Thank George Bush and Waterboarding for bin Laden Kill

And why were orders given to kill, not capture?

Amid all the hoopla over the death of bin Laden two items stand out. With the first, you need to do a bit of reading between the lines of news reports like this one in the Washington Examiner:

Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.”

Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago.

A story in the New York Times confirms "detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators."

And we know from an extraordinary article in the Washington Post from August 2009 titled "How a Detainee Became An Asset, Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding," that it was Bush's enhanced interrogation policy for JUST THREE TERRORISTS which gave us a motherlode of information.

It certainly must make those who whined about the inhumanity of the gitmo detention facility and waterboarding uncomfortable to think that the information which led to bin Laden was obtained using the hated Bush detention and interrogation program.

Kill, not capture?

I wonder if there is an equal level of discomfort from the Bush era hand wringers regarding the news that the Special Forces team which went after bin Laden had orders to kill, not capture? Let's put aside for a moment that fact that no one in U.S. custody ever died from waterboarding and that two bullets to bin Laden's head were certainly an infringement upon any so-called rights terrorists might have.

The bigger issue here is that killing bin Laden, while it may help Obama avoid the embarrassment of sending him to Gitmo or putting him on trial, also means that we do not have access to any information he might have been able to provide. Of course according to Obama it would have been wrong to waterboard Osama. Much better to shoot him instead!