Full credit belongs to President Obama for rejecting the positions of Candidate Obama and of the "anti-war" movement.

It's fascinating that the succesful execution of bin Laden comes from a targeted assassination based on information obtained through interrogations at Guantanemo Bay.

On the targeted assassination:

The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.


"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

This kind of thing has been criticized by the international human rights community:

In the past, such targeted killings have drawn criticism from human rights organizations and others who claim that they violate international law. Co-Conspirator Kenneth Anderson described the debate in this excellent article. It’s unlikely that there will be much criticism of the operation against Bin Laden. However, the broader debate over the law and morality of targeted killings is likely to continue.

Concerning the Gitmo angle:

For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.


Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Does this mean that next year Bush will get a Noble Peace Prize?