"On June 2, 2009, just over four months into his presidency, Obama had signed a memo to CIA Director Leon Panetta stating “in order to ensure that we have expanded every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice” bin Laden."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54093.htmlAnd this is another 2008 campaign promise kept by Obama to the word!
TOM BROKAW: Next question for Senator Obama. It comes from the F Section, and it’s from Katie Hamm. Katie?
KATIE: Should the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and not pursue al Qaeda terrorists who maintain bases there, or should we ignore their borders and pursue our enemies, like we did in Cambodia during the Vietnam War?
SEN. OBAMA: Well, Katie, it’s a terrific question.
And we have a difficult situation in Pakistan. I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn’t finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda.
So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there…
But I do believe that we have to change our policies with Pakistan. We can’t coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars, and then he’s making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I have said is we’re going encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our non-military aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.
And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.
We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/may/01/obama-vowed-kill-osama-bin-laden http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej8HpXcR6_sThis is a major policy change from
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1005815&mesg_id=1005815">"I just don't spend that much time on him to be honest with you." -- George W. Bush, 2002