The Osama bin Laden raid when Joe Biden advised "Don't go."

Rewriting history is a common feature of all politicians. What someone said some years ago comes back to bite them when they are standing for office and that's when the rewriting or reinterpreting begins. Take Joe Biden and the Osama bin Laden raid in May 2011. I was Pentagon Correspondent for The Times in Washington at that time and remember everything very very clearly. After Barack Obama made his historic announcement that bin Laden was dead, killed in an extraordinarily daring and risky raid on his secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, not far from a garrison bustling with Pakistani troops, there was a lot of focus on what the options had been for Obama, especially when it became clear that there remained serious doubts over whether bin Laden was actually in the compound. Yes, a tall bloke about the right size was seen walking inside the compound but always with his head down. None of the US surveillance satellites could pin down the face, just the slope of the shoulders and the walk. Never the face. My recollection is that when Obama asked how strong the intelligence was that the founder of al-Qaeda was the walker in the compound, he was told it was around 60 per cent strong. That's not a helluva lot, although other intelligence that had persuaded the CIA to pay attention to the Abbottabad compound was pretty good. Very good in fact. The options in front of Odama were basically: drop a huge bomb on the compound and annihilate it, carry out a special forces raid to make sure the target was the right one and capture or kill him depending on the circumstances, or wait. There were two very strong voices that advised the third option. One was Bob Gates, the defence secretary, and the other was Joe Biden, vice president. They both told Obama that it made sense to wait until the intelligence was much stronger. The bombing idea was fairly swiftly rejected because if they obliterated the compound they would never know if bin Laden was there and pulverised amidst the compound rubble. So it was special forces raid or delay. Obama went round the table in the White House situation room. He asked: "Go or don't go?" Both Gates and Biden said: "Don't go." Gates has never tried to rewrite history. In fact he fully acknowledged the advice he gave to Obama in his excellent, although somewhat overlong memoir, "Duty". He also confirmed Biden had taken the same line as him. Don't go. Now, as Biden enters the final six weeks before he will know whether he is to be the 46th president of the United States, there seems to be a different interpretation doing the rounds. In fact Biden has actually denied he was against the raid. He claims that after the meeting broke up in April 2011 he walked beside Obama through the White House and told him that he, the president, should act according to his instincts, guessing that he was up for authorising the raid. And he claims he told Obama that he was in favour of the raid. Obviously only Biden and Obama know what was said between them after the situation room meeting. What I do know is that inside the situation room when Obama asked him in front of everyone else whether he should go or not, Biden replied, "Don't go." The following morning Obama rejected the advice of his vice president and defence secretary and authorised the raid. The only person in the meeting who was adamant that the special forces raid was the right option was Leon Pannetta, then CIA director. Obama backed Panetta and sure enough the tall man walking round in circles in the Abbottabad compound WAS Osama bin Laden and he was shot dead as soon as he emerged from his bedroom on the first floor as two members of US Seal Team Six climbed the stairs. Personally I don't see anything weak or wrong about the Gates/Biden advice at the time. The intelligence wasn't strong enough and perhaps a delay of a few days to allow for a few more turns of a surveillance drone over the compound in the hope of catching bin Laden looking up might have made Obama's decision easier. But the fact is Obama decided to risk it. The CIA after all had spent ten years trying to find bin Laden. If the director of the CIA thought the intelligence was sufficient to go go go, then hell, go go go. What's not acceptable is for anyone who said "don't go" to now claim that actually he privately advised Obama to order the raid. Only Obama knows the truth but I'm pretty sure he won't be telling the world that his former vice president is telling a porky. Mind you, Obama has a memoir coming out after the November election. Perhaps he will reveal all then.