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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.
Now let's bring 'em home.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And all it cost were our civil liberties, national character, and trillions of dollars...
Or we found him living in a mansion outside Islamisbad and killed him after a firefight.
Not sure what the motivation for making this up would be. There are likely going to be reprisals for this act.
My last day of work at the World Trade Center was September 10, 2001. I remember turning around, looking at a lone guitarist playing near that fountain with the Globe sculpture, it was a beautiful Monday night, around 9 pm. I had worked late, so I was going to show up late to work on Tuesday. I woke up to my phone ringing off the hook. I lost my job, but compared to what others lost, I lost nothing.
The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American. Bin Laden hated us all, just because we were American. So please, no political games here. This isn't about left and right, this is about a cowardly attack on all of us, as Americans. As a hardcore liberal, I embrace my fellow Americans who are conservative on this good news for us all.
Come together, as Americans, left and right, lose the useless political snark and sniping, and celebrate this asshole's death. Good fucking riddance.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Just think if we had done that from the start. Bin Laden still dead, without wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq.
Why would it? It's pretty much accepted that bin Laden was radicalized by the 2nd in command - who, therefore, was the real power behind the throne. What's more, by landing troops in Pakistan, the US risks a great many Pakistanis joining up with terrorist groups.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move. Further, the media's interpretation of President Obama's remarks was that he had ordered bin Laden's assassination. The US has been trying to assassinate a number of other leaders recently - bodily or by character. That could create some extremely unholy alliances, since leaders generally don't approve of being assassinated and Al Queda is likely to be looking for alternative bases.
Tomorrow, then, will be just like today only the US will have fewer people to blame.
Capturing bin Laden would have been the wisest move. By depriving him of martyrdom, the US would have avoided an excalation in the conflicts. Further, it would have likely resulted in a paniced upper echelon of Al Queda as they'd not know what he knew or what he'd say. And in not knowing, they'd likely act rashly. And that is what we needed.
What happened tonight was a PR stunt intended to bolster the ratings of the Democrats and undercut Republican credentials on security. It had nothing whatsoever to do with actual security at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Right? RIGHT?!
Oh.
Right.
FML
Yes, it is over in exactly the same sense that the Cold War was over .... when Lenin died.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
long after most Americans have forgotten why we went to war in the first place.
Pretty funny that you should talk about "forgetting", because then you say:
And of course we had to forget that most 9/11 hijackers were Saudis
Well you seem to have forgotten is that they were mostly Saudis - trained in Afghanistan, by Al Quidea.
Since that was where AQ was based, where the terrorists were trained, that was in fact the single best place to start in striking back and reducing the threat. I mean, here you seem to imply we should have attacked Saudi Arabia, even though there government there did not condone the terrorism. For a long time after we invaded Iraq there were cries in fact that we should ONLY be in Afghanistan. But you seem to have forgotten that too.
You seem to have forgotten we are not fighting the people of Afghanistan but AQ who has people based there, just as in Iraq for a time we were not fighting many Iraqis any more, but instead a coalition of AQ fighters from all over - including Syria and Saudi Arabia again.
Indeed your message about not forgetting is an important one, which is why I felt it necessary to provide historical fact over re-written sentiment.
Fighting terrorism now means having a TSA agent fondle you or getting photographed naked.
I hate the new rules too and think they are silly.
But to be fair, AQ has shown a fetish long after 9/11 of trying to work terrorism through planes, and so that is where the focus has been on protection. It's a matter of finding what is reasonable and what actually works, something I think they are a long way from yet. It's the right focus but totally the wrong technique.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
That's from the summary. NONE of the three sources state that, and none of the sources I read have said anything like that. I'm not going to jump to conclusions and say he was killed by a bomb in Pakistan a week ago, when the President said he was killed in a ground operation. He was likely killed by American rifles, whether face-to-face or initially from a distance.
While Osama has been hard to track down, lower echolon leaders have been killed left and right. Didn't change a thing. Partly because the US managed to always find a way to kill a lot of civilians (by accident they claim) to fuel new hatred.
Thinking the death of Bin Laden will change anything is like thinking the death of Roosevelt in 1945 meant the end of WW2. (For those lacking in history, it didn't).
The world has changed massively after 9/11 but it also has continued to change. Take the current unrest in North Africa and the middle east. Ghaddafi (however you spell it) went from terrorist leader to friend to target in less then a decade. Now there are calls from the left to watch the bombings in Libya but ALSO to interfere in Syria... wtf? I am sure Israel is wondering just what the hell is going to happen next. Do you think it is an accident Hamas is changing its tune now its allies are burning from within?
