OBAMA'S OWN WORDS TRAP HIM:

2008: "Navy Seal Team 6 is Cheney's private assassination team."

2011: "I put together Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Laden."

2008: "Bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and must be captured alive and given a fair trial."

2011: "I authorized Seal Team 6 to kill Bin Laden."

2008: " Guantanamo is entirely unnecessary, and the detainees should not be interrogated."

2011: "Vital intelligence was obtained from Guantanamo detainees that led to our locating Bin Laden."!

JSOC and Seal Team 6: Liberals “Against It” Until They Were “For It”

May 3, 2011 by mayrant

‘Cheney’s assassination squad’ just killed bin Laden

by Mark Hemingway – Washington Examiner – 05/02/2011

It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru. Marc Ambinder has a good report that fills in some of the particulars:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.

Under Bush, JSOC was routinely smeared by the left and placed at the center of many Bush/Cheney conspiracy theories. Specifically, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh alleged it was Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad: 

“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

Now that a Democratic President has employed JSOC to take out Osama bin Laden, will the fever swamps of the Left continue to assert that it’s just a Bush/Cheney plot to run around unjustifiably killing people?

Presdent Obama: Osama bin Laden Dead - Full Video

Barack Hussein Obama's handling Osama bin Laden's body in Islamic tradition

(Reuters) - The United States is ensuring that the body of slain al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition, a U.S. official told reporters on Monday.

WASHINGTON: Former President George W Bush, who was in office at the time of the September 11 attacks and famously said he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive, said on Sunday the death of the al-Qaida leader was a "momentous achievement."  "victory for America."

"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done," Bush said in a statement. 

 

 

Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday in a firefight with covert US forces deep inside Pakistan, prompting President Barack Obama to declare "justice has been done" a decade after the September 11 attacks.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead, and President Barack Obama will announce his death, nearly 10 years after the September 11 attacks in a televised address, a senior US official told AFP.

The death of the reviled US enemy, after a massive manhunt, sparked jubilation across the United States, with a huge crowd gathering outside the White House just before midnight, chanting "USA, USA" and waving American flags as Obama made a sudden and dramatic nationwide address to Americans.

"Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children," Obama said.

Obama said in the historic speech from the White House that he had directed US armed forces to launch an attack against a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on Sunday acting on a lead that first emerged last August.

"A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.

"After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body," the US leader said.

"Justice has been done."

Bin Laden's demise marks the biggest triumph yet in the 10-year US war against terrorism launched after the September 11 attacks, which saw America embroiled in two wars, and changed many aspects of US life.

The operation will also likely go down as one of the most spectacular intelligence operations in US history, and provide a huge morale boost the oft-criticized US covert community.

Former US president George W. Bush who was in office at the time of the September 11 attacks said bin Laden's death was a "momentous" achievement and congratulated Obama and US intelligence and military forces.

"This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001," Bush said in a statement.

"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."

Pakistani intelligence officials also confirmed bin Laden's death.

Obama said he had called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari after bin Laden's death and said cooperation with the uneasy US anti-terror ally had helped lead American forces to bin Laden.

US armed forces have been hunting the Saudi terror kingpin for years, an effort that was redoubled following the attacks by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon which killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001.

A fourth passenger jet crashed in a remote area of Pennsylvania, apparently brought down after passengers revolted and tried to prevent it from reaching its target, assumed to be Washington.

Until Sunday, bin Laden had always managed to evade US armed forces and a massive manhunt, and was most often thought to be hiding out in Pakistan and Afghanistan border areas.

The death of bin Laden will raise huge questions about the future shape of Al-Qaeda and also have steep implications for US security and foreign policy 10 years into a global anti-terror campaign.

It will also provoke fears that the United States and its allies will face retaliation from supporters of bin Laden and other Islamic extremist groups.

Bin Laden's demise will also cast a new complexion on the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, where 100,000 troops are still battling the Taliban and Al-Qaeda after a decade of war.

Bush first said he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive" in the weeks after the September 11 attacks.

Bin Laden was top of America's most wanted list, and was blamed by Washington for masterminding a string of other attacks, including the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Africa in 1998.

He frequently taunted Bush, and Obama after he took office in 2009, with taped messages.

The US dollar rose against the euro and the yen when it emerged that Obama would announce bin Laden's death.

The dollar went up against the euro, which fetched 1.4764 dollars from 1.4864 in earlier trade. The dollar was at 81.66 yen from 81.19 earlier.

The news was welcomed by Americans across the country, even though bin Laden's death was only confirmed shortly before midnight Sunday.

"I'm proud to be an American tonight," Kenneth Specht, a New York firefighter on 9/11, told CNN, paying tribute to the victims of the attacks in New York and Washington.

"Tonight they are first and foremost in our minds," he said.

Amid fears of retaliation by Al-Qaeda or other groups, the US State Department issued a global travel alert to all US citizens.

"The US Department of State alerts US citizens traveling and residing abroad to the enhanced potential for anti-American violence given recent counter-terrorism activity in Pakistan," it said in a statement.

New York's police chief Raymond Kelly meanwhile called the killing of bin Laden a "welcome milestone" for the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks.