This weekend we marked 10 years since SEAL Team 6 dispatched Osama bin Laden to another realm.
And on that anniversary, the one man in power at the time who opposed that decision seems to want to whitewash history.
In a brief statement about bin Laden’s death in May 2011, President Joe Biden said, “Ten years ago, I joined President Obama and members of our national security team, crowded into the Situation Room to watch as our military delivered long-awaited justice to Osama bin Laden. It is a moment I will never forget — the intelligence professionals who had painstakingly tracked him down; the clarity and conviction of President Obama in making the call; the courage and skill of our team on the ground.”
“It had been almost ten years since our nation was attacked on 9/11, and we went to war in Afghanistan, pursuing al Qaeda and its leaders. We followed bin Laden to the gates of hell — and we got him,” Biden added.
“We kept the promise to all those who lost loved ones on 9/11: that we would never forget those we had lost, and that the United States will never waver in our commitment to prevent another attack on our homeland and to keep the American people safe.”
Biden closed the statement by adding that America’s longest war is over and U.S troops will come home from Afghanistan and that the U.S. “will remain vigilant about the threat from terrorist groups that have metastasized around the world.”
But the rhetorical bravado exhibited in the whole “gates of hell” comment is vintage Biden.
His unwillingness to acknowledge that he was a contrarian on the question of whether we should take out bin Laden not only masks his own position at the time, it allows him to pretend he was on the right side of history.
In this case, some “fact-checkers” at least took Biden to task for changing his story and seeking to change history.
PolitiFact noted in January 2020, a time when Biden was still treading water in the crowded Democratic primary, that the former vice president was being “mostly false” in denying to a reporter that he had discouraged Obama from pulling the trigger on Osama.
Politifact cited Obama and several of his former key staff — White House spokesman Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, CIA Director Leon Panetta – as well as Biden himself as the sources for saying that he tried to dissuade Obama from taking out bin Laden.
Obama, in his own memoir, wrote, “Joe (Biden) also weighed in against the raid, arguing that given the enormous consequences of failure, I should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound.”
But by 2015, Biden had flipped the script, PolitiFact noted. Now, he was telling crowds that he had told Obama to “go.”
“Biden has created confusion with different accounts about what he told Obama,” PolitiFact noted in explaining its ruling.
Over this past weekend, with “we got him” bombast, Biden only added to the confusion by suggesting he was fully on board with taking down the world’s most notorious terrorist.
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