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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)
Will you stop grabbing my balls at the airport now?
Haida Manga
Right? RIGHT?!
Oh.
Right.
FML
I want to see a long form death certificate
(stolen from fark)
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Here come the conspiracy theories.
And all it cost were our civil liberties, national character, and trillions of dollars...
Netcraft confirms it: Osama bin Laden is dead.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
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.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Good.
He got him in less than three years. Good job bro, you did it. Now let's get the hell out of Afghanistan + Iraq and stop molesting our own people at the airport.
The prez just won his second term
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Mazal Tov.
AMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERICA fuck yeah! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
no need to have wars in iraq and afghanistan now that America is safe.
Weren't there multiple reports from credible sources that OBL was dead years ago?
I don't trust the media, but I trust the government even less.
Looks like Ron Paul will be vindicated in the 2012 election as his message of "bring the troops home" will resonate loud and clear.
Libertas in infinitum
Buzzkillington, is that you?
Actually, that whole woosy feeling that I got after 9/11 for several years, not unlike getting kicked in the beanbag, has almost gone away. Bringing it back up is kinda like the bully saying "There is that dweeb that I kicked in the balls a few years ago. Ha ha".
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkjsa0vvlq1qzu2tdo1_400.gif
No, our kids are eating lead...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Nah, any examiner would request to see the body, do a fifteen minute test, and determine if he died last week or *nine years ago*. I'd put money on them "purposely letting him slide through the clutches" but I'm darn sure we'd have a federal referendum if they lied quite that blatantly for 9 years.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
For anyone else who missed the end of the Celebrity Apprentice because of the speech, Hope got fired.
Can we please forget this sad chapter in our history? Thousands and thousands have died, trillions spent, and liberties seemingly irrevocably lost.
I shed a tear and will not celebrate this at all
After all, It's what I was doing on 9/11...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
You think that's bad? Anwar al-Awlaki is the subject of an executive order ordering his death. He's also an American citizen.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Scumbag Obama:
Talk about hope and change.
Continue and expand on Bush-era policies.
Palm trees and 8
I'm all for taking his ass out, but damn, you know they are about to fuck up some city, somewhere...
rm -f /bin/laden
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
based on this mission.
Twitter: @dainsanefh
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.
Better put, people who shoot at you when you go to take them in for questioning don't warrant due process, the mission included bringing him back alive if circumstances allowed.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Don't worry, Obama explicitly said as much in his speech ("we must remain ever vigilant").
From what I'm hearing, expect civil rights to be further restricted in the coming months to protect from "counter attacks" over Bin Laden's death.
After all, this was never the War on Al Qaeda. This is the War on Terror, and Terror still looms... (And don't forget to lock your doors, Al Qaeda is coming to get us back over Bin Laden!)
This seems like a pretty solid example of "resisting arrest". Obama said there was a gunfight in the compound.
Visit the
Good ROI in that mission for them huh?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yeah, because nothing says competence like a guy who shows up an hour late, spouts platitudes to an empty room, and leaves. Seriously, the only competence involved is in the US military and possibly the CIA. Presidents - from Team Red or Team Blue - have next to nil to do with this sort of thing.
I mean, it's good that the asshole is dead but we need a(nother) flamewar on slashdot about it?
We would have found out if he had surrendered.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad we hadn't gotten him 10, or even better, 20 years ago.
Of course, if he'd been arrested the day after 9/11, tried in a civilian court, and sentenced to death, he'd still be sitting on death row now, and for years to come.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Never.
Palin/Trump ticket; calling it now.
R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)
I would have thought that his death would be kept quiet to keep up the fear of a looming attack. Well, I was wrong.
They don't need him anymore. Now it can be "the Taliban" in Afghanistan (who co-incidentally announced their new offensive today) and "the Regime" in Lybia, and whomever else provides a convenient target. It has been demonstrated that citizens of the so called "democracies" have been sufficiently desensitized that they will accept the bonds of slavery as long as they are fed enough American Idol, Charlie Sheen, Royal Weddings and Nascar/Football/Cricket/etc.
What hasn't changed, however, are the laws of economics. Crude oil is near its 52 week highs (again), and still China's economy grows. They are now Germany's biggest market. All those industrial machines and BMW's are going to need fuel. The war for the last barrels of crude is bound to begin soon as we pass peak oil, and the West is starting with a numerical and financial disadvantage. Technology means nothing when you can't feed your army.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Good ROI in that mission for them huh?
Yes, quite possibly.
now where is OSAMA?
The details will be interesting. He was reportedly killed in a mansion near Islamabad, Pakistan. That's the capital city. He hasn't been hiding out in the boonies.
can we go back to being america ?
The Far Right will still find some way to complain about this and slam Obama.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Who gets the oil now?
Uh... you realize Obama wasn't running around in Pakistan looking for Bin Laden himself, right? Our intelligence agencies and military got the job done, after years of hard work. That rat fuck is dead... just be happy, thankful to the people that actually did the job, and resume the political trolling tomorrow morning, eh?
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
Unfortunately, that sacrifice of civil liberties and national character was unlikely to have had anything to do with this turn of events. As for the portion of that dollar amount - it would take considerable accounting to hash out. But I'm not inclined to rush down to the airport and congratulate the TSA on a job well done.
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.
"Hey, where are my virgins? ...And what is Hitler doing with that pineapple?" - Osama Bin Laden
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
bye bye bin.
I won't believe this until I see his death certificate ........ long form.
SO hiding in a mansion outside Pakistan!
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
Posting in an epic thread!
What? Recent stories have lead me to believe Slashdot is turning into Fark anyway, so why not. /epic thread //one day after Caturday ///slashies
Somehow, the majority has forgotten for just a second, the woes that inspired warfare
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)
Get a room.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Take the Gadsden Flag off your foreign car you fucking Tea Partier!
I want to be retired when I grow up.
Hey Republicans, this is what competence looks like.
And only yesterday you were bitching about Obama continuing the Bush war policies.
I'll take the other side and say it goes into an entry as "closure". There were only 2-3 "signature issues" for this whole War on Terror campaign - Saddam/Iraq and Bin Laden. BL was left hanging out there as deep unresolved tension driving this whole ugly crusade by .gov.
Now it's a democrat in office, with a year left in his term, and wherever you place the mission ops credit, he has put away the defining Republican meme of the decade.
So now cynicism says ".mil will keep its toys", but without the "But Bin Laden is out there" headline, the sound bites aren't nearly as good. "Be vigiliant". "Against who?" "Oh, some guy, we don't know yet".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As a Canadian, serious congratulations are in order. It's good to know that my neighbour can spend that kind of money, time, and resources to get something done. Also as a Canadian, I hope your terrorists respond on your side of the border.
My family's spent the last hour wondering how this, and most of the war efforts, could possibly reduce the terrorist activity. Sure you've eliminated dictatorships, but those dictatorships were keeping their own people under control. Now, in democratic societies, those peoples will produce more anti-american terrorists. I share the american continant, so I'm none too happy about that. We're expecting a random bombing in the next week, somewhere in the world, crediting osama in order to discredit tonight's events.
It just doesn't seem like a solution. I hope I'm wrong.
But really, and I'm totally serious, honestly, good job. I know it wasn't easy, and I know it was important.
Yeah, I agree, watched the speech a few minutes ago. In fact, I think it might have just gotten worse.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
there is an old story by art buchwald , he has a conversation that goes something like this
buchwald - "general, how can we prevent peace from breaking out?"
general - "well, thats just a risk we have to take. it could happen at any moment, and we have to be ready for it. "
I can't help but bring this article back up. It is very interesting that this happened so close to this event. I bet we will find out some more to this story in the coming days and maybe it all started with that "diplomat".
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Want to see the bastard's head on a spike in Battery Park --this week--. Can someone make that happen, please?
Huh?
if the economy sucks he'll still lose. After all, the Republicans own the media, and with a weak economy they'll just swiftboat him.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And you're aware that Obama put the focus back on Bin Laden after the Republicans decided to go invade Iraq, before the job was done, right?
Scumbag Obama: Talk about hope and change. Continue and expand on Bush-era policies.
Hey, I am just glad that He was the one who since last August has personally overseen, analyzed intel, and, finally, authorized the strike which took Osama out. What a guy. And He is so humble about it.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Bin Laden really shouldn't have used his real address on PSN
This space for rent.
What freedoms have been taken away?
I saw a film of Obama walking in front of a "Mens Room" sign, showing that he doesn't believe women should hold any political offices. He lives in the "White" House, which proves he hates non-whites. He failed to deliver an Easter address, but has not missed a single Muslim holiday, showing his total hatred toward Christians.
If you can take assorted signs out of context, and blow them all out of proportion, everyone else should be allowed.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Again, I'd have to agree. In the end, very little if anything in reality changes- only the perception of reality in the minds of the many.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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
I know, it's such a bunch of nonsense. For the clueless: a "certificate of death" is OBVIOUSLY NOT THE SAME as a "death certificate".
Wake up Sheeple!
Required reading for internet skeptics
I find it very strange to cheer about somebody's death, but here I am.
It's pretty rare to find undiluted evil in the world, but he sure was it. I was in 5th grade at the time, in northeast NJ. We could see the towers from the top of the slide, and then just two pillars of smoke. Even though I was only 11, I knew damn sure what was going on and what it all meant.
And I'm damn glad he's dead. His organization continues, of course, but he wasn't exactly a figurehead either. I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of this, because they're happening now and in the next few hours and days.
