More Details on Obama's Kill Not Capture Order for bin Laden

O.K. to shoot him, but waterboarding would have been a violation of bin Laden's human rights?

More details are coming out about the bin Laden event. Apparently Obama has decided NOT to release the photos of Osama bin Laden taken after death. Is Obama just trying to stretch this out as a distraction like his birth certificate? Will we need to put Donald Trump on the case? Lacking the Osama photo, all we have is this Obama photo:

Obama, the smallest man in the room at critical moment

Sitting in the corner, a diminished looking President Obama watches along with Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton and others as mission to kill bin Laden proceeds.

Kill not capture?

On Tuesday, the White House admitted that bin Laden was unarmed at the time of his death yet somehow resisted and was shot in the head. If he was unarmed would it not have been possible to shoot him in the leg and disable him and take him into custody?

A story from Politico confirms other reports that the real mission was to kill, not capture:

Officials described the reaction of the special operators when they were told a number of weeks ago that they had been chosen to train for the mission.

“They were told, ‘We think we found Osama bin Laden, and your job is to kill him,’” an official recalled.

The SEALs started to cheer.

It's important to note that this Seal Team was the same group that captured Saddam Hussein alive so that he could face justice.

Waterboarding Key to bin Laden Kill

In the last few days the disinformation brigades have been working overtime to deny that the waterboarding of JUST THREE TERRORISTS played any role in the discovery of bin Laden's hiding place. Yet that denial was upset by the statement of CIA Chief Leon Panetta in an interview on NBC:

“We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation… clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees,” he told NBC anchor Brian Williams.

Spin has they might, Democrats are unable to deny that the interrogations of the three waterboarded terrorists was the first key to unlocking bin Laden's location. Prior to waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was demanding a lawyer. After waterboarding he sang like a canary. The information he gave about a courier set the CIA on the trail.

Al-Libbi was another of the three waterboarded terrorists. Here's how the Washington Post describes his role and connection with enhanced interrogations:

A crucial break appears to have come on May 2, 2005, when Pakistani special forces arrested a senior al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who had been designated bin Laden’s “official messenger” to others within the organization. Libbi was later turned over to the CIA and held at a “black site” prison where he was subjected to the harsh methods that the George W. Bush administration termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Libbi and other detainees pointed CIA interrogators to another messenger with close ties to the al-Qaeda leader.

Obama's bump in the polls won't last

Obama is on his way to Ground Zero in New York City on Thursday. It's his first trip to the site of so much tragedy. This is an interesting change since Obama has refused to visit the site on the two 9/11 anniversaries which have taken place at the site since he became President. He has also had his run-ins with 9/11 families who were displeased with the delays in military tribunals set up to deal out justice to those who conspired to murder their loved ones.

No doubt much of that troubled connection with 9/11 will be swept away by a carefully orchestrated set of photo-ops with selected 9/11 families at the site. Expect all of this propaganda to give Obama a short term bounce in the polls.

But in the long run, it won't matter. Unless Obama can show that killing bin Laden will result in lowering gas prices, his bump in the polls won't last.

The bottom line is that this event hasn't changed Obama. He's still the same weak leader he always was and not even a brilliantly executed plan by the Navy Seals can rescue him.