Osama Bin Laden Reported Dead, Body In US Hands

Reader Tom Hudson, and now several others, have submitted the news that Osama Bin Laden is reportedly dead, and that his body is in the hands of the US military. A statement from President Obama is expected shortly. Watch this space for more details. Update: 05/02 04:01 GMT by T : More coverage at ABC News, at CNN, and at Al Jazeera. The reports say that Bin Laden was actually killed about a week ago by a bomb in Pakistan, and the time taken to confirm his identity via DNA testing helped delay the news. In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.

Comments

A few details

[sayfawa]

This article's a bit heavier on details:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/reports-say-osama-bin-laden-dead-us-president-obama-to-speak-soon/article2006299/

Mr. bin Laden was killed at a mansion outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad, CNN reported. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Associated Press Mr. bin Laden was killed in a ground operation in Pakistan, not by a Predator drone. A senior Pakistani intelligence official confirmed that he was killed in Pakistan.

Re:A few details

[cold fjord]

Interesting, so the US has ground troops in Pakistan, too? Shall we assume that they have both permission of the Pakistani government and the constitutional blessing of the US Congress for being at war in a FOURTH country...

Why, yes, as a matter of fact they do. And I'm glad to see that you are clear that they are fighting against the same enemy in Pakistan, not against Pakistan.

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.--- Authorization for Use of Military Force

Re:A few details

[artor3]

MSNBC just reported that the mansion was several times larger than any other building in the town, surrounded by a 15 foot wall topped with barbed wire, with a double gate, and no telephone wires connecting it to the outside. If that doesn't scream "hide out", nothing does. I'm thinking there were a lot of locals who knew and didn't care. Their loss I guess, they missed out on that million dollar reward.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

You just like getting your balls grabbed, don't you?

Re:Bin Laden murdered?

[larry bagina]

You think that's bad? Anwar al-Awlaki is the subject of an executive order ordering his death. He's also an American citizen.

Re:where's the long form?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, check out this comment... http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21541&cid=2277566

Nailed it?

Re:Mission Accomplished

[Anonymous Coward]

Bacon is a dietary restriction; burying him wrapped in dogskin would be a greater insult to the body.

Re:Please: NO POLITICAL POSTURING.

[Chuck Chunder]

The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American.

Do American's ever pass up an opportunity to look like an ignorant asshat?

Re:Please: NO POLITICAL POSTURING.

[circletimessquare]

you know, it's possible that a throwaway comment on a comment board doesn't crystallize someone's entire thinking. i'm glad you feel the need to condemn because i didn't address every nuance of meaning, so thanks for that

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2118920&cid=35995690

Re:Scumbag President(s)

[Anonymous Coward]

> I bet that next we'll have a queer

Been there, done it, airbrushed his boyfriend "Miss Nancy" from the official US Archives a hundred years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan

Re:Terrorists who were trained in Afghanistan by A

[Col Bat Guano]

Saddam Hussein didn't like Al Quidea - it's very, very unlikely that he would have had anything to do with them at all. AQ moved into Iraq filling the power vacuum when the government fell.

Re:Terrorists who were trained in Afghanistan by A

[Kagura]

Al Qaida did not move into Iraq. Very, very few fighters from Al Qaida or the Taliban operating in Afghanistan or Pakistan made it to Iraq to fight, since they already had infidels to fight. Abu Musab al-Zaraqi renamed his group "Al Qaida in Iraq" and had direct correspondence with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but they quickly split due to ideological differences. Long story short, there is no current connection between the two groups "Al Qaida" and "Al Qaida in Iraq", and there hasn't been since 2006 at the latest. Be careful which term you use.

Re:Scumbag President(s)

[smash]

oh i don't know, go ask some of the inmates of guantanamo

Re:Mission Accomplished

[AK Marc]

Now - was there WMDs? Its not far fetched to believe there were. The US had sold Iraq the basic chemicals needed to manufacture chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. There was a fledging nuclear program. And inspections were not done to the extent that they had been agreed to - certainly not to the extent that the US and former Soviets conducted against each other under various nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

Saddam purposefully lied in order to make it look like he had a bigger program that he did. Of course, all investigations revealed that his statements were false. They were made to make him appear strong and help prevent an invasion or uprising. And, of course, he didn't give carte blanche to the investigators because if he did, his own followers would have thought him weak, opening up a chance for a coup. Again, his actions were predictable for a paranoid dictator (was he paranoid? Everyone was really out to get him...).

