Obama Concealed Strength of al-Qaeda Before 2012 Election

Obama Concealed Strength of al-Qaeda Before 2012 Election

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, the big moment was Joe Biden triumphantly declaring “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”

It turns out that in order to make that narrative stick, Obama had to downplay the actual strength of al-Qaeda.

Saagar Enjeti reports at the Daily Caller:

‘Cherry Picked’: Obama Downplayed Al-Qaida Strength In Lead Up To 2012 Election

The Obama administration deliberately sought to downplay how robust the al-Qaida network was in the lead up to the 2012 election by selectively releasing documents that enforced a preferred narrative, The Weekly Standard reports, citing experts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and New York Times Correspondent Rukmini Callimachi.

The revelation of the al-Qaida network’s strength in 2011 comes after the final release of thousands of documents obtained by U.S. Navy SEALs in a 2011 raid to kill Usama Bin-Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan. The documents reveal that Bin-Laden was minutely managing the day-to-day operations of his terror network all while former President Barack Obama assured the American public the group was “decimated.”

“Think back to when bin Laden was killed. It was 2011, it was right before a major campaign season. I don’t want to underplay the role that the killing of Osama bin Laden had,” Callimachi told the Friday audience, adding “But I think that that was theorized into something much bigger.”

The obvious subtext here is that Obama and Democrats put his re-election above national security concerns. The fact that we’re just learning about this now also suggests that the media either knew this and ignored it, or was too busy cheering at the DNC to look into it. Anyone surprised?

Jenna Lifhits of the Weekly Standard has more:

New York Times Reporter: Obama Administration Misled on al Qaeda

A top foreign correspondent at the New York Times said Friday that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed al Qaeda’s strength in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

“The overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated, he had lost control of this group,” Rukmini Callimachi said during an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the 17 hand-picked documents released by the Obama administration in May of 2012.

Her remarks triggered the following question from Kim Dozier, a former top correspondent for the Associated Press and CBS, and current executive editor of the Cipher Brief: “Do you think that was something that was kept from the public’s view because it revealed that there had to be reams of communication going back and forth, which means U.S. intelligence, Western intelligence, was missing this?”…

“The head of the organization has been killed, and now—these are literally quotes that I would get: the organization has been ‘decimated,’ the organization is in ‘disarray,’ the organization is ‘on the run,’” she continued. “At the same time that we were preparing to pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, I think that it was important to portray this as a problem that no longer existed.”

The good news is that the media will never miss another story like this again. At least not until another Democrat is elected president.

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