Obama on the lesson of getting bin Laden
My New America colleague Peter Bergen sat down for a chat with President Barack Obama the other day to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the bin Laden raid.
My New America colleague Peter Bergen sat down for a chat with President Barack Obama the other day to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the bin Laden raid. Some of the most interesting comments came in Obama’s comments about the future of countering Islamic terrorism.
“We have to stay true to the values during the process,” the president told Peter, who shared a transcript with me. “We have to make sure that we’re not engaged in the kind of knee-jerk anti-Muslim sentiment that we’ve heard from some politicians. We’ve got to make sure that the legal structures around our intelligence gathering and our use of predators is subject to oversight.”
He added a comment about the effectiveness of the U.S. national security establishment, or as Ben Rhodes would call it, the blob: “I think that we can draw a lesson from the bin Laden raid that we’ve got really effective people and a government that knows how to do this.”
Photo credit: PETEWhite House/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons
Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1
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