Remember when the least-posturing leader the Free World has ever known took out the world’s #1 Most Wanted Criminal? OK, self might say: Was that when Biden had covid and took out — ?
No, though that comes close. She’s talking about Obama taking out Osama, an event so top-secret no one even knew about it until it was over (No one except for a civilian live-tweeting from Abbotabad).
Since that momentous event, details cling to self’s memory: the fact that the SEAL team were given Ambien (or Benadryl) before taking off for the mission and some of them were NODDING OFF in the helicopter. The fact that one of the team had a sex-change operation.
Remember the photograph in the Situation Room with everyone staring intently at a screen, and there’s Hillary and there’s even our currrent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, standing at the very edge of the picture, watching from the door?
The event was so momentous, self even wrote a short story about it, and called her story The Walker, after the code name the Americans gave Osama, because even before they knew for sure it was him, they identified a tall figure taking daily walks around a walled compound in Abbotabad. (PS: That story, in case anyone cares to read, was published Oct. 2021 in Issue # 25 of — self just loves the name of the journal, so apt considering the nature of the story! — The Museum of Americana. AND for all you budding writers out there, the editor is fantastic. Submit here!)
Well, here’s that event again, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 4 of Amy B. Zegart’s (fascinating) Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence.
This was it. Decision time. On April 28, 2011, President Obama gathered his top foreign policy advisors in the White House Situation Room. After months of meetings so secret that not even the secretary of homeland security or the FBI Director knew about them, Obama was about to make one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: whether to green-light a Navy SEAL team raid to capture or kill a man the CIA believed might be Osama bin Laden.
— Chapter 4: Intelligence Basics, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence