The Not-So-Swift Swiftboaters

(Photo credit: moonbattery.com)

I think it's fair to say, with at least two big data points now in front of us (John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012; one could also throw in Bill Clinton, 1992 and 1996), that the Swiftboating of Democratic presidential candidates by aggrieved right-wing retired military people is a phenomenon that's not to go away.

The Swiftboating worked brilliantly against the eponymous former Swift Boat captain John Kerry, a Silver Star-decorated war hero who somehow came out looking less tough than a GOP president who had spent the Vietnam War guarding Texas and a vice president who had dodged the draft five times. That's partly because Kerry, eternally anguished about his Vietnam service, failed to fight back in time against the appalling slurs on his record made by these military malefactors.

Such slanders are much less likely to work against Obama, whose historic takedown of Osama bin Laden and successful reorientation of George W. Bush's overblown "global war on terror" into a fiercely focused assault on al Qaeda have been subject to a stealth campaign of right-wing innuendo. The new Swiftboaters have simultaneously raised doubts about 1) how much the president really had to do with the bin Laden mission and 2) the extent to which he is exploiting its success for political purposes by leaking classified information that has put military and intel lives in danger.

Part of the reason it won't hold this time is that the key figures behind the Swiftboating are swiftly imploding on their own. Chief among them is Ben Smith, a square-jawed, earnest fellow, said to be a former Navy SEAL, who appears to great effect in a 22-minute video that attacks Obama for disclosing life-endangering intel. After it was revealed that Smith is an apparently unbalanced tea partier who has also blogged that Obama is "an imposter," a "Muslim," and a "Manchurian President" who should "go back to the country you were born in," his credibility disappeared overnight, deservedly. So too with others who appeared in the video. The Romney campaign, which features a candidate who got only four deferments during Vietnam (to Dick Cheney's five), has been noticably silent.

But the Obama team is being much more forthright in making the case that the president does deserve the credit for the removal of the world's No. 1 terrorist from the field. And it has the facts amply on its side. According to my own independent reporting and that of other journalists, the bin Laden mission was entirely CIA-conceived-and-run. It came about at all only because Obama told his then-new CIA director, Leon Panetta, in 2009 to re-direct most of the agency's clandestine resources to tracking the al Qaida leader and his cohorts down, refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan and away from Iraq. According to two intelligence sources not affiliated with the Obama campaign, in October 2009, when the CIA put together a wish list for approval from the president--including adding more predator drones inside Pakistan; enlarging the areas in which they operated; and opening new facilities including CIA safe houses like the one in Abbottabad, near bin Laden's compound -- Obama surprised the agency by signing off on everything. "It was a sea change, in shifting the focus from Iraq," says one former official.

Beyond that, the bin Laden surveillance mission was painstakingly carried out by the CIA, at the president's direction, for more than two years. It was only in the final stages, after Obama decided on a commando raid over a bombing mission, that SEAL Team Six was "loaned" to the CIA under Title 50 of the National Security Act.

So the idea that the bin Laden killing was all the military's doing, and that Obama just got lucky -- perhaps even with George W. Bush's anti-terrorist campaign -- is sheer nonsense.  That's something you can expect to hear a lot more of from Obama surrogates as the president's campaign avoids all those Kerry pitfalls.

True, legitimate questions have been raised, by Democratic Sen Dianne Feinstein among others, about leaks that have exposed some classified U.S. activities, including the covert campaign against Iran's nuclear programs. But there is no evidence, as yet, to suggest that SEALS or other Americans have been placed in jeopardy. A controversial series of meetings that U.S. intelligence and defense officials had with Hollywood moviemakers involved little more than "going into the history of the hunt for bin Laden, and character questions about what it was like to be on the hunt," said one former official who was familiar with those discussions.

The larger point, however, is this: covert action is pretty much the way America makes war these days, all around the world. It is also very likely the way America will do so in the future--under either President Obama or a President Romney--so to some extent covert activities must be talked about and debated. Just ask the SEAL who took part in the bin Laden mission and who has authored  a forthcoming book  to be published on Sept. 11, that gives a "firsthand account" of the mission. Which would seem to discredit the idea that it is only Obama politicos who are eager to talk about America's battlefield successes.