Barack Obama’s reelection campaign of 2012 is increasingly looking like Michael Dukakis’s campaign of 1988, in which the conspicuously Dove-ish Massachusetts liberal governor tried bolstering his commander-in-chief creds by being photographed wearing a helmet and riding in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank.

First, there was the attempt to portray Mitt Romney as mean to dogs for taking his Irish setter along on a vacation trip in a rooftop carrier which exploded in a nationwide gale of jokes after Jim Treacher pointed out that Barack Obama had referred, in his famous autobiography, to eating dog as a child in Indonesia.

Then, there was the short-lived attempt to push voters’ buttons by having various democrats note that Mitt Romney was a descendant of Mormon polygamists. This one also failed when Republicans responded that it was true that, like many Mormons, Mitt Romney had fairly remote polygamous ancestry, a great-grandfather, but Barack Obama’s father was also a polygamist.

The latest attempt on the part of the Obama campaign to gain advantage involved putting Bill Clinton in a video to praise Barack Obama for making the oh-so-very-difficult decision to send in the Navy SEALs to take out Bin Ladin.

The response to what is being referred to as the Obama campaign “spiking the football” has been a combination of criticism of the president for exploiting the bravery of members of the US military and ridicule.

Mitt Romney retorted that even Jimmy Carter would have made the same decision.

John McCain, in a follow-up rejoinder, delivered a withering response.

I’ve had the great honor of serving in the company of heroes. And, you know the thing about heroes, they don’t brag.”

And, worst news of all for the Obama team, this particular campaign ploy provoked pushback from former SEALs.

Daily Mail:

Serving and former US Navy SEALs have slammed President Barack Obama for taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and accused him of using Special Forces operators as ‘ammunition’ for his re-election campaign. ...

Ryan Zinke, a former Commander in the US Navy who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, said: ‘The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call.

‘I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice – it was a broader team effort.’

Mr Zinke, who is now a Republican state senator in Montana, added that MR Obama was exploiting bin Laden’s death for his re-election bid. ‘The President and his administration are positioning him as a war president using the SEALs as ammunition.

Some political observers think many SEALs are so infuriated by the Obama Administration’s exploitation of their valor for political gain that they are bitterly angry. SEALs commonly believe that, from the time of the actual operation, the White House has shamelessly used the Abbottabad raid, hastily and irresponsibly making details public, and placing its own interests above the safety and security of SEAL team members and American long-term strategic goals.

There is active speculation that an organized group of SEALs may play an active role later in the campaign to “Swift Boat” Barack Obama.

Algemeiner reported several days ago:

The website WikiLeaks has continued releasing for a fourth day what it says will eventually be 5 million e-mails sent between July 2004 and late December 2011 by the private intelligence company Stratfor. ...

Wikileaks claims that Osama bin Laden’s body was transferred to Dover, Delaware on a CIA plane. An email dated May 2, 2011 states the body will then be moved “…to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.” Two US Air Force Airlift Wings are based at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware. In another email dated May 2, 2011 a Stratfor staff member expresses doubt that Bin Laden’s corpse was buried at sea and mentions, “We would want to photograph, DNA, fingerprint, etc. His body is a crime scene and I don’t see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen.”

According to leaked secret files of Statfor, a US security agency, Osama was not buried at sea in an Islamic ceremony but his body was shifted to the military mortuary in Dover, DE, on a CIA plane.

Then it was shifted to the medical institute of US armed forces in Maryland for examination.

At 5:26 a.m. on May 2, the morning after Barack Obama announced the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email that said: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.”

Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, followed that up at 5:51 a.m. with an email titled “[alpha] Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane” that said: “Than [sic] onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.”

At 1:36 p.m. Burton replied to a thread named “Re: OBL’s corpse” with the message: “Body is Dover bound, should be here by now.”

That contradicts the official story that bin Laden’s body was handled in accordance with Islamic tradition and released into the sea from a U.S. Navy vessel.