All his WMD programs were aimed to keep up the appearance of strength, and nothing more. And they were all verified to the ability of the UN, CIA, MI6, FSB, etc. to be that and nothing more. There was no operational WMD in the country when we invaded, and all the WMDs he ever used were given by the US. And the worst part was that everyone knew (or suspected) that was the case. But those in the points of power in the US purposefully chose to believe the known lies and ignore the truths, as long as it supported their goals of invasion. The decision to invade was made before 9/11. They were just looking for excuses and "got lucky" with 9/11.

Saddam supported "Jihadists"

[cold fjord]

Saddam Hussein didn't like Al Quidea - it's very, very unlikely that he would have had anything to do with them at all. AQ moved into Iraq filling the power vacuum when the government fell.

Nonsense.

Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein's willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East.

The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.

The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:

The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.

Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.

Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.

In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.

In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.

The report finds that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is wanted by the FBI for mixing the chemicals for the 1993 World Center Attack, was a prisoner, and not a guest, in Iraq. An audio file of Saddam cited by the report indicates that the Iraqi dictator did not trust him and at one point said that he thought his testimony was too "organized." Saddam said on an audio file cited by the report that he suspected that the first attack could be the work of either Israel or American intelligence, or perhaps a Saudi or Egyptian faction.

The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq's relationship with Osama bin Laden's organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market. .... read more.....

Christopher Hitchens debates Iraq with Reagan Jr.

Re:Mission Accomplished

[Monchanger]

That's a generalized, simple-minded, single-sided and uninformed view.

"Attacks on Israelis increase" because Arab extremists do not want peace, since it conflicts with their politics. So they send a suicide bomber to an Israeli nightclub in an attempt to re-destabilize the region. Sadly, this is effective against Israeli right-wing buffoons, who play into the terrorists' hands by then moving tanks into Arab population centers, or making an inflammatory visit to a Muslim holy site. With these actions you demonstrate that you are an enemy that must be fought which was the intention in the first place. If you think that Hammas considers the killing of a handful of Israelis significant, you underestimate their capacity for strategic thinking.

But that's only half the story. There are saboteurs on the Jewish side as well- the Israeli settlers who should be viewed as equally as terrorists, despite their lesser need to rely on physical violence. These extremists also do not want peace, and will do anything to torpedo it in their wholly idiotic quest to reclaim Ancient Israel. Some of them even use physical violence, such as Rabin's killer, and those who open fire on unarmed civilians in mosques and elsewhere. In their blind pursuit of the impossible, they condemn their fellow Israelis to be attacked, just as suicide bombers invite IDF retaliation and the loss of innocent Arab lives. To criticize Hammas while giving a free pass to an Israeli prime minister who allows settlement construction and refuses to crack down on settlement activity is simply hypocritical. Even George W. Bush criticized Israeli policy in the West Bank.

Israeli military action is not an effective solution, as they have proven time and time again only to simply incite anger each time a civilian is killed. These deaths aren't intentional, of course, but that hardly matters when extremist Palestinian political groups use these to their advantage ("it wasn't an accident that Israel regrets- he's a martyr who bravely fought the evil Zionists"). Israel is clearly militarily stronger and has demonstrated its resolve and willingness to use force countless times. The Arabs cry "genocide" on every minor case of collateral damage, so how would going back to military curfews, indiscriminate nighttime raids of private homes, besieging the current equivalent of the Mukataa, or actual acts of mass death change anything? The answer is they wouldn't- you would simply be legitimizing "resistance" groups.

The whole reason Al Qaeda gains its membership is thanks to the powerful cultural rhetoric Bin Laden could use to manipulate impoverished and uneducated young men- "the infidels are killing your women and children", "the crusaders occupy holy Mecca and Medina", etc. The answer is not to bomb them into obedience, but rather to deny political groups these easy tools of manipulation. The Libyan situation demonstrates this- do not simply engage in unilateral action, forcing "liberation" when "the west" determines it wants to, as was done in Iraq, but work in concert with the population's needs and requests. Ghadaffi still places the blame on the US and Britain, but very little of the population believes him, whereas in Iraq we encountered far more native resistance.

This is of course not to say Israel should stop retaliating against terror activity (it shouldn't), and that the US should not have engaged Iraq (it shouldn't have). Rather, that there are consequences to such actions, which may or may not make the actions themselves worthwhile, and that these require a more significant analysis than the neanderthalic "they hurt me, so I must hurt them more" nonsense that hardliners parrot. So long as Israelis demonstrate their willingness to put knuckle-draggers in office, the Arabs have no reason to trust they'll ever gain true sovereignty, and part of them will turn to their own brutes for salvation. Likewise, the Arabs must learn from their idiotic election which gave Hammas legitimacy and only hurt their cause, by giving Israelis the excuse "there is no partner for peace."