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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

"Mr. Obama looked 'stone faced'.... Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fingered his rosary beads."

From a NYT description of the scene in the Situation Room of the White House during the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. They were watching a video screen. On it was Leon E. Panetta, narrating, from CIA headquarters:
“They’ve reached the target,” he said.

Minutes passed.

“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”

Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”
ADDED: Anyone want to take offense at that code name?
Apparently the code namers thought of bin Laden as a 21st century equivalent of the Chiricahua Apache leader....

Like bin Laden, Geronimo proved to be an elusive target. More than 5,000 soldiers were deployed to capture him in around 1885.

Geronimo was fighting for his land, and committed what U.S officials at the time might have called acts of terrorism, conducting raids on white settlers in Apache territory. U.S. officials said they could convict Geronimo and his fighters of murder, and exiled the outlaw Apache to Florida as a prisoner of war, never to return to his homeland.

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