All Episodes
Previous Next
May 2, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:03
May 2, 2011, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hiya, folks.
The views expressed by the host on this program, as always, documented to be almost always right, 99.6% of the time.
Great to have you here.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882, and the email address L Rushball at EIB net.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, we uh we we need to open the program today by congratulating President Obama.
President Obama has done something extremely effective, and when he does, this needs to be pointed out.
President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East.
He did not scrub the mission to get bin Laden.
In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off.
You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb, like they always do.
They wanted to go in there and drop missiles and launch uh bombs, a number of uh of totally destructive uh techniques here.
But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the special forces.
No one else thought of that.
President Obama, not us not a single intelligence advisor, not a single national security advisor, not a single military advisor came up with the idea of using SEAL Team Six or any of the special forces.
Our military wanted to go in there and just scorch the earth, leaving no evidence of anything after the mission.
But President Obama single-handedly understood what was at stake here.
He alone understood the need to get DNA to prove the death.
Obama alone understood the aftermath, alone understood that there would be doubting Thomas's if the place was just obliterated and no evidence was to be found.
Not one member of the United.
Well, then according to news reports, not one member of the military, not General Petraeus, nobody in the Intel community, nobody had the slightest idea of going in there and using special forces.
It was President Obama, single-handedly and alone, who came up with the strategy that brought about the effective assassination of uh Osama bin Laden.
He kept the Bush policies alive, keeping a military presence in the Middle East, allowing the military to finish the job that they started nearly ten years ago.
What a great testament it is in these times for an element of the United States to perform as designed.
What a magnificent moment for them.
A brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed operation.
And it's a very uplifting thing to realize that such precision can still be accomplished in this country.
I was last night I was as proud as I have been to the U.S. military in I don't know how long.
And I and I I remain so today.
I toyed with the idea of opening the program with military music.
Felt so happy and proud about this.
And the the uh this was just just from a 40-minute operation.
Get in, get it, and get out.
We've got, I mean, there are a lot of questions about it.
Burial at sea, the DNA supposedly takes a week to get, but we've got it already.
The proof positive it was.
Uh it's it's a um it's a very, very, very important and positive day for the U.S. military.
I've got a lot of uh uh press accounts here, by the way.
We did a number of things in terms of show prep today.
Uh I went back and looked at some of the stories that have been published in the past about where people thought bin Laden was, whether he was still alive, whether or not he's been dead.
It's interesting to go back and look at a number of uh ways, the any number of ways the story of Osama bin Laden has been covered since 9-11.
Reports that he was killed in Torabora, reports that he's been dead all of these eight years.
It's an interesting thing to go back when you have the benefit of research to go back and look at all this, and I've got a stack of things like this.
One of the things that I want to point out here, Obama, sorry, Osama is dead.
And the fact is he has long ceased to be a commander.
The stories that we're getting are that this mansion, and believe me, I've seen the pictures, it's not a mansion.
I mean, it's a it's an enlarged hut where this guy was living.
It was a big hut, but it was not a mansion.
It cost a million dollars.
What we're hearing is that there were no communications in or out, that he required couriers.
And guess what?
It was again Obama who deserves praise of continuing the Bush policies at Guantanamo Bay.
I told you that this administration would never close Guantanamo Bay.
And it was the intelligence we gathered among the detainees at Guantanamo Bay that led us to this enlarged hut that's called a mansion outside uh Islamabad.
Couriers were needed by Obama to receive Osama to receive and send information.
In order to keep him alive, in order to keep him safe, they couldn't allow any communication.
There was no television, there was no internet, there were no telephones, no satellite, nothing in or out.
It required couriers.
Detainees who may have been waterboarded, and again, we need to never forget that President Obama deserves praise for continuing the policies established by George W. Bush, which led to the uh learning, the acquisition of this intel that led us to the enlarged hut in Pakistan that led to the assassination of bin Laden last night.
The detainees, many of them started talking, and the couriers were identified.
The couriers were then tracked and followed by intelligence operatives.
And it was learned as far back as last summer where bin Laden was.
Last summer it was suggested that we go in and get bin Laden.
And Obama, even then, knowing full well, and the only one in the room knowing that the military's way, going in there and bombing this thing wasn't the way to work.
Thank God for President Obama.
If he had not been there, who knows what would have happened.
It was only Obama who understood the need to get DNA to prove that this was bin Laden that we had assassinated.
So the information, the intel from captured detainees at Guantanamo led to the discovery of the courier system that kept bin Laden informed of what's going on.
I told you that this regime would never close down Guantanamo Bay.
