Since the only topic you guys seem to be interested in is not "UBL is dead , yah!" but Obama needs more credit, I'll give him some.
Perhaps we knew your guys would be crawling out of the woodwork praising Dubya for his tight work.
Indeed. It was an amazing job of putting the pieces together stretching across years. Starting with getting the courier's nickname through our interrogation of prisoners in 2004, to connecting that nickname to a real name in 2007, to finding the guy and tracking him down to that compound. From there, discovering Bin Ladin's courier lives in a compound with no phone or internet?
And he was taken out just like I had hoped he would; shot in the head by SEALS. Far better than merely dying of complications from diabetes or renal failure. And he even revealed himself a coward at the end, using one of his own wives as a human shield. It was all goddamn perfect!
It's really been a great day!
That would be an amazing feat, even for Dubya. Especially since the compound wasn't even built until 2005.
As far as you mimicking Cheney on the torture stuff,
not really...
Let's revisit history, again, by going to the best source, Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel. The waterboarding of KSM, all 183 instances, occurred in March, 2003. The torture of al Libi happened in early 2002, after his November, 2001 capture.
As Marcy explained in an e-mail:
Assuming they got the courier's name in 2005 or 2006, per reports, it happened 2 years or more after KSM's waterboarding.
Which would say KSM withheld this information under waterboarding.
And given how much time it took to actually get from the courier to the compound (presumably about 4 years), both KSM and al-Libi didn't give all that much on the courier(s).
KSML was waterboarded 183 times, presumably without revealing the name of the courier. And, since it took 183 tries, the efficacy of the whole enterprise can only be questioned. [Update: The following applies to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, not to Abu Faraj al-Libi, who is sourced in the AP story. The lesson about the effectiveness of torture remains unchanged, but the timeline for Abu Faraj al-Libi is slightly different. See emptywheel for more on that.] But what the torture of al Libi "revealed" is even more damning for the pro-torturers's case.
Someday, somehow, somewhere, you guys will give up the Bush/Cheney praise and realize what a complete fraud they were.
