President Obama will meet on Friday with some of the special operators involved in the U.S. strike that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, according to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
The meeting will come amid the President’s visit to Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, where he will deliver an address to members of the 101st Airborne Division who have recently returned from deployment in Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon, the visit was planned prior to bin Laden’s death. Vice President Joe Biden will be in attendance as well.
Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One Friday that the President will use the speech to thank the servicemembers for their sacrifice and acknowledge that the strike against bin Laden “was an historic and singular event” but will not take a self-congratulatory stance. Instead, the President will stress that the killing of the terrorist leader “does not by any means mean that we are finished with the war against al Qaeda.”
The identities of the members of the special operations team that killed bin Laden have been withheld, but according to recent remarks from Biden, they were part of the elite Navy SEALs.