If this is true, we need to elect another president from Yale who can see to it that Osama’s skull winds up (along with those of other enemies of the United States like Geronimo) preserved for long-term private appreciation and ridicule inside a certain windowless building on High Street in New Haven, Connecticut.

A new book, SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden, by Chuck Pfarrer based on interviews with Navy SEALS who participated in the strike that eliminated Osama bin Ladin apparently offers a number of details contradicting the White House version of events.

The Week:

The US Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin Laden – codenamed ‘Bert’ – are angry over inaccuracies in the official account of the al-Qaeda mastermind’s death, a new book featuring interviews with the men claims.

A former commander of Seal Team 6, which carried out the killing, Chuck Pfarrer, interviewed many of the men who took part for his new account, Seal Target Geronimo, reports The Sunday Times.

One of the biggest revelations is the claim that the White House blew valuable intelligence gathered during the mission by announcing Bin Laden’s death too soon, giving “time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole” according to Pfarrer.

The Seals are also angry that the White House described the operation as a ‘kill mission’. First, says Pfarrer, Bin Laden was killed within 90 seconds of US Navy landing in his compound – though the version of events given to the press suggested his death came towards the end of the 38-minute mission.

He was killed not after a protracted gun battle – but in a clinical operation where just 12 shots were fired.

Second, the Seals were fully prepared to take him alive. “I’ve been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words ‘kill mission’”, Pfarrer said. “It’s a [Washington insider’s] fantasy word.

“If it was a kill mission you don’t need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades,” he added, explaining they were forced to shoot Bin Laden as he reached for his AK-47.

Daily Mail:

[T]he President was not nearly that engaged – and was actually playing golf until 20 minutes before the operation began in earnest. ...

Mr Pfarrer says the President’s role was largely inflated and suggests he stayed out on the golf course for so long so he could distance himself in case it went wrong. Mr Pfarrer writes: ‘If this had completely gone south, he was in a position to disavow.’

He says the White House photographs did not show the moment that Bin Laden was killed, but the moment a helicopter went down, which happened after the shooting. ...

The book also gives a dramatic new insight into what happened during the 1am raid, during which only 12 bullets were fired.

Within 90 seconds of their helicopter landing, the SEALs saw Bin Laden slam his bedroom door shut. Two SEALs burst in and saw Bin Laden and one of his four wives, Amal, who shouted: ‘It’s not him!’

Contrary to White House statements that he was unarmed, Bin Laden had a gun next to him. As he shoved his wife at the SEALs, four shots were fired.

The first round whistled past Bin Laden’s face. The second grazed his wife’s calf. Mr Pfarrer claims: ‘Two 5.56mm Predator bullets slammed into him. One struck him next to his breastbone, blowing apart his aorta. The last went through his skull.’

He also reveals that Bin Laden was known as Bert to the Seals, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was Ernie – a reference to the Sesame Street puppets.

Downing a helicopter apparently by a rocket-propelled grenade, which is not a standard anti-aircraft weapon, indicates that the Taliban has perfected methods for shooting down low-flying American helicopters with the basic weapons in their possession.
As the investigation begins on the incident, there are conflicting reports about the mission performed by the men aboard.

According to a US military source, they were returning from an operation in which eight insurgents were believed to have been killed. A Taliban insurgent present at the crash scene told Western correspondents the helicopter was not leaving but arriving: “What we saw was that when we were having our pre-dawn (Ramadan) meal, Americans landed some soldiers for an early raid. The other helicopter also came for the raid,” Mohammad Walil Wardag said. “We were outside our rooms on a veranda and saw this helicopter flying very low, it was hit by a rocket and it was on fire. It started coming down and crashed just away form our home close to the river.”

The New York Times reports a story leaked by US intelligence officials which connects the dots between the late Osama bin Laden and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency.

The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.

The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.

Hat tip to Grouchy Old Cripple via Vanderleun.

US News has the story via two military equipment blogs. It was the HK 416 which delivered a double dose of “77gr. of justice.”