It was simply too valuable a military asset.
So, ladies and gentlemen, regardless what you think, and I know there my email is filled with people who saying they want to see the long-form death certificate.
I mean, there's uh uh just uh the the deathers now, that's the new term.
There are uh uh uh a number of people.
Well, it might have been Khalid Sheikh Muhammad himself who gave up the information about the couriers.
It might have been Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and ladies and gentlemen, while Osama is dead, he had long since uh stopped being a key commander because he had no way to issue orders.
He was a figurehead.
He'd been taken out of the game because of the worldwide manhunt to find him.
The actual planner, and we know this, the actual planner who drew up the blueprints, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad is still alive.
He's at Club Githmo.
That is something that is 100% under Obama's control.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could have been put before a military commission long, long ago.
They wanted a show trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City.
They still do, in fact.
But this is an occasion about which to declare victory.
And it is a victory brought about by the policies of the Bush and Cheney administration.
Policies that President Obama saw fit to continue to the end, keeping our troops in the Middle East, a heightened military presence, unafraid to use the special ops.
Unafraid.
You go back and look at some of these stories in the past that I was telling you about.
I got many stories where Obama said I'm not going to make him a martyr as a candidate for the presidency in 2008.
Obama's, I'm not going to make him a martyr.
I would not kill him.
I would capture him.
Well, reality has a change, a strange way sometimes of maturing people.
And Obama realized that capturing bin Laden, and now what to do with him.
The Saudis did not want his body.
Nobody wanted him.
So we buried him at sea, which is one of the final options in Islam that's permitted if all else fails.
We don't know what sea, but the last thing they wanted was to establish a grave site.
That could be a destination for pilgrims, if you will, for the ages.
So the question of where is Osama bin Laden also a brilliant, brilliant strategy.
Executed by this regime, utilizing the policies laid down by Bush and Cheney.
Time to declare victory.
It really is.
This is a major moment.
Even though bin Laden was no longer an effective leader.
In fact, our buddies at uh at Stratford, a global intelligence website, the tactical irrelevance of Osama bin Laden's death, they point out that there's not much he could do to leave.
He couldn't get orders in or out.
He'd become a figurehead.
And so, in terms of the war on terror, it will go on.
Terrorism will still happen.
There's another story here.
This is six days ago in an Australian newspaper.
That Khalid Sheikh Mohammed says that there is a nuclear device planted somewhere in the world that will go off in the event Osama bin Laden is captured or killed.
A major nuclear device.
Having seen this, it was six days ago.
I didn't see an Australian newspaper.
We'll go through this stack and share with you some of the stuff that we uh that we have dredged up.
Al Jazeera seems to be um uh a network here that many in Washington approve of and are quoting liberally from with uh with great credibility.
Also CNN back in October of 2010.
NATO official bin Laden deputy hiding in Northwest Pakistan, CNN knew via intel from NATO where bin Laden was months ago, all the way back in October of 2010, and we're told now that so did Obama.
And the military had plans that Obama alone knew would not survive the aftermath.
That Obama alone knew would not pass the smell test.
Here it is, Australia 9 News, the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks warned that Al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe, which will unleash a nuclear hailstorm if bin Laden is captured, leaked files revealed.
The terror group also planned to make 9-11-style attack on London's Heathrow Airport by crashing a hijacked airliner into one of the terminals, the files showed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the nuclear device if the Al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed.
This according to files released by WikiLeaks.
All this is in a WikiLeaks dump.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, has been held at Club Gitmo since 2006, is to be tried in a military court at the U.S. Naval Base In Cuba over these attacks.
A brief timeout, my friends, will come back and continue here as we kick off a brand new week of broadcast excellence right here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And we're back, Rush Lindbaugh, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Let me give you some history.
Ladies and gentlemen, that will put some of this in perspective.
And we're all being inundated here with uh information.
We're all being inundated with news reports that raised questions as well as answer them.
We've all seen President Obama last night on television announcing his single-handed involvement in securing the death of Osama bin Laden.
We know that it was Obama who called off the bombing, insisted on the special forces.
In fact, we know it was Obama who assembled the team.
He said so.
I mean, my three of the most used words in President Obama's media appearance last night.
Not a single intelligence advisor, not a single national security advisor, military advisor came up with the idea.
Not one of them.
Not one of them, according to Obama had the ability to understand the need to get DNA.
This was Obama's message last night.
He said that, quote, I assembled a team.
He refused to give the team the green light for the last three months.
Because the team wanted to go in and create Mayhem and Obama alone.