So good job to all involved. Truly a moment in history.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
And for the national debt, we can dismember his body and sell the pieces on ebay...
If it is natural to die, then to hell with nature. --FM 2030
Um... you don't think he was hiding out by himself with, ya know, no documents, records, phones, or other intel that we might have snagged? That and the messages "you can't hide anywhere" and "we will come and get you, alone, and without the help of the country you are in" are pretty powerful.
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.
Muammar Gaddafi sure got the the "abandon WMD" message when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I wonder if he'll take this as a message to relinquish control of Libya...
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.
Due process? I say we process his rotten corpse by sewing it up into the carcass of a pig. Fucker.
He's taking credit for getting Osama to release his death certificate...
174 comments and nobody's mentioned this, but what happened to the presumption of innocence?
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial. Timothy McVeigh (the second biggest terrorist to attack US soil) got a trial. People who systematically abduct and rape hundreds of little girls and hide their bodies in barrels get a trial.
If absolutely nothing else, now we'll never truly know if he really did it. Who the power behind him was. Who was sponsoring him, who was protecting him (aside from the obvious: Pakistan), who were his allies. Think of all he could know.
Action movies lie to you. Dead guys give zero intel and create martyrs. Killing him was, by a huge long away, out and out the worst way to handle it. Bring him in alive. See what he knows. Then put him in prison for the rest of his days.
This was a poor choice.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Which do you think will keep happening over the next few months, gas prices skyrocketing or Osama being killed?
Hint: One is an O(1) operation.
This will provide a nice morale boost for the nation but is not going to have lasting impact for Obama, who is now suffering through the effects of the policies he has put in place through his term in office.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So for kicks I flipped the channel to Fox News, here's two things I noticed
1) they consistently report that the raid happened a week ago and the "U.S. has been waiting for DNA evidence that it really is Usama bin Laden"
2) they consistently report that the raid took place "on the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan"
Hearing the President's speech, I find no evidence for either of these, how can a news organization get the time and place of death wrong when the President announced it less than a hour ago?
I do believe President Obama said this happened "today".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
erm, hitler killed himself.
Sent from my PDP-11
Looks like he gave plenty of credit where it was due, and being Commander-in-chief. It WAS his call.
Would you then also rate killing three grandchildren and a reformer son of a dictator as "Competence"?
Just because the military finally managed to finish something Bush started doesn't tell us much about Obama's abilities, contrasted with an action that Obama started and continues and the direct results we see from trying to run a war we dare not declare a war.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
It might not have been feasible to capture him given the conditions. Or perhaps they were trying to capture him but he was shooting back, making capture impossible. Capturing is not easy in a war zone. And it is nearly impossible if the person you want to capture would rather die then surrender (I don't know if that applied to Obama, but it is possible).
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial.
Not if he's still shooting when the police, or anyone with a gun, arrive. Then he gets shot.
OBL and AQ were still planning other operations. Sometimes in the middle of action there is no time for trial. In a real war trials are madness, you cannot fight real bullets with lawyers not matter how many lawyers you have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They killed Emmanuel Goldstein! Now who will shout at during our Two Minutes Hate!?!?!
So, it was the CIA that took down the PSN to find OBL! It all makes sense now.
Can we pick one way to spell Al Qaeda\Quaeda\Alqueda\Al Quidea? Please?
Yes, he's already accomplished so many of his campaign promises. he's shut down Gitmo, He's got all of our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. He's destroyed the health care system. Unemployment has never been over 8%. He's made the houses things bipartisan. No more political meetings with the other party left out. No more secretive closed door meetings.
Well, 1 successful campaign promise anyway. That should be worth a couple more Nobel Prizes.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I'm actually a bit disappointed. I was hoping for some HD video of a sniper shot. Nothing says job well done like your target's head exploding in a cloud of pink mist.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
How do you sleep at night?
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
I'm not buying it either. I think it's highly convenient that this is announced eight years to the day that Bush gave his speech in front of that infamously stupid banner. Why did it take them since last August to make this move? How could the most wanted man in the world stay hidden for so long? Whether or not you measure from when this "lead" was established or from the original attack.
Since he was killed in a US military operation, he is now a martyr to his followers: this is not the good news it appears to be.
If they ever show the body, I certainly want to see the effects of more than a decade of diabetes.
"This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done." - U.S. President George W. Bush 5/1/2011
He was aware that he was wanted for questioning. He opted to instead hide and shoot back. When the guys with the guns walk up and offer you due process, and you shoot at them, you've voluntarily waived your due process.
Or are you asserting that if someone has a warrant for your arrest, you get to just say "No, I won't come" and they'll apologize for inconveniencing you and wander off?
Learn to love Alaska
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."
I guess the US military took Seth Meyers' advice and tuned into C-Span between 4 and 5pm....
