President Obama's 2008 pledge to kill Osama bin Laden is a Promise Kept

During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama pledged several times that he would act to capture or kill terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Today, that's a Promise Kept on our Obameter.

With the late-night announcement on May 1, 2011, that bin Laden is dead, many PolitiFact readers have pointed out President Obama's vow to kill him from October 2008. We had not included this promise when we created our Obameter database in 2009, so we are adding it now, as we have done with other campaign vows that readers have pointed out.

In an October 2008 debate with Republican nominee John McCain, Obama said the following:.

"What I have said is we're going encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our non-military aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants. And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.

"We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida . That has to be our biggest national security priority."

You can read our full report on this promise on the PolitiFact National site. We've also rated that Obama vow to "crush al-Qaida" as In the Works. With the killing of bin Laden and the deaths of other leaders in the past decade, al-Qaida is not as strong as it was once way -- but neither is it out of business.

We have a wrapup of seven other campaign promises related to terrorism too.