Barack Obama alone knew the right way to do this.
Slight problem.
See, we love the U.S. military here.
Cannot tell you how proud everybody in my house was last night over this.
Just especially with the status of the country in so many ways.
For that realization and comfort derived from knowing that they work, that they are still the best, that something in this country is still the best.
And that it is the U.S. military.
That it is the best.
That a part of America is still the best.
I can't tell you how happy and proud personally that made me.
Now, these teams that Obama said he assembled.
They fall under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command.
They have been operating for almost 30 years.
The Joint Special Operations Command is comprised of Delta, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
These are the guys who fly the helicopters in the dead of night 50 feet off the ground.
Marine Force Reconnaissance, SEAL Team 6, 1st Special Operations Wing, the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, a few other support elements...
The CIA is also heavily involved, especially those from the clandestine service.
That team, that organization, has been assembled and operating in Iraq and Afghanistan for almost 10 years.
This is the same group that brought down Saddam Hussein.
This is the same group that found Saddam Hussein in a hole.
Actually, the CIA found him.
They've been tracking him for months with the help of some Delta guys on the ground.
This is Obama, we're talking about Osama, and uh this team that went in last night was a mixture of these various units.
Guarantee you, they have been assembled and operating in Iraq and Afghanistan for almost 10 years.
And this is why I say that I want to sincerely congratulate Obama despite his words, Despite every indication he gave verbally of disassembling this because he wanted America to be respected again.
Despite his promises and words to tear apart this team, he continued it.
Obama does deserve to be graduated for congratulated for continuing the operations of this team, keeping a military presence in the Middle East.
But he did not assemble it.
When they went in and got Saddam, what it was the Rangers went in first.
They blocked the two roads that led into the area, then a mixture of SEALs and Delta went in and actually grabbed Saddam.
It's the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command who deserve all the credit for this.
And President Obama deserves credit for not disassembling them.
For keeping them in the loop, because this that happened last night has been the policy of this country for ten years.
It is a great day for America.
But the guys who did the heavy lifting are the guys who wear the uniform.
And they're not demanding lifelong pensions and health care demands today.
For the record, uh ladies and gentlemen, in his brief announcement last night, President Obama used the word I ten times.
He used the word me three times.
He used the word mine five times, and the word my three times.
Navy SEAL Team Six was not practicing courageous restraint last night.
Courageous restraint is a new operational tactic that the president on his own has instituted in Afghanistan.
Courageous restraint is not firing on terrorists who might be shielded by women and children, civilians.
Last night we know that a woman was killed, acting as a human shield for Obama.
SEAL team six.
Osama, right.
I better say bin Laden when I mean Osama, because not just gonna get, I feel like I'm Ted Kennedy in here, who himself got it all screwed up.
Navy SEAL Team Six was not practicing courageous restraint.
Also, folks, will the Bush lawyers who suggested uh harsh interrogation techniques, suggesting that constitutionally and legally those techniques were okay.
Will they now be hailed as heroes or will the regime continue to pursue them legally?
So, yeah, I know some of you I don't want to be misunderstood about this.
You know, we're programmed that's focused on the truth.
I'm a host focused on the truth.
President Obama deserves credit for keeping in play the Bush Cheney policies of dealing with these people.
Guantanamo Bay, interrogation, rendition, all of the things the Bush administration put into play to win the war on terror, this regime kept in place.
They might have said something else.
They might have given their supporters a different impression, saying they're gonna close Guantanamo Bay, they're gonna end all this harsh technique uh interrogation technique stuff.
But in fact, they continued the policies.
The Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East using special ops forces, which were not required to follow any rules of engagement, by the way.
Now I mentioned uh Al Jazeera.
And by the way, uh, ladies and gentlemen, fear not.
Prior to, unlike everybody else, I was watching Fox last night.
Actually, I wasn't watching television.
I was reading a book, and my cell phone started going nuts with people sending me instant messages, my iPad starting vibrating off the couch.
I said, what is going on?
And I said, uh looked at this, and the message, turn on Fox is a major announcement from Obama coming.
It was 1030.
So I turned on Fox, and there's the grim reaper.
Haraldo Rivera, and I said, Oh my God, somebody's died.
What is it at 10:30 on Sunday night?
Who could it be?
Somebody's either dead or is gonna be real soon.
So they hadn't heard about any inclement weather during the day, so what could it be?
I said, maybe we got Qaddafi.
So that's what I thought at first.
Maybe we got Qaddafi.
Then the word started leaking that it was bin Laden and as close to an on-air orgasm as I've ever seen from anybody.