I was against/uneasy about the war in Afghanistan and completely against the war in Iraq, but I was always for a police / sf action against the Al Qaeda criminals.
Bin Laden got what he deserved.
Obama focused on the real problem and got results. Good for him.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
"They intend to change our values and way of life". Well, they have. Mission Accomplished indeed.
It isn't just a feel good thing, though there is that. It shows that if you are the kind of asshole that stands against civilization, that just wants to kill and create havoc, you'll be tracked down and dealt with. Bin Laden was very much a figurehead and as such there is a lot of symbolism to his death in a capture attempt, rather than of natural causes. It is sort of an extension of "nobody is above the law."
Also it will hurt the morale of those who follow his line of thinking. Figureheads are powerful things and his downfall will hurt their morale, their commitment.
Like you said, this won't be the end of anything, but for all that it is more than just nice, it is helpful. I look at his death the same way I look at McVeigh's capture/sentencing: It is a win for civilization. It is society saying "You cannot attack us and just get away with it. We WILL have justice."
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.
It was started under the false premise that it was relevant to the War on Terror and the extremists responded. Our soldiers fought terrorists associated with the same terrorists who attacked us.
And all it cost were our civil liberties, national character, and trillions of dollars...
TFA quote:
"I met repeatedly with my National Security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located Bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside Pakistan," the president said.
"Finally, last week I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice," he said.
Nice wording indeed... (I don't decry the assassination of bin Laden by a military/commando squad, just a bit worried this is called "bringing someone to justice")
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I can confirm both gunfire and fireworks in my local area. Regrettably, I don't have any fireworks on hand today. An oversight I intent to prevent on anniversaries of this event.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Al Queda was not just at war with the west but with many Muslim nations as well. But it is NOT Al Queda (no matter what fox says) that is behind the overthrowing of the corrupt dictatorships in the middle east. Those uprisings have the potential to change the world far more then 9/11 ever did AND for the better. All 9/11 brought the Muslim world was Iraq and Afghanistan on fire and a spreading hatred of Muslims (imagine ten years ago it being MAINSTREAM policy in Europe to close the borders to immigrants AND have headscarf bans in effect or going through legislation in a lot of countries).
But in less then a year, peaceful protests mercilessly cut down by Muslims leaders have resulted in more change then we have seen in a long time and it is far from over. If Syria errupts (so far there seems to be no sign of armed resistance despite some soldiers having defected) then the turmoil is complete. Saudia Arabia and Iran are far from save then (Saudia has send troops to support an allied dictator in an other region, tying itself to the fate of said dictator, Iran uses Syria as a puppet to support Hamas in its push to destroy Israel).
This is changing the world. Without Syria, Iran stands very much alone, Hamas would lose its support (why do you think they have changed their tune so fast recently). Saudia Arabia might face some though questioning of not outright revolt... the middle east might never be the same. Of course, it could also turn very very bad (if you believe fox) but lets hope not shall we (so far Egypt is stable and shows no sign of sliding into a muslim extremist nation despite what fox claimed).
I think it is very significant that all of this happened without Al Queda at all. Bloody attacks, no change. Peaceful uprisings, the world may never be the same.
Bin Laden is dead, the path of Martin Luther King jr and Gandhi seem to get the best results. Who would have thought.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What people seem to forget a woeful 2 years later on is that Obama ran on pumping up our Afghanistan presence to get the people *actually* responsible for 9/11 and pulling out of Iraq. I'll admit I thought it was stupid to throw more troops at Afghanistan, but it worked.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
WTF? Why is this story on Slashdot? How is this news for nerds?
At least this isn't as bad as the Russian fairytale story that Timothy posted the other day.
To who?
Tin foil hat time.
As someone pointed out on the news: This comes just in time for the 10-year memorial ceremonies. Close enough to tie-in a few months from now, but early enough that it doesn't overshadow the ceremonies themselves. ie, they've known where he was for a while and just now struck.
> 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
Let me ask you something: if you walk towards somebody with the order of "Bring him in preferably alive, but dead is ok too" and he starts shooting at you, do you still try to take him alive? Especially since the operation is in what is pretty close to enemy territory?
Yeah, we all would have liked to see him paraded around in a court house, and sentenced to life in prison. But I would rather have him dead than lose one more life in his pursuit.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
What better way to celebrate the death of a terrorist, than with a potentially deadly act of random violence!
Ah, so THAT'S where he was hiding!
That's if Mr spy with his recently printed Dr certificate doesn't do the examination, but what makes you so sure anything would happen if they were caught lying.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
We are invading Iraq because they have weapons of mass destruction.
Personally i think its perfectly likely that he evaded capture this long. I'm only surprised he didn't kill himself a while ago so the united states would spend an another trillion looking for him.
Rocket Surgeon.
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.