The biggest secret in the special operations community—what gun did SEALs from “DevGru” kill Osama bin Laden with—has been revealed. Two military gear blogs, citing multiple insider sources, credit the highly reliable HK416 rifle, an M-16 type weapon, with the “double tap” of 5.56 mm bullets to bin Laden’s head.

While the military isn’t talking about what SEALs from United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, formerly SEAL Team Six, carried in, two sites—Military Times Gear Scout and Soldier Systems—said the gun used was the German made, Delta Force designed Heckler & Koch rifle used by several militaries.

“I’ve just heard from a SOCOM vet,” says Military Times “He tells me the stack of SEAL assaulters from Red team that went through Osama bin Laden’s bedroom door were running HK416s.”

The Daily Mail reports that a small American firm producing special gun lubricants is claiming that Osama bin Laden will not be entering the Mussulman’s Paradise or receiving any 72 virgins.

Was Osama bin Laden shot with a bullet soaked in pork fat, denying him a place in paradise?

Yes, if one rather shady website, that peddles gun oil containing liquefied pig fat, is to be believed.

The makers of Silver Bullet Gun Oil claim it contains 13 per cent USDA liquefied pig fat thus making the product ‘a highly effective counter-Islamic terrorist force multiplier.’

The apparent owner of the gun oil site, who goes by the name ‘The Midnight Rider,’ explains how the pig fat will transfer onto anything the bullet strikes.

This ‘effectively denies entry to Allah’s paradise to an Islamo-fascist terrorist,’ Rider adds.

The oil, which costs $8.95 for 4oz, apparently puts the ‘fear of death into them (terrorists)’.

In Islam consumption of pork is forbidden, but the Quran also states that if one is forced to consume the meat then they are guiltless and therefore not disqualified from paradise.

The website also notes its customers include members of the U.S. military.

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Silver Bullet Gun Oil web-site
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I wish I owned shares in Silver Bullet Gun Oil, because sales are definitely going to skyrocket as the word of the availability of this useful product gets around.

Hat tip to Bruce Kessler.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

William McGurn, in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, observed that catching up with bin Laden failed to bring out the best in the president and inevitably caused him a major political problem by bringing up the issue of his past statements and policies on interrogation.

Sunday night.. Mr. Obama rushed a national address on the bin Laden killing. Notwithstanding his later comment to “60 Minutes” that Americans do not “spike the football,” the president appears incapable of doing what would serve him best here: Letting the action speak for itself, and heaping praise on his predecessors (Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush) for their contributions. Instead we got the implication that no one was trying to get bin Laden until Barack Obama arrived in town.

At the same time, all the president’s men were put in the position of denying something the Navy SEALs had made obvious: They owed much of their success to information resulting from policies authorized by President Bush but opposed by Mr. Obama. Thus Leon Panetta found himself bobbing and weaving when NBC’s Brian Williams kept asking the CIA chief whether waterboarding had anything to do with finding bin Laden. When you’ve lost Brian Williams, you’re really lost.

In the end, Mr. Panetta allowed that intelligence often comes from “a lot” of sources. In the past, Mr. Obama and his team could get away with this kind of non-answer, mostly because the connections between Mr. Bush’s policies and his success in keeping us safe from another attack were highly abstract. The bin Laden raid, however, has now thrown them all into sharp relief.

During the 2008 campaign, for example, Mr. Obama asserted it was “the fact” that Mr. Bush “championed a strategy that distracted us from capturing bin Laden, that focused on Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11.” Now, however, we learn that we discovered the courier’s close tie to bin Laden through a top al Qaeda operative, Hassan Ghul, captured in 2004 . . . in Iraq.

During the campaign, we learned that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogations were “torture” plain and simple—”something that undermines our long-term security.” Now we learn that these interrogations in fact gave us operable clues about the courier’s identity.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama told a crowd at an Iowa rally that he was “frustrated with warrantless wiretaps and the undermining of our civil liberties”—and he voted against allowing the National Security Agency to listen in on foreign terrorists calling the U.S. (before flip-flopping on the issue six months later). Now we learn that intercepts of overseas phone calls helped give us the courier’s real name.