If anything this shows how silly the idea of control is in the world. Bin Laden became a symbol but had little control. He achieved next to nothing. The uprising against the oppressors in muslim nations is instead against both religious AND secular leaders (Syria is secular, its Iranian ally is strongly religious) and the uprisings are both religious and secular. About the only prediction that stands is that nobody predicted any of this.
What will happen now Bin Laden is death? A symbol is dead but the things that made him a symbol are not. There is severe dissatisfaction in the world and people seem more ready then ever to use violence to made their dissatisfaction known. You might hail this is a fight for freedom or extremists wanting to force their view on the rest of the world, but the fact remains that right now more struggles are happening then in a long time in history.
A leader of a decade ago is dead, few will mourn him but he is a relic. There are new struggles to overcome. Iraq is still a mess, Afghanistan is a war zone. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. North Korea is facing collapse and won't go queitly, Libya is in civil war. Syria is about to erupt in war. The list goes on and on. Wikileaks Assange has disappeared of the radar of news but that is still far from finished.
No, I don't think we can breath a sigh of relieve just yet.
And that in a way is a good thing. The world has NEVER been a safe place. Better we are aware of it not being safe and work to make it safe even if we make mistakes then to live in false security.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Dead Nailed it, along with the follow comments:
The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution. Whenever a tragedy likes this occurs, the government always announces a get tough on terrorists policy that will have no effect on the psychopaths who do this, but will severely limit our rights.
Yep. I give it a week before Bush announces a "war on terrorism". And we all know what "war on XXX" means, don't we? Bye-bye Bill of Rights.
Yep. Let's put face recognition cameras in all airports and log activity of anyone who enters or leaves an airport. We all know it wouldn't stop the attack, but hey, it will help us correlate who boarded the planes with their respective political associations.
You don't get it. If the Constitution is a casualty, then the terrorists have won. Their aim is to destroy this country. The Constitution IS this country. It's the only thing that makes us different from any other country in the world.
Sorry? What exactly did Saddam and Iraq have to do with the 'War on Terror'? I mean, other than pissing off the fundamentalist Muslims even more than before.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move.
I could see it going either way. Bin Laden was a charismatic figure head of an ideology. Sometimes death creates a martyr, but more often in history it kills the movement. When it does create a martyr, it is because the movement is rising anyway, like when John Brown's death became a catalyst in the growing abolitionist movement. More often the cause dies quietly, like when Guy Fawkes failed to draw people to the cause of Catholicism.
In this case, it appears Middle Easterners have largely given up on the political ideas of Bin Laden, and instead have started turning towards democracy as a way out of their problems. It's hard to know public opinion for sure in that region, but there have been many uprisings of people demanding democracy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Abbottabad is about 50 km north of Islamabad, and 150 km east of Peshawar. It's also the location for a number of major military establishments. Which, of course, raises a whole lot of very interesting questions about the Pakistani government's knowledge of, and possible complicity in, his holing up there.
In chief, specific freedoms regarding privacy. Most of that weight is distributed across the Patriot Act and airport security measures. While I haven't heard a lot of complaining about the Patriot Act in quite some time, the what the TSA has been up to in the last two years or so could possibly be regarded as unreasonable search and seizure. Most of this goes unnoticed in the daily lives of a large swathe of the American population, but it's there, to be sure.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Nothing at all.
The real question is why did you wait nearly a decade to question this?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Look, for once could we let the partisan crap go? A bad guy is dead. That's cause for celebration. It's not an invitation for every partisan whackjob to whip out his pecker and start pissing all over everything.
We all know the drunk uncle who has to be invited to the wedding, but who can be counted upon to leave the reception cuffed in a squadcar. For today, could you try not to be him?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1) In war, the same rules don't apply. There are rules, but they are different. For the "world rules of war" you can see the Geneva Conventions, though that doesn't cover everything and indeed fighters like bin Laden that do not wear a uniform and attempt to disguise themselves as civilians aren't covered by many of the protections. For more specific US rules you can see the Rules of Engagement. Regardless, wartime rules are different than peacetime rules. You don't have to agree with that idea, but you can't very well claim it isn't how it works, it has been that way in every nation for basically all of history and is codified in national and international law.
2) To get your chance at a fair trial, you have to not shoot the people that come to get you. Apparently there was a firefight and it was one that bin Laden and his people lost. You shoot at troops, or at police, they'll shoot back. They take the Malcom Renoylds advice to heart: "Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back!" This is true in the civilian/police world as well. If the police come to arrest you for a crime and you and your body guards open fire on them, they'll fire back. They'll then bring in more heavily armed police, and if you keep shooting, they'll eventually kill you. You want your fair trial you need to surrender.
