“Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not.”
~Ben Smith, purported to be a Navy SEAL 

A 501(c)(4) group is coming out with ads in at least 6 different swing states accusing the President’s administration of leaking sensitive information as well as “taking credit for” killing Osama bin Laden.  Except – this group is featuring former Special Ops soldiers including former Navy Seals in a move that is highly reminiscent of the famous Swiftboat attack ads to discredit John Kerry’s time as a veteran during the Vietnam war where he won 2 purple hearts.

A 501(c)(4) is supposed to be a social welfare organization and thus they do not have to report who is funding their organization but it is absolutely clear that this is a group specifically put together to attack President Obama.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand this.  We do not know who specifically is funding it and so they can make any accusations they wish without any facts or data to support them.  The people paying for this video are cowards and the veterans in this video have allowed themselves to descend from the honor of being a soldier to the lowliness of being partisan hacks.

Reuters has the story HERE:

A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives is set to launch a media campaign, including TV ads, that scolds President Barack Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and argues that high-level leaks are endangering American lives.

Leaders of the group, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, say it is nonpartisan and unconnected to any political party or presidential campaign. It is registered as a so-called social welfare group, which means its primary purpose is to further the common good and its political activities should be secondary.

In the past, military exploits have been turned against presidential candidates by outside groups, most famously the Swift Boat ads in 2004 that questioned Democratic nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam War service.

The OPSEC group says it is not political and aims to save American lives. Its first public salvo is a 22-minute film that includes criticism of Obama and his administration. The film, to be released on Wednesday, was seen in advance by Reuters.

The Obama campaign’s response to this is:

“No one in this group is in a position to speak with any authority on these issues and on what impact these leaks might have, and it’s clear they’ve resorted to making things up for purely political reasons.”

In other words – the people in the video have no inside knowledge of anything and even though they’re no longer in the military … they will wear their military clothes to somehow signify that the American military is very much against President Obama.

The Daily Kos gives us some more detail on the people running the group HERE:

it is likely a simple coincidence that the president of the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc organization, Scott Taylor, is a former Navy Seal who ran unsuccessfully for a Republican congressional nomination; it is undoubtedly simply a quirk of fate that Chad Kolton, onetime spokesman for the office of Director of National Intelligence in Gee Dub’s administration, is a representative for the OPSEC group.  They’re just a bunch of guys…Concerned Americans, you understand, who just happen to have banded together into a 501(c)4 organization because of their CONCERN.

For the first time in decades – the American people trust a Democrat on foreign policy than they do the Republican candidate for President.  9/11 happened on George W. Bush’s watch; he blew it.  He and the Republican controlled majorities in Congress led America to two long wars costing America trillions.  It has taken years to scrub the Bush taint off America’s image in the world and gaining the moral high ground allows America to influence others using soft power instead of having to bomb every country to smithereens.

Bottom line – getting bin-Laden was a huge accomplishment.  It took a lot of teamwork but if the mission failed … Republicans would have been using it to bludgeon the president politically.  The President shouldn’t shy away from an obvious accomplishment that the country should rally behind.

The day after Obama announced the Osama bin Laden killing – there was a rush of former Bush operatives going on tv trying to take credit for the killing of bin Laden.  Cenk Uygur showcases that partisanship HERE.  They want Americans to believe that somehow we obtained this new information because of torturing Al Quaeda members even though the torturing of suspected terrorists occurred 8 or 9 years earlier.  Of course in 2002 … this is what George W. Bush had to say about bin Laden:

Question: But don’t you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

If President Bush had given the order to successfully kill Osama bin-Laden … Republicans would be calling for his face to be on Mount Rushmore right now and would call Democrats “weak on terrorism”.

Of course in 2007 – Mitt Romney said when referring to Osama bin-Laden:

“It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
~Mitt Romney

And as Reuters documented in 2007 … Mitt Romney completely disagreed with then Senator Obama’s position that America should take action if we have actionable intelligence in Pakistan and the Pakistanis won’t take out these high value targets.  Reuters writes HERE:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized Democrat Barack Obama on Friday for vowing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if necessary as the Obama camp issued a strident defense of his plan.

What had been an internecine foreign policy battle between rival Democrats Obama, an Illinois senator, and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, spilled into the Republican arena in the heavily contested state of Iowa.

“I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours… I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort,” Romney told reporters on the campaign trail.

To this day – most Americans do not understand how we actually got bin-Laden.  In actuality – the CIA planned a fake vaccination drive in Pakistan in order to test and compare DNA of known bin-Laden associates.  The Guardian explains more on that HERE:

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

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