Dead Osama spam is already in your mail Bin, Laden with links to sites with drive-by exploits.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If he was right next to the capital, as has been suggested by some reports, why would he need to keep anything at the compound? Remember, he's been constantly on the move and when you move you want to travel as light as possible. Phones are also unlikely - we know he did everything by courier. So, no, it is exceedingly unlikely that he was where the intel was. Same as the President doesn't stay in the Pentagon.
"You can't hide anywhere" is a pretty useless message to give to someone who believes that dying in battle is a glorious death. These people have a similar mindset to the Japanese kamakazi pilots. Telling them that it's bad for their health isn't going to be much of a deterrent. If anything, it'll bolster the numbers.
Consider American history for a moment here. The gunslingers who died in battle are the ones you remember to this day, and each and every single person who dreams of America returning to the Wild West days - and there's lots - aren't picturing the lawmen when they do so. They're picturing those gunslingers and the blaze of glory they supposedly lived in. What we have done is give bin Laden that blaze of glory, that ultimate legend status that remembers the fight against the men of power but conveniently forgets the cruelty and the evil. Cults of such sick and perverse figures always spring up and all nations have them.
(Alexander the Great murdered his father, torched entire cities filled with civilians, and even ordered his men to walk over cliffs to their deaths in order to terrify opponents into submission. General Custer had no problems massacring women and children. As for the charge of the light brigade.... magnificent perhaps but it isn't war.)
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)
R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)
Yeah, I remember when he took the Title from Salman Rushdie.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
http://i.imgur.com/IDsF2.gif
Hey, I am just glad that He was the one who since last August has personally overseen, analyzed intel, and, finally, authorized the strike which took Osama out. What a guy. And He is so humble about it.
Did you really just capitalize your self-referential pronoun in the same sentence as pronouns referring to Him? tsk tsk.
+1
Wait... is it a "certificate of live death", or a "certificate of dead death"? I'm confused.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Per the announcement, it was in Abbottabad, which is nowhere near Islamabad. (It's near Peshawar.)
Abbott is the last name of the federal opposition leader in Australia.
If there is a Costelloabad or Turnbullabad anywhere the Liberal party (big L, they are conservatives) may be in serious trouble.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I just saw Donald Trump on Fox News.
After taking credit for the killing of bin Laden, Trump said he wasn't going to believe he was dead until he placed his fingers in the wounds in Osama's hands and side.
In other news, the GOP has released a statement condemning Barack Obama for taking so long getting this done.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yup. Hopefully the symbolism of his death will be of greater importance than his physical death and the U.S. will be able to regain its civil liberties and national character. One can hope, at least.
Technology means nothing when you can't feed your army.
When is the last time you left your basement? We are on the continent of farm land. The Army will be fed. Have you seen their salary? Most are already working for peanuts!
I want to be retired when I grow up.
First they found the flight recorder of Air France 447 on the bottom of the freaking ocean, and then they found Osama bin Laden. Are the planets in the solar system aligned or something? Now if only I could find my car keys...
The reality was that the president wanted personal revenge because he blamed Saddam for Daddy losing out on a second term ...
Uh, no, Ross Perot was to blame for that. :-) The Gulf War was popular and considered well executed. It was the economy that did Bush Sr in, not anything to do with the war. The revenge against Saddam angle would hypothetically be for the attempt to assassinate Bush Sr when he visited the middle east after his presidency.
The true reality of the situation was that Saddam tried to hide the fact that he no longer possessed WMD. He wanted others, in particular Iran, to think he may still have them. Saddam feared appearing weak. He admitted this under US interrogation. And no there was no water boarding, it was the effective type of interrogation - long term contact, establish a relationship, use psychology, etc. National Geographic had a pretty interesting documentary about Saddam's interrogation.
"Hey, where are my virgins? ...And what is Hitler doing with that pineapple?" - Osama Bin Laden
Why am I a dung beetle, exactly which elephants behind am I attached to.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I bet Bin Laden regrets allowing his iPhone app to "use his current location".
Not my joke. Saw it on Yahoo. Had to share it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Nonsense. Military/intel forces are not interchangeable. Except for the actual take-down, getting Bin Laden was a surveillance/analysis problem, not a mass force problem. Taking everything we had in Iraq and throwing it at the task would not have helped, except perhaps for things like UAVs which were not in short supply anyway. A large chunk of the man-hours spent in finding him were probably put in by intelligence people here in the US, going over the data and putting pieces together.
Remember, Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, and has probably been there for most of the decade. Pakistan has been very upset just with the pinprick drone strikes we've been doing. Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan? Because when you blame the how long it took to capture Bin Laden on Bush invading Iraq, that's the alternative you're implying.