Haroldo just started dancing the jig up there on Fox.
And I said, Well, who better to have on Fox News when you get Bin Laden and a grim reaper himself for Roldo Rivera?
And then we saw the protest, not protesters, we saw the celebrants at the outside the White House in Times Square.
And I'm like you.
I said, where's the store at 11 o'clock Sunday night to go buy American flags open?
These are the questions that I had.
And then Obama came out and made the announcement.
There was some conflicting elements that he was been dead a week ago.
Um, that we were testing the DNA, all of these things.
We found the operation took place last night, not a week ago.
Now, we've heard Andrea Mitchell from NBC, and a number of people in the regime uh praised Al Jazeera.
Oh, uh I'm not gonna let this take away from other news.
I had a wonderful show prep stack ready to go today, and I'm gonna get to it.
For example, Wall Street Journal, millions set to lose unemployment benefits.
Five and a half million.
What effect will that have?
John Harwood, this is kind of funny.
John Harwood, the New York Times, organizing now Democrats expect tough bid in 2012.
Just as I've been saying all of last week and the week before, the idea that the re-election of Obama is a shoe-in is nothing more than PR.
It's nothing more than a strategy.
This guy is no more a shoe-in for re-election than Alfred E. Newman is.
Now, Harwood has already gone on television today to disavow his own column.
After bin Laden was killed, and the news reached Harwood's all over TV.
Forget what I wrote.
Forget what I wrote.
It doesn't matter now.
Obama re-elected.
It's automatic.
Proving he didn't want to write this piece.
Somebody at the New York Times somewhere realized, wait just a second.
We really gonna go out and make the case that these economic circumstances and the future are the guaranteed way to win re-election in this country.
A couple other things I want to say about that too.
What is Obama's real plan?
What are they banking on in order to secure their re-election?
This is important, and we're gonna get to it today.
But just a couple of other items on this story.
Zeroing in on bin Laden, May 2 from Al Jazeera.
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a 40-minute raid that followed months of planning and years of investigation, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Bin Laden went into hiding shortly after the 9-11 attack, so his communications with the outside world were handled by trusted couriers.
U.S. spies have been monitoring many of those couriers for years, the CIA said on Sunday.
And how were they able to do that?
They got the intel from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which, despite all of his promises, Obama has not shut down and won't.
One courier in particular had our constant attention, said a senior administration official.
We identified him as both a protege of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Faraj Alibi.
The U.S. spy agency learned his name four years ago.
Two years later, it tracked the courier and his brother to a compound in Abbatabad, Pakistan.
This is where this enlarged hut is where bin Laden was.
Calling it a mansion.
No, it's not a mansion.
It's a big hut.
Even seen some of the pictures of the interior.
Architectural digest will not be making a trip over there to do a photo spread.
So we've known about this compound for two years.
We have known about this enlarged hut for two years.
The people who lived there, according to the CIA, had no visible source of wealth, which led the CIA to believe that other people lived there who did.
U.S. officials eventually came to believe that those other people were bin Laden and his family, and they presented their assessment to Obama back in September.
President Obama has known that we suspected bin Laden and his couriers were in that hut since September.
In other reports, which I just alluded to CNN had a report that he was there last August.
Several months of investigation followed, and then Obama chaired a series of five National Security Council meetings to decide on a course of action.
You might say, well, why should this be such a tough decision?
Five National Security Council meetings, eight months to decide to do something.
The council, after all of this time, since last October, decided on an operation to capture bin Laden.
They did.
The original plan was to capture bin Laden, take him alive, read him his Miranda rights, and supply him with legal counsel.
That was the original plan.
Then the military wanted to go in with guns blazing, drones, missiles, and bombs.
And President Obama alone.
Among all the people at all of these five meetings.
President Obama alone.
The expense of the military.
Petraeus didn't know what he was doing.
Nobody else in the military apparently knew what they were doing.
Obama himself figured out.
Not a single intel advisor, not a security advisor, not one military advisor, thought of the idea of killing Obama and producing DNA.
Osama and getting the DNA.
Not one of them.
It was Obama himself.
And this explains why this was done with ground troops instead of laser guided missiles.
President Obama.
Original plan, capture him.
The original plan was to capture bin Laden.
Somebody then said, no, no, no, that really the worst thing that could happen here.
But the president said, but that's what I said I would do.
Eric Holder said that's what we would do if we capture sure we're not savages and so forth.
Somebody realized that that would be a giant mistake.
Now Reuters then has a story.
Remember now, the Al Jazeera story in Al Jazeera, Andrea Mitchell and a number of others, Al Jazeera is the network to emulate.