So obvious are these connections that Mr. Obama’s smallness in not admitting them is now working against him. For it invites the question that both Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum effectively raised in last week’s debate among would-be GOP contenders: Would we ever have gotten bin Laden if then-Sen. Obama’s policies had been put into effect instead of Mr. Bush’s?

Isn’t technology wonderful?

It turns out that there is a free on-line War on Terror game called Kuma War, and its developers have already uploaded Episode 107 in which the first person shooter gets to invade his compound and take out Osama bin Laden.

Via the Sun.

Osama clearly had no flair for interior decorating and was not very tidy.

Left of the television, a large black cloth seems to be covering something: maps? or a whiteboard showing the plan lines of operational terrorist plots? or Osama’s luxurious 54” big screen tv that he does not want the jihadi in the street to know about?

Spencer Ackerman has all five.

None of them have any sound.

The others are less interesting, but in those Osama has dyed his beard black, proving that he was determined to present a public image more flattering to himself than reality.

Former CIA Director Michael B. Mukasey testifies to the crucial role played by mildly coercive interrogation techniques in establishing the trail that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden.

The cosmic irony is that the single greatest success of the Obama Administration resulted specifically from the policies and tactics used by the previous administration which he ran against and has since eliminated.

[T]he intelligence that led to bin Laden came… began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.

That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. “Do this for all the brothers,” he advised his interrogators.

Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.

Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden’s couriers that helped in last weekend’s achievement.

The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful.

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. ...

Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the “dirty little secret” of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable. ...

We… need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.

Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden.

Frank J. Fleming marvels at what true genius can accomplish.

Sure didn’t take long for Obama to squander the goodwill from killing bin Laden. I mean, you got the most wanted man in the world, so how do you take that and start to make yourself look like an idiot? Well, let’s have Obama show us how.

So there’s debate about releasing the photos of Osama. I don’t even really care about it. Obama administration could have just said, “We’re not going to release the photos because we don’t feel like it.” and I would have been fine with that. Instead it’s the usual, “If we release the photos, it will make Muslims in the Middle East mad.” Really? There are Muslims in the Middle East who just give us hugs all the time, but if they see a photo of dead Osama they’re suddenly going to become murderous? But they were okay with us killing him — just don’t want to see the photo? I’m sorry, but anyone who would be stirred up to commit murder by an Osama photo are people we should be already hunting down and trying to kill — so stirring them up will just make them easier to find. But it’s hard to believe it will stir them up since so many in the Middle East are just constantly angry all the time at the most moronic things imaginable. When do we just say, “These guys are angry idiots constantly getting enraged by everything, so let’s stop worrying about what will make them angrier lest we catch some of their psychosis trying to think like them.”? If we want to end anger in the Middle East, let’s just send the message that being stupid angry is how you get dead. So everyone who is like, “Me see photo! Me want to murder now!” why don’t you learn to count to ten before you end up like Osama. And the Obama administration: Stop trying to coddle the feelings of people who celebrate a mass murder and instead concentrate on the feeling of your own people.

And then there is the changing story of how the assault went down. Now I, like pretty much every American, don’t really care how it went down as long as we got the end result of taking out Osama. The official report could have been, “Osama begged for mercy while we ripped off his leg and beat him to death with it,” and everyone would be like, “Great job, Obama!” But instead we keep getting this changing story about whether Osama was armed or not and whether he used a human shield — things we don’t even really care about — and now they’re like, “We’re done talking about this.” Hey, Obama, no one cares what the details of what happened in the raid, so just stop looking weasely about it.

So just, a couple days later, we go from Obama’s one flash of competency to looking like this probably all happened in spite of him, because, really, what an idiot.

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Jim Treacher says that President Obama is taking his victory lap in a clown car.

