See No Evil; President Obama may think that the threat from al Qaeda is receding. It isn’t.

Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard; 

 

"The rest of [bin Laden's] 27-page document undermines the president’s case. “We still have a powerful force which we can organize and prepare for deployment,” bin Laden wrote. This cuts against the president’s claim that al Qaeda is mostly a spent force. And bin Laden emphasized that al Qaeda needs to “concentrate” its “jihad efforts in areas where the conditions are ideal for us to fight.” Bin Laden surmised that “Iraq and Afghanistan are two good examples.” Yet much of President Obama’s speech was devoted to proclaiming the “end” of the post-9/11 wars in both countries.

"The president cited just one of the 17 bin Laden documents declassified and released to the American public. And those 17 documents are just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of documents and files captured during the May 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, hardly sufficient for any robust analysis of the al Qaeda network.

"Still, the president’s selective citation of bin Laden’s files is illustrative of a larger point: When it comes to fighting al Qaeda and its affiliates, the president and his advisers see only what they want to see."