Donald Trump recounted the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the following manner:
He [Baghdadi] died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming. The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house un-injured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, who had dragged three children with him to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast, but test results gave certain and positive identification.
The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, panic and dread—terrified of the American Forces bearing down.
Over at Reason, Elizabeth Nolan-Brown found Trump’s comments just a bit over the top, comparing them unfavorably with earlier, similar statements by Presidents George Bush and Barak Obama:
Say what you will about Bush and Obama, but at least they tried to situate their actions in a framework of human rights. Trump described the operation like an action-movie sequence, focusing on lurid details and, especially, the humiliation America (and by extension Trump) supposedly meted out to a powerful terrorist leader. It reads like the kind of statements put out by authoritarian rulers, designed not to provide us with a vision of our highest ideals but about Donald Trump, his might and power, and the retribution enemies will face for crossing him.
Well, amen to that, but I’d like to remind Elizabeth and everyone else of what a certain Deputy National Security Advisor, circa 2011, by the name of John Brennan said about Osama’s killing:
“Thinking about that from a visual perspective, here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield,” Brennan said. “I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”
As I said at the time, “Speaking of false narratives, it wasn’t a million-dollar house, bin Laden was not hiding behind women used a shield, nor was one of them his wife, nor was bin Laden armed at the time of his death, which Brennan also alleged, in a free-wheeling “narrative” that included such over-wrought scene-setting as “It was probably the most anxiety-filled periods of times … the minutes passed like days,” not to mention such unadulterated ass-kissing as “one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent history.”
Shamefully, Brennan’s abject toadyism in the service of the supposedly principled Barak earned him a ticket to the top at the CIA (though only because Super General David Petraeus couldn’t control his penis), where he lied almost as much as Donald Trump, as Conor Friedersdorf recounted at the time. I’ve repeatedly expressed my own lack of enthusiasm for Big John over the years. More recently, Brennan has proved a furious critic of Trump himself, accusing him hysterically of “treason”, about the only crime Trump hasn’t committed. Well, if you’ve spent your whole life adjusting your figleaf, it must piss you off to see a guy running around without one.