It’s been less than 72 hours since President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Special Forces had killed Osama Bin Laden. Since then, his administration has been hard at work screwing the whole thing up.

Let’s start with that speech Sunday night. It was originally announced for 10:30 but didn’t happen until 11:30. By that time, the news Obama was supposed to be breaking had broken already. Not the best start. Presumably he was delayed arguing with his speechwriters about keeping in all the “I,” “Me,” and “Mine.” Everything having to do with this raid was “I”; anything that could be attributed to the Bush administration was “We.” “I gave the order, I did this, I did that.” The hallmark of any great leader is a willingness to bravely take credit for the hard work and sacrifice of others.

Then there’s the official narrative of the raid, which has already gone through more versions than the Star Wars movies. First Bin Laden had a gun; then he didn’t. He hid behind one of his wives, who was killed; wait, no, scratch that, she’s alive and wasn’t his wife. Maybe? Now Leon Panetta says he and President Obama didn’t actually see the whole thing go down, after the White House made a point of releasing that instantly iconic picture of the whole gang watching it go down.

Isn’t it kind of important to get all that stuff right the first time? Personally, I don’t care if Bin Laden was holding a tray of freshly baked cookies and asking our boys if they wanted any tea when they shot him. You’ve heard of suicide by cop? As far as I’m concerned, Osama Bin Laden committed suicide by 9/11. But now the White House just looks like a bunch of bumblers. If you’re not exactly sure what happened, why give details you might have to retract? How in the world do you screw up a win this big? (Amanda Carey has a wrap-up of the inconsistencies in the official story.)

And now the Obama administration is showing decisive leadership on the issue of dithering. “Gee, should we show the pictures of Bin Laden with his Navy SEAL makeover? Won’t that make people mad?” The Abu Ghraib pics were in the public interest; visual evidence of the death of the mastermind of 9/11 isn’t. Keeping us from seeing flag-draped coffins was bad; keeping us from seeing a blood-drenched mass-murderer is good. Now they’ve finally decided not to release the pictures, after Panetta already said they would. I’m sure that’s Obama’s final decision unless he changes his mind. Stay tuned for the latest round of polls.

Read the whole thing.

Bookworm Room lists the contradictions in the narrative as it exists.

1. 2003: Enhanced Interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad Results in the Nom De Guerre of bin Ladin’s Courier…

2. 2004: Enhanced Interrogation of al-Qahtani Confirms the Nom De Geure of bin Ladin’s Courier…

3. 2006 (?): Enhanced Interrogation of an Al Qaeda Captured in Iraq, Ghul, Produces the Real Name of the Courier…

4. 2006-2009: NSA Begins Furiously Intercepting Any And All Communications Made By Anyone “al-Kuwaiti” Has Ever Known…

5. Late 2010 (?): al-Kuwaiti Places a Very Ill-Advised Phone Call… “[conversing] with someone who was being monitored by U.S. intelligence… the courier [then] unknowingly led authorities to a [bizarre] compound in the northeast Pakistani town of Abbottabad…”

6. 2011: Surveying Abbottabad, We Grow Confident We’ve Found Bin Ladin’s Hideout…

7. April 29-May 1 2011: Obama’s Team Tells Him They Have High Confidence Bin Ladin (or at Least His Most Trusted Courier) is In the Compound, and Obama Agrees, and Orders the Raid; On May 1 It’s Executed By SEAL Team 6…

8. May 2011: Begin a Disinformation Campaign To Convince the Public That 2003-2008 Never Happened.

FLASHBACK: Obama lifts photo ban on U.S. military coffins…

After mulling it over for a couple of days, while America and the world waited eagerly for more information, that brave and bold Barack Obama decided that the best policy with regard to Osama bin Laden’s death photos and the videos of the attack on his compound was his own traditional approach to releasing information like birth certificates and school records: no voluntary release.

CBS reports:

In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday’s “60 Minutes” conducted today, President Obama said he won’t release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death.

“It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool,” said the president. ...

