Biden reveals why he advised Obama to wait on Osama bin Laden's raid in 2011

US President-elect Joe Biden recently revealed why he advised Barack Obama to wait to order the raid which killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. Biden’s advice about Bin Laden raid has been a source of controversy. During his election campaign, Donald Trump had also attacked the former vice president opposed taking out the al-Qaeda leader altogether.

While speaking to CNN for a documentary about vice presidents- ‘Presidents in Waiting’- Biden said that it was to “give him space”. While Biden’s version of events has shifted, from saying he advised Obama to wait to saying he told him to go, Obama’s recently published memoir, however, revealed that Biden “weighed in against the raid”. In his book, A Promised Land, the former US President wrote that Biden and defence secretary Robert Gates were concerned about the enormous consequences of failure and counselled that Obama “should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that Bin Laden was in the compound”. 

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Obama ‘risked his entire presidency’ 

While speaking to CNN, the 46th President-elect echoed Obama and said that back then the President (Obama) went around the room and out of 17 people present, three gave him an absolute. Biden added that two said go and one said don’t go. He told the media outlet that in his view, there was an option there that was remaining. 

He said, “..you could have done one more very low flight … spying down on the site to determine whether this was Bin Laden because again, there was no certainty”. 

Biden added, “… And so I looked around the table, I said, ‘I didn’t think we had this many economists in the room. On the one hand, the other hand.’ I said, ‘Mr President,’ to give him space, I said, ‘I think you should wait.’ And do one more pass.’ Knowing that if you made the lower pass, they might observe it and he’d flee”. 

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Again echoing the former president, Biden said that he and Obama had a subsequent private discussion in which he advised the president to follow his instinct. In his memoir, Obama wrote that he appreciated Biden’s willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest “of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations”. Biden told the media outlet that Obama risked his entire presidency on making the call. 

He said that he was trying to preserve space for him but the end of the day it was a “consequential decision” showing Obama’s courage and determination, at the risk of his entire presidency. Biden said, “He’d follow Bin Laden to the gates of Hell to get him”. Meanwhile, in the event, Obama had ordered a Navy Seal team to fly from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where they shot dead the al-Qaeda leader, the head of the group behind the 9/11 attacks, who was swiftly buried at sea. 

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