And in the years since then, intelligence officials believed bin Laden lived in a relatively small area along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a largely ungoverned and largely uninhabitable region out of the reach of the governments of the two countries, and even the United States. Pakistani and Afghan officials regularly traded public claims that bin Laden was living in the other country’s territory.
Bush’s failure to capture bin Laden became a significant political issue in the 2004 presidential campaign and fueled regular criticism of Bush, with Democrats pointing to the failure to capture or kill bin Laden as evidence of ineffectual military strategy. Foreign critics also regularly pointed to the fact that bin Laden was at large as evidence of impotence on the part of the U.S
As the Bush White House faced early criticism over its difficulty in locating the al Qaeda chief, the administration gradually de-emphasized the importance of finding bin Laden.
“We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is,” Bush said during a March 2002 news conference. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.”
The issue continued at a lower temperature through the 2008 campaign. Obama took some flak from Democrats and Republicans in 2007 for publicly suggesting he would take military action to kill senior al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan.
“There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” Obama said in an August 2007 speech. “They are plotting to strike again. … If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
After taking office, Obama dramatically stepped up the use of armed Predator drones in Pakistan to target al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden.
The fact that bin Laden was killed, rather than captured, is extraordinarily politically fortuitous for Obama and his aides because capturing the al Qaeda leader alive would have raised thorny questions about what to do with him. For more than a year, the Obama administration took a pounding from lawmakers in both parties over plans to put other September 11 suspects on trial in civilian court. Obama formally abandoned those plans about a month ago.
However, the decision of what to do with bin Laden was never resolved, an official said Sunday night. Since Obama took office, senior administration officials were tripped up repeatedly on Capitol Hill over questions about where bin Laden would be taken if he was captured and where he would be tried.
During a House hearing in March 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to entertain the question of whether bin Laden would be put on trial in the U.S. or taken to the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay — a facility that has not received a new detainee since Obama took office.
“You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden,” Holder said. “He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. … He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.”
In February of this year, CIA Director Leon Panetta told a Senate hearing that if bin Laden was captured he would “probably” be taken to Guantanamo. Other administration officials declined to endorse that statement.
On Sunday night, Bush’s homeland security adviser Francis Fragos Townsend lauded the Obama administration’s action.
“This goes beyond the usual politics of Washington. It’s a tremendous achievement,” Townsend said on CNN. After the attacks, she kept a small scale model of the Twin Towers on her desk at the White House.