If you oppose the war in Iraq, fine, there are valid reasons for doing so, but saying that it delayed Bin Laden's capture is ridiculous.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Young Georgie had to get revenge because Saddam made his daddy look bad
I do believe that stuffed with Chorizo and respectfully consigned to air burial is the corpse disposal method you're looking for. I'm all for the spirit of your post, but it would be a waste of good bacon.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
would rather have not reacted at all? i think this has been beneficial for the whole world everything considered.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
The US army has no shortage of concussion grenades. It has tested and used microwave weapons for causing extreme pain. A violent blast of light during a dark raid will kill night vision and blind night vision goggles, but if your side shielded them for the duration, you can see and they can't. The Indian military have weaponised the extremely hot peppers you can get - my guess is that if you're close enough to put a bullet through someone's head that you're close enough to put a pepper spray canister in his room.
Hell, for that matter, if you can fire regular rounds at the guy, why not have a couple of sharp shooters armed with rubber bullets in their rifles? Much better chance of capture if you've something that can be used on the battlefield to capture.
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)
No, that was just a very enjoyable movie.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i thought he said he could announce it today that blah blah...
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Due process? I say we process his rotten corpse by sewing it up into the carcass of a pig. Fucker.
Fine with me.
Just please don't use the "bring him to justice" wording, it's hypocritical.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
Hmm... that's what he said, though everyone else is (mis)reporting(?) he was killed earlier and they were waiting on DNA confirmation.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
But the idea/ideology lives on working together with the free world to take away our rights in the name of securing us from that idea/ideology.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
in history.
If OBL really masterminded the 9-11 attacks, he achieved with a few men and card board cutters what the whole Wehrmacht, the Japanese Imperial Army, the USSR and the eastern block didn't achieve, to cripple the USA's economy and destroy it from within; and achieved it even when in that (in)famous interview with Robert Fisk he said how he would do so. Current USA is a shadow of its former shelf in economic and freedom terms, entangled in a expensive war in several fronts, and the Chinese busy making the Ocean Pacific a Chinese lake, one bit at a time.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Have you never seen middle eastern billboards / graffiti? Every suicide bomber is a "martyr" and is painted on the side of a building somewhere in the region. Many of them are painted all over the place. (particularly in Palestine)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
What is more the funding can't come from Afganistan or Iraq or countries like this, as they really don't have the funds. Such money has to come from the rich aristocracies in the region such as the residents of Saudi Arabia, Libya, Korea. So what do in America? Buy cars and create energy policy where US citizens fund the states that are funding the people who want to kill US citizens. At current prices, the Saudis are making tens of dollar of profit on each barrel of oil, a percentage of that potentially is used to murder innocent citizens. And all we can do is say we have to drill more, coincidentally in areas that require high prices to support, which in turn support the mass killing of US citizens. Makes wonderful sense.
To be even less politically correct, I don't know where we get this idea that we could not fight a war in Afganistan, because the people there were not part of the problem. The people in Iraq were not part of the problem, but we certainly inconvenienced them. Afganistan was the training location, but to justify action in Iraq we created a fiction of special circumstances for the people in Afganistan. In fact the cowards in the US military, not all, but some, simply wanted the simple fight against the old and ill trained troops of Iraq instead of the more difficult fight in Afganistan. Distract the people with a good show, while leaving the fundamental problems for future generations to solve.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This seems like a pretty solid example of "resisting arrest". Obama said there was a gunfight in the compound.
He's just a victim of DWB --- Driving While Bin-Laden
Osama Bin-Laden - - Just another victim of profiling.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
# rm -vf /bin/laden
removed `/bin/laden'
#
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
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)
youtube is touching new highs!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
"Osama found and killed after details of his location were stolen from the Playstation Network."
Because a fifty foot banner across the bridge of an aircraft carrier is the same thing as a men's room sign.
Go-go failed reading comprehension. My comment was actually referring to the lack of timeliness of this site's postings.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Throughout the years how many harmless sheep hearders were killed in the hunt simply because they kind of sort of looked like Osama?
In this OP his son and a woman used as a human shield also died.
Osama is a monster and the world is better off with him gone... I'm not sure celebrating a death in an action that cost others their lives would make me much better.
Proper way to make the announcement:
Dig a hole in the White House lawn, maybe in the helipad area. Get the White House press corps out there. Drag out the body, dressed in a pink bikini, and kick it into the hole. Obama sprinkles bacon bits, followed by a bag of genuine First Dog shit. Wait a week before adding the dirt on top.
How much do you want to bet we'll not get them back now that bin laden's gone?
Whilst I am not upset to see him dead, extrajudicial murder does not count as justice in my book.
The day was actually called Gunpowder Treason day. It was dedicated to mocking those who plotted to blow up parliament. Guy Fawkes wanted England to be Catholic. His cause basically died, and those who remember Guy Fawkes today (because they watched the Natalie Portman movie) rarely know what Guy Fawkes supported.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
chmod +x /bin/laden /bin/laden
rm -f
Congratulations, you have won this months Falconhell award, for the most s paranoid on Slashdot this month!
