By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
A year ago, on May 1, 2011, an elite U.S. SEAL team killed the world's most wanted terrorist. After a decade of near misses and dead ends, Osama bin Laden was finally cornered in a fortresslike compound, in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, close to that country's elite military academy, and fatally shot. The following day, his body was buried at sea by the U.S. Navy in an Islamic ceremony.
Peter L. Bergen was one of the first Western investigative journalists to cover Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the late 1990s, and then he published two best-selling books and numerous articles about what became the world's most dangerous terrorist organization.
Even the capture and interrogation of top al Qaeda operatives such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in 2003 failed to reveal new information about bin Laden's whereabouts, Mr. Bergen writes, although they produced a wealth of intelligence about the organization that helped to apprehend or kill other senior-level operatives.
Mr. Bergen then describes how intelligence analysts began creating a "composite of the ideal courier: he would have to be able to travel in Pakistan without sticking out, he would have to speak Arabic to communicate effectively with al Qaeda's Arab leadership, and he would have to have been trusted by bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks."
