The Plan was in the offing for many years, even when Obama was a Senator.
Read On.
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: link.reuters.com/weg59r)…..
The 13-year quest to find and eliminate bin Laden, from the November 1998 day he was indicted by a federal grand jury for his role in the East Africa embassy bombings, was filled with missteps, course adjustments and radical new departures for U.S. security policy. It ultimately led to a fortified compound in a little known Pakistani city named after a long-dead British major.
Even with bin Laden buried at sea, the changes to U.S. security policy could linger for years, or decades.
The mission to destroy bin Laden, and his network, sparked the creation of a chillingly bureaucratic process for deciding who would be on “kill lists,” authorized for death at the hands of the CIA. It revolutionized the use of pilotless drones to find and attack militants; drove the controversially brutal treatment of detainees in U.S. custody; and brought the United States and Pakistan closer together, then wrenched them apart.
(Even in ordering the risky Navy SEAL raid on May 1, Obama made allowances for Pakistan’s sensitivities. The raid was carried out by the U.S. military but under CIA legal authorities and command, partly for deniability if something went wrong and partly because the United States is not at war with Pakistan, a U.S. official said.)
But there was one constant in the search for bin Laden. On September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush issued a still-classified “finding” that gave the CIA “lethal authorities” to deal with the al Qaeda leader and his top lieutenants. Ever since, there was an expectation — even a preference — that bin Laden would be killed, not captured, Bush and Obama administration officials said.
The same day that Bush signed the directive, he publicly declared bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive.”
Numerous officials said they knew of no explicit command that bin Laden was not to be taken alive. When he ordered the SEAL raid, Obama had on his desk a written protocol for what would happen if the al Qaeda chief were captured and removed from Pakistan to an unnamed U.S. military installation, the senior White House official said.
But it was vaguer than the rest of the operational plan, and the expectation among most of the people who planned and executed the mission was that bin Laden would be killed. If bin Laden had surrendered, Obama’s senior advisers “would have to reconvene and make a decision about what to do with him,” said one official, who like many requested anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters. “It was intentionally left to be decided after the fact.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-kill-idUSTRE74B6H820110512
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