It disgusts me whenever someone says the world changed after 9-11 and we had to take the actions we took. Even If a 9-11 size event is the price of living with the civil liberties so precious to me, then I am willing to accept the risk of living in such a country.
We get ten times as many fatalities from traffic accidents every year , and look how loud people scream if they have to pay for a new mandatory safety device when they go shopping for a new car.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
The bailout was under BUSH. It was BUSH who said Wall Street had to be bailed out or everything would collapse. Congress panicked and voted for Bush's bailout because stock prices were going down faster than the lead MILF in a porn video.
Obama added to the deficit with his stimulus bill, which was largely hijacked by special interests, "thanks" to Congress. And it did help the economy get stumbling forward again, though not as much as it could have.
I assume this means I can bring my 64 oz. tube of Aquafresh on the plane next week.
rm -rf /bin
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.
*devil's advocate*
Same result.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I am a Muslim, and I'm so happy they finally nailed this creep.
He's killed thousands of Americans, including many Muslims in my community who worked in lower Manhattan. 9/11 even destroyed the local mosque at the Towers.
Bin Laden was never a Muslim leader, back in the 1990s Muslim leaders spoke out against him and called for his capture, after his involvement in bombing of US embassies. Even his "spiritual leader" told the press that Bin Laden is not qualified to speak for Islam and he had no training to make rulings or give fatwas.
God's gonna judge him, and I hope He gives Bin Laden what he deserves, for the misery he's put Muslims worldwide through, and for disgracing Islam and the millions of peaceful patriotic law-abiding American Muslims.
It is moments like this that I am reminded of the words of the great writers/filmmakers Parker & Stone, "America! Fuck Yeah!"
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Apparently the production of that video is now not out of the question.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Heck with the news networks, comedy central predicted a shot in the head on South Park.
IIRC he was suffering from failing kidneys in the late 90s, so unless they had dialysis machines in the caves I smell something fishy my own self. Personally I want to see the body. if we killed him there is a body, yes? let's see it.
Personally I think it is more likely he has been dead since 03 (after that you'll notice the only vids you got was his picture and a voice) and we probably just now found the body. Since there is no way in hell the military is gonna go "hey guess what?" and admit the guy had been DOA all that time and we were having our collective chains yanked, you shoot the body full of holes and say "got him!".
So I want to see the body, it ought to be pretty easy to tell if the corpse is fresh or moldy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
previous announcements on may 1 have been about the ending of some form of human terror, or the beginning of a new more insidious kind.
on May 1:
2010- the death of OBL announced.
2003 - Bush's "Mission Accomplished." speech
1961 – Fidel Castro, proclaims Cuba a socialist nation and abolishes elections
1956 – Public availability of The polio vaccine announced
1945- the anouncement of the death of Adolph Hitler.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They were tracking him illegally downloading old Clash tunes on his iPhone.
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
Um....
Richard Stallman
Osama bin Laden
They really don't look that much alike.... I mean, sure, they both have beards, but....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Dammit, the birth-certificate distraction came a week too late.
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.
You don't think intel got diverted to Iraq, to search for those mythical WMDs?
Osama missed the memo, the rest of the world is playing Sardines with China.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
...do you really think the TSA's antics have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? Other than using the attacks as an excuse.
Uh, yes.
It's security theater. It's an inept attempt to reassure a panicky populace with an emotion driven response. I really don't think the TSA wanted the headache. They would much rather pretend there wasn't a problem at all (sort of what they're doing anyways).
Wiretapping (etc) on the other hand, is a different ball game. There are arguments for FBI, border patrol, et al. wanting more power. I don't generally subscribe to such theories, but I'm sure there's at least some truth to it.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -- Sir Winston Churchill
Get a grip man! A mortal enemy of western civilization and all the good things it stands for is dead and all you can do is whine about Republicans? Pitiful.
After taking credit for the killing of bin Laden, Trump said he wasn't going to believe he was dead until he placed his fingers in the wounds in Osama's hands and side.
Did you just compare Osama bin Laden to Jesus? Because that's what the Lit Major in me just read.
the Bin Laden compound is on fire. I hope it was possible to recover some leads in the hunt for other AQ leaders before the blaze took hold.
Nullius in verba
We had less than 100 of our own people on the ground at ToraBora, largely because Afghanistan operations were being reduced for the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
The large-formation troops most useful for operations in terrain such as the Tora Bora environs (in the case of the US) are those of the 10th Mountain Division, which didn't go to Iraq until late 2004, almost three years later, and (if memory servces). Tora Bora was primarily a commandos plus airstrikes operation anyway. To repeat what I said in the grandparent post: military units are not interchangeable. You do not condemn a cardiologist for being elsewhere when a patient is undergoing cancer treatment.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Is that /bin/laden or /usr/bin/laden?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
Sounds like you've never spent a Sunday night in Austin before.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
MSNBC is reporting that he was killed in a targeted U.S. raid of his mansion.
