President Joe Biden boasted about following Al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden to the “gates of hell” during his first address to a joint session of Congress, despite having opposed the mission to kill or capture bin Laden when he was vice president.
During the address, Biden said:
We said we would follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to do it. If you’ve been to the upper Kunar Valley, you’ve kind of seen the gates of hell. And we delivered justice to bin Laden. We degraded the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Biden did not mention he had actually opposed the 2011 Navy SEAL raid to kill or capture bin Laden at the time.
Former President Barack Obama wrote in his memoir A Promised Land that Biden “weighed in against the raid.”
Obama wrote, according to a summary by the Guardian, Biden was concerned about “the enormous consequences of failure” and counseled that the president “should defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound.”
The operation ended up being successful in killing Bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks killing thousands of Americans on United States soil.
Obama also recalled that after the mission was successful, Biden put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed, saying, “Congratulations, boss.”
Biden himself admitted in 2012 to telling Obama not to conduct the raid, saying “My suggestion is don’t go.”
However, since then, Biden has taken a more blustery tone.
Biden said in April: “I said, among — with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be. That’s exactly what we did, and we got him.”
As Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported then, the “gates of hell” line actually came from the late-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
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