The president said he had discussed the issue with his intelligence team, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and that they agree with the decision. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Mr. Obama made the decision today.

I would say that the president is behaving with a characteristic timidity and bias toward concealment and self protection, and in a situation of this kind his approach is completely a mistake. The whole point of sending in troops and not simply bombing the compound into oblivion was to prove that Osama bin Laden was killed. In the age of cellphone cameras and the Internet telling the world that you will not release documentary evidence of what happened and the results inevitably makes you look guilty and deceptive. The result will be an intensification of questioning and an escalation of challenges to you account.

I think the odds are good that Obama will eventually be forced to release that photograph and video, and he will consequently and deservedly look stupid and manipulative as the result of this bad decision.

I commented yesterday on how much the photograph of the Administration’s security team released by the White House appeared to me to make the president look like an irrelevant spectator watching from the background.

I was clearly not the only one who noticed, and you can see that the left’s commentariat is on the job spinning this photograph into proof of precisely the opposite.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in the Atlantic, contends:

Why amazing? Because the President seems so small and peripheral to the action. He is hunched down, seated on the margins of the meeting, seemingly trying not to take up space. It appears as if he couldn’t even find a place to put his jacket. By contrast, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, practically bestrides the room like a Colossus (an affable Colossus, if you know him). I was struck, when I saw this photo, that the Bush White House would have ever released a similar photograph. This is not to cast aspersions on Bush, but could you seriously imagine his public relations releasing an image of him leading from behind, as it were?

I was just talking to David Brooks, and he, too, was struck by this photo. He noted that the President most likely had to move seats to see the screen, but he did not move to a central seat, but to a small chair against the wall. The negative interpretation of this, of course, is that the President wasn’t running the meeting, but both of us found this impossible to believe. The positive interpretation is that the President is so confident in his power that he is comfortable even in a corner. This speaks well of him, to my mind; a president who kills America’s enemies without swagger is better than a swaggerer who doesn’t kill America’s enemies. (Maybe here I’m casting a few aspersions on Bush.)

The plan for killing Osama Bin Laden was perfectly conceived and as perfectly executed as any special forces operation since Israel’s raid on Entebbe. But the follow-through has been strange at best, sometimes bordering on incompetence.

First, there was that weird burial at sea “in accordance with Islamic tradition.” There, the White House managed to annoy most everyone. There are those like me, who thought Bin Laden’s corpse was treated with too much respect, to those in the Islamic world now inflamed because it wasn’t really done properly after all.

Then there was the president’s oddly bloodless speech Sunday night. For almost ten years we’d been trying to get the guy who murdered 3,000 Americans, attacked our military HQ, and ripped the heart out of the New York City skyline. The effort spanned two continents, four or five countries, a Caribbean Navy base, and the persistent efforts of two presidents, the American intelligence community, and the best of the best of our special forces. And yet President Obama sounded as if he were announcing a “worthwhile Canadian initiative.”

Now the Administration can’t even decide whether or not to release a photo of the body.

Don’t Worry: Osama Was Shot in Accordance with Islamic Tradition.

Frank J. Fleming knows the very first thing that went through your mind when you heard of bin Laden’s death: were all the religious niceties observed?

I know what was probably the first thing to go through your mind when you heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed: Was his dead body handled properly according to Islamic tradition? Well, on behalf of the U.S. government, I am happy to tell you that yes, it absolutely was.

Read the whole thing.

Looking at the Times’s photograph (by Pete Souza) of the White House National Security team once again, I am struck by how much Barack Obama appears to be a passive outsider on the sidelines, while the group sitting and standing on the right side of the picture, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seems to be in command and in charge.

It’s just an impression I got looking at the photograph, and it may not mean anything, but I then came upon what purports to be a leak from a knowledgeable insider.

This alleged witness claims that Barack Obama was taken in hand by his senior military and intelligence staff and steamrollered into permitting the mission to go ahead.

From Ulsterman via Theo.

