Barack Obama ‘played cards’ during raid on Osama bin Laden

US President Barack Obama spent a large chunk of time playing cards on the day of the Navy SEALs’ raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan in which the al-Qaeda chief was killed, a former aide to Obama has said.

The iconic photo of the raid is of the Situation Room, where an array of generals and top government officials, including Obama and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton, watched the events in Abbottabad unfold in real time.

But in a talk with Jim Newton of the Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, Obama’s former body man Reggie Love revealed that he, Obama and two others spent a large chunk of time during the raid playing cards upstairs, The New York Magazine reported.

Love said they must have played “15 hands” of spades in the White House’s private dining room. “Most people were like down in the Situation Room,” he recalls, “but (Obama) was like, ‘I’m not gonna be down there, I can’t watch this entire thing,’” Love said.

The “entire thing” lasted around 220 minutes, about 180 minutes of which consisted of helicopter rides to and from the compound. The magazine quoted sources as saying that a hand of spades lasts around 10 minutes, so 15 hands would take approximately 150 minutes.

So while the timeline is unclear, Obama was not necessarily playing cards upstairs during any of the significant moments of the Abbottabad raid in May 2011.