Bush deserves no credit for finding Bin Laden

[Hugabear]

First of all, I don't care what the right-wing talking points are, I don't give a goddamned what the media says, the intelligence we used to find Bin Laden did not come from torture. It's been shown repeatedly that torture is a very inefficient way to gather knowledge.

Then there was Iraq. How much of our intelligence resources did Bush squander on his hunt for nonexistent WMD's? Even after we occupied Iraq, how much resources did we waste searching for Saddam, and subsequently trying to put down the insurgency?

When it comes to Afghanistan, and the actual hunt for Bin Laden, even that approach was a colossal waste of time, money, energy, and human life. All we succeeded in doing was pushing the Taliban and Al Qaeda into Pakistan, and it still took almost 10 years to find Bin Laden. Treating this as a conventional military operation, using tanks, predator drones, and 18-yr old recruits seems a rather cumbersome way to find someone. This is precisely the reason why we spend billions of dollars on our intelligence agencies and Special Operations forces. I'm still not a big fan of covert military operations, but at least that way there would have been a lot less dead Americans and Afghans.