Luckily for President Bush, he had five former top officials from his administration on the Sunday shows yesterday defending his torture program and giving him credit for the current President killing Osama bin Laden. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice started the game earlier this week by claiming the Canadians supported Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (they didn’t) and yesterday on CNN, she said there was a “unit” dedicated to getting bin Laden “every single day” during Bush’s administration:

ZAKARIA: President Obama did say that he felt that the capture or killing of Bin Laden was not a top priority when he took office and he moved it to a top priority. What’s your reaction?

RICE: Oh, it was a top priority. We wanted to get Osama Bin Laden every single day. And there was a unit at the — the agency that worked on nothing else.

Watch it:

While it’s impossible to know what level of priority President Bush gave to nabbing bin Laden, he routinely said, even as early as March 2002, that he didn’t “spend that much time on him.” But if by “every single day” Rice meant, “every single day until late 2005″ then she would be correct because, as the New York Times reported in 2006, that’s when Bush closed the bin Laden unit in order to shift resources to Iraq:

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed. [...]

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. [...]

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

And of course, President Obama ended to the war in Iraq and put resources back into getting bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview on 60 Minutes last night, “I brought [CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’” So actually making bin Laden a top priority seems to have worked out pretty well.

Despite the fact that last week President Obama led the most successful counterterrorism operation in American history, the major news networks thought it was a good idea to host five former Bush administration officials to discuss the events. Many of them had previously taken to the airwaves trying to give President Bush most of the credit and claiming that his torture program was directly responsible for getting bin Laden. Thus, it’s not surprising that they repeated most of these talking points yesterday.

On CNN yesterday, Bush’s CIA Director Michael Hayden, of course, praised the use of torture, but also seemed to try to diminish Obama’s role in getting bin Laden, saying that any president would’ve done the same thing:

HAYDEN: But, in addition to being courageous, I think it was also inevitable. This was the very best chance we had to kill or capture this target. The president had choices, and it made more difficult because even as those helicopters were going over the wall, everything we had on this facility, the belief that Bin Laden was there, was truly circumstantial. There were no sightings, nothing that you can point to and say, that’s it. That’s him.

So the president made this decision, even in the face of uncertainty. That requires some courage, but – but, frankly, I – I cannot imagine any American president not making that decision.

Watch it:

What if John McCain had won in 2008? Indeed, one doesn’t have to go back very far to “imagine” that any other American president might have acted differently. While campaigning for president, Obama said that if the U.S. had actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, that he would order a unilateral operation to take him out, with or without Pakistani cooperation. McCain called that “naive” and asked the next day, “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?”:

“The first thing you do is, you don’t tell people what you’re gonna to do. You make plans and you work with the other country that is your ally and friend, which Pakistan is.

“You don’t broadcast and say that you’re going to bomb a country without their permission or without consulting them. It’s just fundamentals of the conduct of national security policy.”

There’s a reason why President Obama didn’t consult with Pakistan on bin Laden. Last night on 60 Minutes, Obama said that many of his most senior advisors had no idea about the bin Laden mission. “I didn’t tell most people here in the White House. I didn’t tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security,” he said. When asked why he didn’t consult with the Pakistanis, Obama replied, “If I’m not revealing to some of my closest aides what we’re doing, then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don’t know.”

For married couples, when one spouse is a United States citizen and one isn’t, the citizen can sponsor the foreign national for residency, but only if they are of the opposite sex. The Defense of Marriage Act prevents same-sex couples from accessing the same protections because the federal government does not recognize their marriages. The Department of Justice clarified on Saturday that, despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s intervention on Thursday in one particular case, deportations will likely continue in immigration cases of same-sex binational marriages. This was luckily not the situation for a Newark, NJ couple when a judge granted adjournment on Friday, meaning the couple could stay together until at least December. The judge cited Holder’s decision as the impetus for delaying his ruling.

Despite the unique exceptions for these two couples, DOMA continues to be the law of the land, which means that individuals in same-sex binational marriages, civil unions, or domestic partnerships have no right to sponsor their partners for green cards. Immigration Equality estimates that there are 36,000 same-sex binational couples in the United States, 45 percent of whom have children. In the absence of employment sponsorship, these families have no legal protection to stay together.

Two bills are before Congress that would alleviate this discrimination against same-sex couples and their families. Last month, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) reintroduced the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA), which would allow gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans to sponsor their same-sex partners for residency. Forty-eight U.S. House members also sent a letter (PDF) to the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security requesting deportations come to an end. Just last week, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced the Reuniting Families Act (RFA), a family immigration bill of a wider scale that also includes the same protections as UAFA. Until one of these bills passes or DOMA is overturned, families will continue to be torn apart by government-sanctioned discrimination.