Osama bin Laden is dead, Mr President

If Donald Trump wants to win the military vote he should stop going around hinting that he has sympathy for the suggestion being put about by conspiracy theorists that it wasn't Osama bin Laden who was killed by US Navy Seals in May 2011 but a double, and that the real one is alive and well and living in....wherever. Well of course it's total nonsense. So why does Trump think it's a good idea to peddle such rubbish during an election campaign? The answer is simple. It's because Barack Obama was president when the al-Qaeda founder was tracked down and killed and anything Obama did in his eight years presidency is open to doubt in Trump's view. So when some dodgy outfit called QAnon came up with the conspiracy idea in a tweet that the death of Osama bin Laden was just fake news, Trump leapt on it and retweeted it. Trump loves retweeting almost as much as he likes tweeting. He might have thought it was fun but actually it will seriously annoy the US military, particularly the Seal community. Like all special forces units around the world there is tremendous rivalry between the different organisations. In the US it's the US Navy Seals and the US Army Delta Force. The bin Laden operation was the biggest coup for the Seals and their reputation went sky high when details of the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan were made public. They won't take kindly to their president and commander-in-chief casting doubt on their heroism. Perhaps Trump didn't think of that when he did his retweet. So far only one of the Seal Team 6 unit which carried out the raid has spoken out. Unfortunately it's Robert O'Neill, the former Seal who claimed with huge publicity that he was the one who fired the shots that killed bin Laden as he emerged from his first floor bedroom. In my view O'Neill lost all credibility and respect when he effectively pushed the rest of the team to one side and boasted that he was the one to be praised for killing the most notorious terrorist leader. Talk about glory hunting. Then he further sullied his reputation by refusing to wear a mask on a passenger plane and making a total a..e of himself. Neverthless his condemnation of Trump for dismissing the bin Laden killing probably reflected the feelings of every member of Seal Team 6 and the majority of members of the US armed forces.