123tim
05-12-2011, 05:08 PM
I'll be honest. I couldn't get past the halfway point in this article. I've posted the link below if anyone wants to read it in it's entirety. I just wanted to say that I never knew that we were in the business of making Martyrs.
I've pulled two parts that I found interesting and quoted them below:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A pivotal moment in the long, tortuous quest to find Osama bin Laden came years before U.S. spy agencies discovered his hermetic compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In July 2007, then Senator Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers met in the modest two-room Massachusetts Avenue offices that served as his campaign's Washington headquarters. There, they debated the incendiary language Obama would use in an upcoming speech on national security, according to a senior White House official.
Pakistan was a growing worry. A new, highly classified intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate, had just identified militant safe havens in Pakistan's border areas as a major threat to U.S. security. The country's military leader, Pervez Musharraf, had recently cut a deal with local tribes that effectively eased pressure on al Qaeda and related groups.
Days after the Washington meeting, candidate Obama told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
It was the most carefully crafted sentence in the speech, a statement no U.S. leader had ever made. (Text of Obama's speech: http://link.reuters.com/weg59r)
Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term, voiced the view that prevailed through two presidencies. "I think we took Osama bin Laden at his word, that he wanted to be a martyr," Armitage told Reuters.
The U.S. government, he said, would do all it could to help bin Laden realize that goal.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110512/wl_nm/us_binladen_kill
I've pulled two parts that I found interesting and quoted them below:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A pivotal moment in the long, tortuous quest to find Osama bin Laden came years before U.S. spy agencies discovered his hermetic compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In July 2007, then Senator Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers met in the modest two-room Massachusetts Avenue offices that served as his campaign's Washington headquarters. There, they debated the incendiary language Obama would use in an upcoming speech on national security, according to a senior White House official.
Pakistan was a growing worry. A new, highly classified intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate, had just identified militant safe havens in Pakistan's border areas as a major threat to U.S. security. The country's military leader, Pervez Musharraf, had recently cut a deal with local tribes that effectively eased pressure on al Qaeda and related groups.
Days after the Washington meeting, candidate Obama told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
It was the most carefully crafted sentence in the speech, a statement no U.S. leader had ever made. (Text of Obama's speech: http://link.reuters.com/weg59r)
Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term, voiced the view that prevailed through two presidencies. "I think we took Osama bin Laden at his word, that he wanted to be a martyr," Armitage told Reuters.
The U.S. government, he said, would do all it could to help bin Laden realize that goal.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110512/wl_nm/us_binladen_kill