2. MYTH 1
The war on terror is over
“The war on terror is over,” declared a senior State Department official.
Really? In the year since OBL’s death, up to 500 fighters have been killed by
US drones in Pakistan alone. The US recently expanded its drone campaign
in Yemen, and has carried out 23 strikes in the past year.
3. MYTH 2
The Taliban and al Qaeda stopped cooperating
An intelligence official told CNN that as of 2006, al Qaeda and the Taliban were
not cooperating. According to The New York Times, a NATO report called “State of
the Taliban 2012” found that the Taliban had gradually distanced itself from al
Qaeda. But documents found in the bin Laden raid show a close relationship
between Taliban commander Mullah Omar and top al Qaeda commanders,
including bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Some of the correspondence dated
back to only weeks before the raid.
4. MYTH 3
Bin Laden was no longer involved in al Qaeda planning
“In my opinion,” said U.S. Institute for Peace Army Fellow Col. John Maraia, “bin
Laden had evolved from an operational leader into a symbolic one.”
Far from sitting isolated in his safe house, declassified documents from the
Abbotabad raid show bin Laden advising members of Al Shabaab in Africa and
instructing his followers on specific steps to take to avoid drone strikes. He also
suggested ways to use the media to capitalize on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
5. MYTH 4
Enhanced interrogation efforts didn’t work
“These techniques,” former FBI agent Ali Soufan told a 2009 Senate panel, “from
an operational perspective, are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result
harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda.”
But the intelligence that led to bin Laden proved Soufan wrong. The initial
information that led to locating bin Laden’s hideout came from al Qaeda operatives
in US custody, all of whom were interrogated by the CIA. One of the detainees
who underwent enhanced interrogation techniques revealed that bin Laden used a
lone courier nicknamed “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.” 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, when asked about the courier, tried to protect his identity, tipping off
interrogators that they were on to something important.
6. MYTH 5
The Obama administration’s new approach led to bin Laden’s capture
President Obama pushed the narrative that the Bush administration ignored bin Laden, boasting
in the speech that revealed bin Laden’s death, “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon
Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our
war against al Qaeda.”
But without the military and intelligence capabilities developed during the Bush administration,
the raid would not have been possible.
“The trail to bin Laden” wrote former Chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center Jose Rodriguez,
Jr., “started in a CIA black site — all of which Obama ordered closed forever on the second full
day of his administration — and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists
who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal
interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.”