HC = Hillary Clinton

CoC = Chain of Command/Commander in Chief

[There was a s]ignificant push to take [bin Laden] out months ago. Senior WH staff resisted. This was cause of much strain between HC and Obama/Jarrett. HC and LP were in constant communication over matter – both attempted to convince administration to act. Administration feared failure and resulting negative impact on president. Intel disgusted over politics over national security. Staff resigned/left. Check timeline to corroborate.

Now Intel already leaking to media facts surrounding how info obtained. Namely from enhanced interrogation efforts via GITMO prisoners. Obama administration placed in corner on this. Some media aware of danger to president RE this and attempting protection. Others looking for further investigation. We are pushing for them to follow through and already meeting with some access.

Point of determination made FOR Obama not BY Obama. Will clarify as details become more clear. Very clear divide between Military and WH. Jarrett marginalized 100% on decision to take out OBL. She played no part. BD worked with LP and HC to form coalition to force CoC to engage.

IMPORTANT SPECIFIC: When 48 hour go order issued, CoC was told, not requested. Administration scrambled to abort. That order was overruled. This order did not originate from CoC. Repeat – this order did not originate from CoC. He complied, but did not originate.

There is no way to know if there is any truth in all this. If so, I expect we will hear more along these lines.

If the report is false, I would say that it was dastardly and outrageous to fabricate such a thing libeling a president who has just made a courageous decision.

I was persuaded to pass it along because the source is right: anti-Obama Intel leaks are popping out all over, identifying the crucial roles played by enhanced interrogations and renditions in making the operation that killed Osama bin Laden possible. I would still file it in the “Interesting, But Not Known to Be True” category.

Iowahawk explains that, with a democratic administration in power, avenging 9/11 is cool again.

[I]f you had asked me 48 hours ago whether Osama Bin Laden would ever brought to justice I would have probably answered “no.” Like many Americans I had all but abandoned hope that we would ever capture or kill the 9/11 mastermind, and had resigned myself to the idea he would die an old man thumbing his nose at us from some comfortable cave in Waziristan. Well, I can happily report that I completely underestimated the skill, courage, and perseverence of America’s military. And, almost as happily, I can report that I also completely underestimated the capacity of America’s erstwhile “peace community” for turning on a dime and embracing the kind of all-American xenophobic flag-waving bloodlust they only recently decried. So today I stand proudly with my new friends of the formerly antiwar left in a mindlessly jingoistic salute to President Obama for an extralegal military assassination well done.

Yes, it’s true that some pre-January 2009 antiwar activists have remained morally and logically consistent in their opposition to America’s military presence in the Mideast; but, thank God, it appears now they were only a tiny, insignificant minority. Recent events have happily made clear that the antiwar movement of 2001-8 was overwhelmingly dominated by a vast silent hypocritical majority of craven political opportunists awaiting a Democratic administration to gleefully celebrate the covert execution of a man whom, until 28 months ago, they would have described as a “tragic civilian casualty.”

Read the whole thing.

The Wall Street Journal has a photo slideshow.

No guarantees of authenticity. I will reported any subsequent debunkings of this photo.
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Minutes later: Yes, it seems that it is a fake. Too bad.

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An hour or so later:

The Administration has real photographs of the dearly departed, but is fussing and fidgeting about releasing them. I think we all know that they will do so in the end. It is important to prove that he’s really dead. So they are just demonstrating how feeble they are by temporizing.

Jake Tapper:

The Obama administration has photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body and officials are debating what to do with them and whether they should be released to the public, officials tell ABC News.

“There’s no doubt it’s him,” says a US official who has seen the pictures and also reminds us that OBL was 6’4”.

The argument for releasing them: to ensure that the public knows and can appreciate that he’s dead. There is of course skepticism throughout the world that the US government claim that it killed bin Laden is true.

The argument against releasing the pictures: they’re gruesome. He has a massive head wound above his left eye where he took bullet, with brains and blood visible.

Via Ric Anderson, US House Press Gallery Staff.