You'll notice that Saddam Hussein did surrender to US forces when found and he was brought in alive. He was either unarmed or threw down his weapons and surrendered. Per the rules of war, he was then captured and not killed. He got his trial, which of course did not end well for him.
You can't honestly say that US troops should have just sat there, gotten shot, and not shot back can you? You really think that they could or should be given the order "Go in and capture everyone alive, no matter what. Doesn't matter how many of you die, no lethal force, just keep going in until they run out of bullets and you can take them alive." Hell no, if they got fired on, they had a right to fire back and the idea that you can shoot someone to knock the gun out of their hand is pure action movie BS. You shoot to kill.
I'm not sure "choice" is a fair word to use.
In a perfect world, sure, I'm certain that the US gov't would have preferred to grab him alive, milk him dry for intel, and then have him found guilty in a trial and executed.
However:
- his capture would simply have resulted in an uncountable number of abductions of US citizens, mostly innocents, in an effort to trade them for his release. How would YOU like to have been the American president faced with telling Mr and Mrs Smith that their little Johnny or Joanna was just BEHEADED on Al-Jazeera when you could have traded this single, nearly-irrelevant, stinky old man for them?
- further, his capture would have opened up a whole new round of deep hand-wringing about how we 'dare' treat him. Could we dare make him uncomfortable, or would that be "inhumane"? Is forcing him to hear Backstreet Boyz for 24 hours a day cruel and/unusual?
- his trial would quite likely have been a mockery of grandstanding and posturing - offering him a world stage he's been too afraid to step up to for the last 10 years.
- finally, in reality, what are the odds that he really was going to EVER be captured? He was not a luxury-loving sybarite like Saddam Hussein, whose narcissism made it likely that - at the end - he wouldn't take himself out. Osama was a different creature, having fought in his 20s with the mujahedeen, and having walked AWAY from wealth and luxury in favor of hardship in pursuit of a 'cause'. Seriously, what is the real likelihood that he could have been so totally surprised and immobilized in less than the 0.5 seconds it would have taken him to put a bullet through the roof of his own mouth?
As I mentioned above, organizationally he's probably largely irrelevant; but symbols matter - and his extinction lends credibility to the near-magical capabilities of American intel-gathering amongst the Al-Qaeda faithful, as well as a useful air of implacability to the resolution of the US gov't, even across administrations.
So no, I doubt it was a "choice" by anyone, except OBL himself. Good riddance to him.
-Styopa
Ok, here's the problem. Let's say that there actually was a successful raid which led to the killing of bin Laden.
First, the body was buried at sea, according to the US military, which means there's no proof he's actually dead. In other words, he's going to turn into the Elvis of Islamic terrorism. Either there is a conspiracy, and he's not dead, or conspiracy theorists will claim that he's still alive somewhere. We live in a world where (some) people believe that the President of the United States forged his own birth certificate with the collusion of the state of Hawaii; you think a 19-year-old terrorist recruit in Whatthefuckistan is gonna just take the word of the United States government that the leader of Al Qaeda was buried at sea?
Second, I guarantee that within two days a new bin Laden tape will be released. The guy had less value as a strategist than he did as a symbol, and I'll bet that there are pre-recorded tapes yet unreleased, and that there will be audio tapes with a "voice purported to be Osama bin Laden". Probably talking up Ayman al-Zawahiri as the operational leader of AQ.
Third, while there is potent symbolism for the West in killing bin Laden, keep in mind that he headed an organization which advocated suicide bombing as a tactic. Bin Laden's death is going to make him a martyr in the world of radical Islamic terror. While there may not be a single figure that can replace him right now, there are plenty of other affiliated groups, with plenty of other members, and a successful attack can be planned and carried out by an uncharismatic moron just as easily. For that matter, an unsuccessful attack can have a significant impact, too. Ask Richard Reed.
Fourth, to the West, this looks like the USA is still the baddest motherfucker around, and we always get our man. To people who live in Pakistan, the Middle East, and other, non-Western places, this looks like the only superpower in the world spent ten years and billions of dollars to kill one guy who pissed it off, in a campaign culminating in the use of clandestine intelligence and spec ops, in someone else's country. How's that for international diplomacy?
I'm not saying I'm sad the guy's dead, because I'm not. I think it's great. I just wish he'd gotten hit by a truck, or ate some bad dates or something. I have a strong feeling that this is not going to make our lives any easier.
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