Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Now this will piss many people off, if true:

Besides, these things are of little consequence when you realize how we missed, squandered, screwed up, made a mess of and were massively risk adverse — again — when we did not kill Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan just two short months ago.

We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it. Nice job again guys — now, pull the damn trigger.

Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden.

You cannot make this crap up; truth is always stranger and more telling than fiction. Our government, the current administration and yes, our military leaders included, failed to kill bin Laden for no other reason than incompetence.

Blackfive wonders if it has to do with our soldiers recently being put on trial for killing known terrorists.  Just like Marcus Luttrell, who along with his three Navy Seal comrades were pinned down inside Afghanistan because they worried what the lawyers would do to them if they killed two sheepherders.  That cost three of them their lives, along with nine men sent to rescue them.

Bryan at Hot Air asks:

Are we overlawyering the war to the point that our troops won’t even kill bin Laden himself without worrying what the legal eagles may accuse them of after the fact?

From the comments at Blackfive:

Just to make things perfectly clear, to those joining late:

1. 2 snipers face charges multiple times in taking out known baddie
2. Said snipers were cleared by CID and others, but charged again on direction of LTG Kearney
3. Said LTG’s actions could possible cause ‘double-think’ in field personnel actions when facing enemy
4. ”The One” (Luttrell) said in his book they worried more about rear-echelon reactions and the media more than Taliban or AQ.

Think that if what COL Hunt says is true and proven or confirmed, that someone didn’t get cold feet?

I can see it now.  Some lawyer types telling the brass that 70% is just that, 70% and not enough confirmation to take out a whole convoy killing many.  So in the end Osama got away.

Man, I hope this isn’t true.  

UPDATE

Comment at Hot Air:

I don’t know where Hunt ot his info and if it’s accurate but I have no faith in him and I hate to say that about a local guy who is clearly a hero. I hear him often enough on local radio to know he gets a lot of stories conflated and often seems to be exaggerating. I remember him on BOR a few years ago claiming we had killed a HVT (I think it was UBL) and said, “It’s all over but the DNA.” That’s the kind of bad info I’m talking about. Maybe he’s right in this case, but I want to hear it from a more reliable source.

[...]I bet this is his “take” on the NYT story about the raid Rummy called off. I’ve heard his take on that incident morph and I bet this his latest exaggerated version of it.

Which would mean he was regurgitating this story:

Another official said that intelligence analysts believed strongly that there was a high probability that “either HVT-1 or HVT-2 was there,” using U.S. intelligence descriptions — high value targets — for Bin Laden and Zawahiri. He added that while opinion inside the agency was divided, many believed it was Bin Laden rather than Zawahiri who was present. The reason: “They thought they spotted his security detail,” said the official, a large al Qaeda security detail — the kind of protection that would normally surround only Bin Laden, or Zawahiri.