the "public relations battering," Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's deputy counterterrorism chief at the time, wrote later, the episode inflicted a "broader blow . . . on the perceived integrity of U.S. intelligence and U.S. counterterrorist efforts generally."

From Washington Post, Wednesday, December 19, 2001, longish article but interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A62725-2001Dec18

[oldtime dfl_er]

8. Remember, Bush wasn't "that concerned" about him way back in 2002

From a March 13, 2002, press conference:

Q: But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

BUSH: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.


source: http://mediamatters.org/research/200410140007

[Raine]

9. It SHOULD'VE been long ago but Bush didn't really look so

it only took 2years. Bush never made a serious effort it suited him to keep OBL alive and a boogeyman to scare Americans with and take away our rights.

[ReturnoftheDjedi]

10. it's a victory because we should have found him long ago. but we found him yesterday

[Hannah Bell]

11. yeah, he's been living there apparently since 2005, we have spy planes & spy satellites

& an international network of spies & informers, we spend billions, but we just couldn't find him, he's too smart.

[pnwmom]

12. Bush didn't try very hard. He pulled most of the troops out of Afghanistan

in order to fight the war in Iraq.

Afterwards, he was quoted as saying Bin Laden wasn't important anymore. He felt Bin Laden had been contained.

When Obama won, he promised to wind down the Iraq war but to put more troops into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden. And that's what he did. At some point Bin Laden moved into Pakistan, but Obama was determined to get him wherever he was.

[fujiyama]

13. There is something

sad and pathetic when it takes over a trillion dollars (the size of many countries' entire GDP!) and thousands of lives to find ONE tall bearded man, especially when it was fairly well known which region he was hiding out in.

Then again, I gotta figure if that much money is being spent with no results, either someone is purposely not doing their job (likely in the case of 8 years prior to Obama), or it is a matter of criminally gross incompetence and negligence. I think we finally had the focus on this in recent years that it deserved.

[johnaries]

14. Nope! It took 2 years.

Bush was never serious about finding him, he just used it as an excuse to invade Iraq. He pretty much admitted it.

[JI7]

15. i don't think they were looking for him for the first 8 years

at least not seriously. see tora bora and maybe they didn't want him.