RUSH: Let me address this one, ladies and gentlemen. Isn’t it a bit of a stretch now — and we’ll back all this up here as the program unfolds and we go through the stack. Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to keep calling the decision to go after Bin Laden such a “gutsy call”? I have noticed this is being ramped up as the days are added on. The decision is referenced as gutsier and gutsier. It becomes gutsier every day. I mean, it was gutsy on Sunday but on Monday it was really gutsy, and yesterday was profoundly gutsy and today it was unbelievably incomprehensibly gutsy! But isn’t that a bit of a stretch, especially in view of the fact…
Look at it this way: If it ever got out that Obama had passed on a chance at capturing or killing Bin Laden, Obama’s political career is over. You know, once they tell him, “We’ve got him,” even at that it took 16 hours. Even after they told him it took 16 hours for him to make a decision. I think that he had no choice whatsoever to go after Bin Laden, one way or the other. I know, they’re saying the gutsy is using the SEAL op, the ground op rather than drones or missiles or bombs. But the bottom line is that Obama had to act. Look at all the people in the chain of command who knew.
It would not have been possible to keep it secret, to keep the lid on the fact that they had Osama and somewhere at the top an executive decision was made not to go in. There was a movie made about that in a previous incarnation with Bill Clinton, The Path to 9/11. Remember that movie? ABC ran it… Well, no. Did they? Now I’m having a mental block. The Clintons put all kinds of pressure on ABC not to run it. Oh, yeah, and then they did run it and they cut something like a minute and a half out of it, and then they didn’t release any DVDs. That’s what it was: The Path to 9/11 had no DVDs.
The premise of the movie The Path to 9/11 was we had Bin Laden and the Clintons didn’t want to do anything about it. So you had a repeat of the circumstance here, possibly. If you add thousands of people here (well, at least hundreds) who knew that Bin Laden was in that compound and if Obama had not acted, some people would have been really ticked off about it, and it would have leaked that Obama had refused to act — and he woulda never survived that scenario politically. So, okay, gutsy. But he had to at the same time.
So now (or then) it became a question of how.
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RUSH: The damage control on whether or not waterboarding had any effect on intelligence gathering for this successful mission continues. Dianne Feinstein. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle: “Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that none of the information that led to the killing of terrorist Osama Bin Laden came from torture or harsh detention policies practiced under the Bush [regime]. In a briefing for reporters, [Feinstein] called the decision by President Obama to send armed commandos to bin Laden’s compound … ‘a very gutsy call.'”
Well, again, he had to. He had to! Too many people knew that Bin Laden was there. Hundreds of people, if not more, knew that Bin Laden was there. It’s a bit of a stretch to keep calling this “gutsy.” If it ever got out that Obama knew he was there and didn’t launch the assault, there’d-a been hell to pay. Mark my words.
Here’s Rumsfeld, by the way. This is last night. This is from Hannity on Fox. Hannity said, “You think it’s pretty clear now that discovering who this courier was through strong interrogation techniques that were employed during the Bush administration without which this day would never have occurred. It seems to be we need to reignite this debate about enhanced interrogation in this country. Is that a good idea?”
RUMMY: Anyone who suggests that the enhanced techniques — let’s be blunt: waterboarding — did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence just isn’t facing the truth. The facts are General Mike Hayden came in, he had no connection with waterboarding anybody, he looked at all the evidence and concluded that a major fraction of the intelligence in our country on Al-Qaeda came from individuals — the three, only three people — who were waterboarded.
RUSH: And, by the way, let’s also be clear: Those three were waterboarded by the CIA in their black-op prisons. They were not waterboarded by the DOD. You know, the people that Dick Durbin called the Nazis and the equivalents of the Soviet gulag prisoners or Pol Pot’s gang. The CIA did the waterboarding. Didn’t happen at Club Gitmo.
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RUSH: Charles in Pacifica, California. Hello, sir, great to have you here.
CALLER: Rush, great to talk with you. I wanted to thank you for bringing up The Road to 9/11, about the Clintons. I think that’s extremely important. I wish that you would bring it up more, and it’s too bad that we kinda had to wait ’til now to bring that up. You know, it was an intelligence operation that gave Bill Clinton the opportunity to take out Bin Laden, both times that I know of as far as what the CIA has talked about that. The war on terror, the war on Bin Laden or whoever, that started in the nineties and Clinton completely failed on that. And I’m glad that you brought that up.
RUSH: He passed on a number of opportunities to either have Bin Laden handed off to us, or to take him out. There were a number of occasions. But ThePath to 9/11 movie, ABC ran it, but they clipped like a minute and 16 seconds out of it. They toned down a scene in The Path to 9/11 that involved Sandy Berger, who was the national security advisor declining to give the order to kill Bin Laden. They toned that scene down according to the person involved with the film who declined to be identified. That sequence had been the focus of attention. Now, that’s from the Chicago Tribune of September 7.
I, ladies and gentlemen, as a powerful, influential member of the media, have the full, unedited version of The Path to 9/11 on DVD. And that minute and 16 seconds or something like that they took out was pretty key, but the Clintons wanted the whole thing not run at all. They didn’t succeed in that, but there were no DVDs. Disney decided no DVD release of The Path to 9/11. The only reason I bring this up is that there was a chance to get Osama, and, look, here’s a movie that was made about it, and look at the controversy that arose from it. The same thing here. It goes to this whole notion of just how gutsy was this? Because in this case, it was clear that a lot of people knew that Bin Laden was in that hut. I still cannot suppress a smile when I keep reading about the mansion that the guy lived in. Living in the lap of luxury? Come on! The place looks like a crackhouse!
Here’s Nic Robertson, our old buddy at CNN. Listen to this. John King said, “Nic, now that night has fallen, give us a better sense of what you’re learning about inside that luxury compound, just how Bin Laden was living.”
ROBERTSON: Very secretively. People we talked to who live right next to his compound, one man whose house overlooked it just 50 yards away told me that when children’s balls were — soccer balls went over the wall, that the family would just give them money rather than let them into the compound, which is normal in the area to get their balls back. They would just give them money and say, “Okay, go buy another ball.”
RUSH: Yeah. So they didn’t let anybody in there, soccer balls ending up over the 18-foot wall — have you seen this compound? It’s nowhere near anybody else’s house. But the kids are out there, the soccer balls end up over the wall and the Bin Laden family, rather than let the kids come in there, just say, “Okay, here, kid, here’s some money; go out and buy a new ball. We’re keeping the ball.” They don’t want anybody in there. The point is everybody, lot of people, Pakistanis, it’s now known, knew who was in there. And if this attack had not taken place after all this information was given to Obama, then there would have been political hell to pay, just like The Path to 9/11, only it would have been worse. It would have leaked out. So, yeah, the line of the day, the word of the day, “It was gutsy. Maybe one of the gutsiest moves a US president has ever made.” But he’d-a been politically DOA if he hadn’t made the call.
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