Al Jazeera, they're the stars now.
Al Jazeera, that's the network everybody ought to be watching, right?
And the Al Jazeera story is, no, we weren't going to kill him.
No, we weren't going to bomb.
We were going to go in there and we were going to capture.
And read him his rights and give him a legal team.
Reuters.
U.S. team's mission was to kill bin Laden, not capture.
And that story is today.
U.S. Special Forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the Al-Qaeda mastermind, not capture him.
A U.S. national security official told Reuters this was a kill operation, The official said.
He made it clear.
There was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.
So the word went out after the network of record Al Jazeera came out and described the original mission as a capture mission.
The regime said, oh no, no, no, no, no, I can't have that.
So they called up Reuters.
And the word went out to Obama's press minions to tamp down this Al Jazeera story, claiming the mission was intended to capture bin Laden.
The mission all along was a kill mission.
But if it was a kill mission all along, why not just bomb the compound?
Why not just bomb it and then go in and collect the body afterwards?
Pakistan led us in there.
They're an ally.
They wouldn't have stopped this from going into getting the body.
And anyway, that's where we are in this.
Al Jazeera says the original mission was capture.
Reuters comes out and says, no, it wasn't.
The original mission was to kill.
The regime obviously didn't want the Al Jazeera story to survive.
Firefight lasted forty minutes.
Well, the operation lasted forty minutes.
We don't know how much of that was intel gathering and how much of it was actual fire fight.
We don't know if he had bodyguards.
We don't know how dedicated they were.
The White House is now contemplating releasing a picture of the corpse.
They've got it.
They say it's just too gruesome.
Now there's a Spanish website that has put out a headshot of what is claimed to be the corpse of Obama.
Your host has seen it.
It's not that gruesome.
I've seen worse in the Transformer movies.
And we're back, Rush Limbaugh, the excellence in the broadcasting network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Let's grab a couple of phone calls here in this hour.
I know that any number of you want to weigh in on it.
We'll start Cleveland with Tammy.
Welcome to the program.
Nice to have you here.
Thank you for taking my call.
Um I really think that that you should play the nine minutes of Obama's speech, actually, on your show today.
I was listening to you say that, you know, talking about all the eyes that he was saying, you know, I did this, it was all because of me.
President Obama alone, you know, figured out the idea of killing Obama.
And I just I I know you're being sarcastic, but I I just think you need to give him a pass on this.
I mean, he is the commander in chief, and I listened to that speech last night, and I I just I didn't hear what you were saying today with the self-congratulatory tone at all.
You didn't hear what I was saying?
No, I really didn't.
What do you mean you didn't hear what I was saying?
You just said you understood what I was saying.
Oh, I heard what you said.
I listen I listened to the first half hour.
That's that's what I'm saying.
I heard what you said.
But I also listened to his speech last night, and I just I didn't get the self-congratulatory tone out of it.
Out of his speech?
Yes.
You didn't think wait.
No, I really didn't.
You didn't think that all the use of the word I mean my that he was not, he was not self-congratulating himself.
No, actually, actually, I did not.
I did I just didn't I just didn't take it that way.
I mean, I'm not a I'm not an Obama Obama fan by any means, but I thought it was a really great I thought it was.
I misunderstood.
I thought you were upset with me for uh praising Obama.
I know you were being sarcastic.
I was not being sarcastic.
I'm telling you, I was praising Obama for continuing the policies the Bush administration implemented and keeping Guantanamo Bay open and the intelligence gathering operation ongoing in order to get the intel to get the guy.
I was being very serious about that.
All right.
But but then, sarcastically, you did say President Obama alone figured out the idea of killing Obama right now.
That's what he said.
I'm simply reporting what he said.
He always he assembled the team.
That he he alone?
He he didn't say He alone.
I assembled a team.
I did this.
I've got well, I've got a I got 36 seconds of it here.
I don't have enough time to play it for you now.
I figured everybody that would call here or listen today would have heard that.
But no, it was very obvious that he he.
I mean, and finally, last week, I determined we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized.
I authorized an operation to get bin Laden and bring him to justice.
Yeah.
Um I mean my.
That's.
Look at it this way, folks.
All this story about Obama being a shoe-in for re-election.
If he was a shoe-in for re-election, Osama bin Laden would still be alive today.
There would have been no need to undertake the mission.
And Donald Trump would not have had any jokes told about him on Saturday night at the White House Correspondence Dinner if Obama were such shoe in.
But he's not.
And we'll continue.
We'll be back right after this.
▲
Export Selection