Intelligence Officer Claims He Hears From "Friends at the Pentagon" That Obama "Drug His Feet" on Foley Rescue Plan

A few points, to be fair:

1. This source says he hears the intelligence grew "stale" due to the delay, and thus Foley wasn't present when the rescue attempt came. Well, that's one possibility; another possibility is that he had never been there in the first place. Intelligence is a very iffy thing.

2. We don't know how long this delay was or whether the operation was delayed due to weakness of the intel. There is, after all, a level of weakness of intelligence that would prompt even an aggressive president to decide that ten special forces operators' lives were not worth a speculative gamble. (On the other hand, he did order it, eventually, so...)

3. This is one guy repeating what he says he hears, second-hand, from "friends."

All that said, Larry O'Connor's report is worth considering.

Certainly it fits a pattern. Administration people cooperated with the scripting of Zero Dark Thirty and the whole middle section of that film dramatizes Obama's foot-dragging on the bin Ladin hit. The CIA agent who discovered bin Ladin's hiding place had to tell her superiors every day how much time had passed since the intelligence was obtained. 30 days, 60 days, 88 days, 120 days... after more than 120 days, the order was finally given.

(Well, actually, the film doesn't include Obama, but I will take the high-ranking intelligence bureaucrat as reflecting Obama's wishes to not act.)

posted by Ace at 02:23 PM

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