Steven Newcomb: Obama confirms 'Geronimo' codename

Friday, May 13, 2011  

"Many people angrily responded to my previous column on this subject by claiming that the U.S. military had merely applied the Apache leader Geronimo’s name to the U.S. military operation to hunt down bin Laden, and had not applied the name to bin Laden. Well, President Obama laid that canard to rest in a May 8 interview with the CBS program 60 Minutes.

60 Minutes: “When was the first indication that you had found the right place, that bin Laden was in there?”

President Obama: “There was a point before folks had left, uh, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying, uh, back to base, where, uh, they said, uh, ‘Geronimo, uh, is, uh, has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden’.”

Now the issue becomes one of interpretation. The analogy takes the story of Geronimo and associates it with the story of Osama bin Laden. They were both hunted and pursued by the military forces of the United States. They both successfully eluded capture for a lengthy period of time.

There are problems with the analogy. Geronimo was never captured; he formally surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles, under specific terms of surrender, and was shipped off to St. Augustine, Florida. He was eventually permitted to go to Fort Sill (the U.S. military fort, not the present day town) in the Indian Territory (now called the State of Oklahoma). He finally died there in his nineties, while officially still a U.S. prisoner of war. (In 1918, Prescott Bush and some Yale classmates, who were fellow Skull and Bones members, claimed to have robbed Geronimo’s grave and stolen his skull for ritual purposes.)"

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: “Geronimo was the Code Name for bin Laden.” (Indian Country Today 5/11)

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