During his first Joint Session of Congress address Wednesday night, President Joe Biden touted the 2011 U.S. military raid on a complex in Pakistan where 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was hiding.
"We went to Afghanistan to get terrorists, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. And we said we would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to do it. And if you’ve been to the Upper Kunar Valley, you’ve kind of seen the gates of hell. And we delivered justice to bin Laden. We degraded the terrorist threat in Afghanistan," Biden said.
But at the time, then Vice President Biden was against the raid and advised President Barack Obama not to go through with it.
“Joe weighed in against the raid,” Obama writes in A Promised Land, about discussion of the Navy Seals mission, which he ordered to go ahead as intended in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on the night of 1-2 May 2011.
In his memoir, Obama echoes the accounts of other senior aides present in the White House Situation Room nine years ago who have said Biden counselled caution.
The Obama administration also abandoned the doctor who pointed U.S. intelligence to the Bin Laden compound. He's still in a Pakistani prison after working with the CIA.
Dr. Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound is paying a heavy price for his role in the operation.
Afridi was dismissed as a traitor in Pakistan but lauded as a hero by the United States.
Shakil Afridi has been languishing in a prison in the city of Peshawar for almost ten years after his fake vaccination programme helped US agents track and kill the Al-Qaeda leader.
"He is being kept in prison now only to teach every Pakistani a lesson not to cooperate with a western intelligence agency," said Husain Haqqani, who was serving as Pakistan's ambassador to Washington at the time of the raid.
