If letter writer E. Bruce Preece really believes President George W. Bush spent “ten years of painstaking effort” to find Osama bin Laden, and that Bush therefore deserves credit for finding him (May 13 letter, “Efforts of Bush years led to capture”), he must have not been paying much attention to Bush himself.
In 2002, mere months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush said of bin Laden: “I don’t know where he is … I just don’t spend that much time on him.”
Sorry, but that does not indicate “painstaking effort” of any kind, save the effort to sidestep both a valid question and his responsibility at the time.
The “blatant hypocrisy” is not Obama’s objections to using improper and ineffective torture during interrogations, it is in those who still exalt a president who trashed our financial reserves and our global reputation by attacking a nation that was not connected with 9/11, was not preparing to attack, and did not have large quantities of weapons of mass destruction in waiting.
