Remember the night Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces had visited Osama bin Laden in his no-longer secret housing compound in Pakistan? And that the head of al Qaeda responsible for the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 and many others elsewhere was no longer breathing?
That was May 2, 2011.
Spontaneous — mostly joyous and peaceful — demonstrations broke out in the streets of major cities across the country. We got him!
The U.S. almost had bin Laden soon after 9/11 as he fled through the mountains of eastern Afghanistan toward Pakistan.
Gen. James Mattis had his allied forces arrayed across the escape path. The New York Times, however, published the seditious scoop that the CIA was tracking the terrorist leader by his cellphone signal.
That signal immediately went dead.
Then, for unexplained reasons, the Pentagon ordered Mattis to back off and sent in Afghan troops. You'll be shocked to know that their "manhunt" failed. The Saudi native escaped.
What followed was a decade-long global search that only ended when a Pakistani country doctor named Shakil Afridi obtained DNA evidence from a suspicious housing compound in Abbottabad.
Dr. Afridi may not have even known why he was asked to get those blood samples. But their results provided just enough evidence to convince Obama and his entire national security team — with the glaring exception of Vice President Joe Biden — to send SEAL Team Six 120 miles into Pakistan unannounced to "secure" the target.
That is a story we detail in this week's audio commentary below.
What is not so widely known is the disgusting fate of Dr. Afridi. Thanks to the very loose and extremely stupid lips of a U.S. Embassy official in Pakistan, he was named as a CIA asset who helped locate the notorious mass murderer.
It didn't matter if it was the truth. Pakistan, the alleged ally so very happy to receive in excess of $2 billion in U.S. aid every year, was not so very happy to have its deceit and U.S. betrayal exposed.
And Dr. Afridi became the helpless scapegoat.
He's been in a tiny prison cell ever since, tried on unrelated charges and tortured, while the United States has not done enough to free the man and reward him and his family properly in a safe place.
Sadly, this kind of cold ingratitude is not an isolated incident, which we detail in this week's commentary here. It's become a pattern in our foreign escapades. President Trump had nothing to do with creating this deep stain on our national honor. He's already obtained the freedom of dozens of Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.
Which makes him the perfect man at the perfect time with the perfect opportunity to right this ongoing wrong.
I hope you'll help get this message out. Or as one political boss once told me with a smile, "See that you suppress this widely."
This week, we also posted another in the ongoing series of Malcolm's Memories. This one was on the Junes of my childhood at Grandma's house. These accounts, I now realize, deal with the telling ways that all of our lives have changed over the years, not just mine.
All of the Memories are linked at the end of each one.
This week's Sunday column examined the marathon, skilled attack on Iran's facilities to develop nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Of course, it was built on the skills and shoulders of America's military volunteers. But the planning, announcement, and decisive follow-through bore all the impressive trademarks of Donald Trump.
The most recent audio commentary — Quietly, Americans Are Voting With Their Feet in an Epic Population Shift That's Changing Our Politics — drew an unusually large audience and active comment section. Given the shocking mayoral election results in New York City, this phenomenon seems likely to accelerate.
