Biden's Diminishing Confidence in Abbottabad

I try strenuously to avoid political issues here, but Vice President Joseph Biden told a whopper about the Abbottabad raid at a New Jersey fundraiser last night that bears noting. 

According to The Huffington Post, the Vice President declared:

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.

This provokes head-scratching on two levels.  First, with all due respect to the SEAL and SOCOM planners who actually developed the plan for the raid, I think that the 1970 Son Tay raid to rescue POWs in North Vietnam, the 1950 Inchon landing, Operation Overlord/D-Day, to name a few, were equally audacious, perhaps even greater given the consequences of failure.

Second, this is part of a pattern I expect we'll see repeatedly over the course of the election year as Administration officials consistently understate the probability of bin Laden's presence at Abbottabad.  According to Eric Schmidle's report in the New Yorker:

[CIA Director Leon] Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent.” [Emphasis added]

Similarly, in "The Man Who Hunted Osama bin Laden," the Associated Press reported: "Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden?  John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent." [Emphasis added]

Finally, in September a White House insider told Newsweek that some intelligence officers "thought that it was high as 80 or 90 percent."  That insider?  President Obama.

Again, the President deserves full credit for ordering the Abbottabad raid, but I don't think there is anybody who doesn't believe that President Bush would have ordered the raid under similar circumstances.  (Whether Clinton would have or not is a more interesting question, although I think ultimately he would have given the green light had he been President post-9/11).  I also think it is unseemly for Administration officials to try to inflate the fortitude it took to authorize the operation for political purposes.