Audacious

Well, it didn't take long for bin Laden's presumed opinion of Joe Biden to be proved again:

“You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Morris Township, N.J. “Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term president?” Biden asked. Obama, he said, “is willing to do the right thing and risk losing.”

Here's how David Ignatius. via the White House, described bin Laden's take of Joe:

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.

Evidently the details of Operation Audacious Gutsy will keep trickling out until November. However.. there's an interesting comment in the Politico story about those very details. Several groups have been trying to FOIA information relating to the raid with no luck.  The commenter claims the DoD says they have "lost" the UBL file, which if true would be hugely conspiratorial. Did they?  It depends on what constitutes 'lost'.  Here's their reply:

The Pentagon told the AP this month it could not locate any photographs or video taken during the raid or showing bin Laden's body. The Pentagon also said it could not find any images of bin Laden's body on the Navy aircraft carrier where the al-Qaida leader's body was taken. The Pentagon said it could not find any death certificate, autopsy report or results of DNA identification tests for bin Laden, or any pre-raid materials discussing how the government planned to dispose of bin Laden's body if he were killed. The Defence Department said it searched files at the Pentagon, the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, and the Navy command in San Diego, California, that controls the USS Carl Vinson, the aircraft carrier used in the mission.

The Pentagon told the AP in late February it could not find any emails about the bin Laden mission or his "Geronimo" code name that were sent or received in the year before the raid by William McRaven, the three-star admiral at the Joint Special Operations Command who organized and oversaw the mission. It also could not find any emails from other senior officers who would have been involved in the mission's planning. It found only three such emails written by or sent to then-Defence Secretary Robert Gates and these comprised 12 pages sent to Gates summarizing news reports after the raid.

How to explain this?  Maybe they never had anything, maybe CIA or some other alphabet had it.  Anyway, so many theories, so little time!  Here are a few wags:

1) The few people still in the Laurie Mylroie "KSM and Yousef were not Islamists, they were hired hit-men for Saddam who used Islamist rubes to do their dirty work" camp might see this as completely fitting--to them bin Laden was a tool and never as powerful as he or we thought.  Once the Ba'athists/Saddam terror machine was rolled up he was relegated to a safe house to dream Caliphate fantasies while watching Debbie Does Dallas.

2)  The truthery tinfoiler might say, "UBL has been a foil for 11 years now. He was killed at Tora Bora but the Pakistanis kept him alive to get money; Bush kept him alive to perpetuate the WoT and Iraq invasion; and Obama kept him alive long enough to pull of the most audacious capture in 500 years."   They would say it shows the need for a new 9/11 investigation and be so juiced they'd vote for Ron Paul 50 times in the next online poll. 

3)  Basic skeptics might look more at the Stratfor wiki leak on bin Laden's body possibly coming to America (which appeared on Drudge for about an hour before being sent to the memory hole without explanation) instead of the the bottom of the Persian Gulf and wonder WTF. 

4)  Political junkies may simply see the shutdown of FOIA requests as an attempt to completely control the narrative for reelection purposes of a certain politician that won't be named.

5)  The rest will either say "Obama is awesome" or "what a bunch of BS" and go back to their favorite goof-off endeavor. 

In other words, same old same old.

SNAP!   3/21/12

In today's version of Operation Audacious Gutsy Ignatius reveals details of a document allegedly sent from AQ media dude Adam Azzam the American Gadahn to UBL about how to win the media wars.  Bolded for effect:

In the letter, the media adviser focuses on “how to exploit” the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, on television. He worries that CNN “seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others,” though he praises its “good and detailed” Arabic coverage. “I used to think that MSNBC channel may be good and neutral a bit,” he continues, but then notes the firing of Olbermann. The media chatter continues: CBS “has a famous program (‘60 Minutes’) that has some popularity and a good reputation.” ABC “is all right; actually, it could be one of the best channels,” because of its chief investigator and terrorism expert, Brian Ross. But all the networks, he complains, will bring in analysts who will “conduct a smearing” of al-Qaeda figures.

Heh, the right kept telling everyone this all along. Gadahn, like UBL, also lamented the loss of Muslim life in the war, ie, Iraq.  Which suggests one) AQ was VERY involved in the Iraq outcome all along, and two) it sounds like they are saying we won based on the surge. 

Anyway, strange stuff, hopefully there will be some actual document releases. Since the administration is selectively leaking this trove to the Post it's odd they would pick items suggesting that members of AQ favored the mainstream press over Fox News. Maybe they think any slam of Fox News is good, even if coming from AQ.   Like everything else with this war it's perplexing. It may take another 500 years to figure it out.