Mod this sick puppy down.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
you're assuming those things weren't the actual agenda in the first place.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That is how it works. When McVeigh attacked American government property and killed innocent Americans, France didn't come in and catch him and try him. Why? Not because France thought that was ok but because it was America's justice to have. He committed crimes against the US, the US punished him for it.
Same deal with extradition treaties. If you commit a crime in France and then run to Germany, Germany does not try you for that crime if they catch you. They send you back to France, who then tries you since it is their justice to have.
You even see this within the US itself. If you commit a crime in or against a certain state, it is that state that will try you. You don't get tried by whatever state happens to find you, or by the federal government. You are tried by the appropriate jurisdiction for your crimes. Like the guy Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Giffords and others at a rally. He faces two different trials: The federal government will try him for the attempted murder of Giffords, the murder of the federal judge, and a couple of other crimes that, under the law, are against them. He also faces a trial by the State of Arizona for the murders of other citizens who were present.
So no, the US doesn't go after everyone in the world who is a terrorist trying to hurt civilization, they go after the ones who hurt them. Plenty of people could lay claim to wanting bin Laden, but the US certainly had a good claim, and they have the intelligence agencies and military to make good on that claim, it would appear.
Crackpot says: lunatic theory A, lunatic theory B, fact everyone knows, lunatic theory C.
Fact everyone knows turned out to be true! Therefore, crackpot was right!
oh i don't know, go ask some of the inmates of guantanamo
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
those two outcomes (osama and friends safe and sound, and your kids eating lead) are not mutually exclusive.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm making a note here: huge success.
I'm sure there's a few people in London and Madrid that might disagree with you.
But the U.S. has remained the primary target the whole time, and the attacks against U.S interests (at home or abroad) have been very weak, with nothing really succeeding. The organization at its original strength would have had much more success with one or more of the past failed operations and they would have been much larger in scope and more orchestrated, like the original attacks.
You aren'y seriously going to claim the failed attempts are the stellar achievements of Homeland Security, right?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And all it cost were our civil liberties, national character, and trillions of dollars...
Yeah, no kidding. If you figure the the reason the US is in Afghanistan is to kill or capture Bin Laden, and that bringing stability to the region was an effort to this end, this is literally a trillion dollar man hunt. Perhaps the most expensive man hunt in history.
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 doubt it, given the 200+ year history of the US military
And then you proceed to give this link....
My short web search started here, which is where I would start reading if I was so inclined:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Note that includes, and is probably mostly, deaths from bombing attacks by suicide bombers. You say the military has been around 200+ years but with the period of daily car bombings suicide bombers have engaged in and the inordinate care the military takes not to harm civilians, I am pretty sure the suicide bombers are well in the lead at this point (over the U.S. military anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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...
The New York Times is reporting that the town Osama was found in is an affluent town near a large army base plus the country's military academy. Somehow I think we may not have given the Pakistani government much, if any, prior notice. There have been too many reports that some in the intelligence service and military are supporters or protectors of Osama. Our President could not risk another Tora Bora where locals decided to protect Osama rather than capture him.
"Abbottabad is home to a large Pakistani military base, a military academy of the Pakistani army, and a major hospital and other facilities that would could have served as support for Osama Bin Laden." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-is-killed.html
I don't get this thinking by some post 9/11 that the standard terrorist operating procedure has somehow become "Hijack a plane"
It's not quite that focuses, but I DO get that they are still very much focused on planes - terrorists always have been for some reason.
There was the shoe bombing, the underwear bombing, and also the attempted package bombing, all involving planes.
Even though they could hit anywhere else and it makes little logical sense to focus so heavily on planes, that's apparently exactly what they are doing, hence our very heavy attention to security in that regard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think this is justice. We went to go get him, and a firefight broke out. He died.
What, should we have dicked around with UN proceedings for months, if not years, to determine that after all that, it wasn't even him that was responsible? Or that his capture was all under false pretenses?
I think the world has waited long enough. Before 9/11, everyone in the world was happy and complacent about many things. Now we have to worry about sleeper cells, dirty bombs, IEDs, etc etc, and it's all because he decided to flying some fucking airliners into skyscrapers.
Screw that guy, he had to go and wake a sleeping giant.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
But ladies of USA keep being touched by TSA. That is what that lasts.
You don't think intel got diverted to Iraq, to search for those mythical WMDs?
Considering that intelligence analysts are rather specialized folk, I doubt it. Your statement is akin to Obama's gaffe in 2008, saying that the Iraq war was diverting Arabic translators from Afghanistan, even though the Afghans don't speak Arabic (at least as their primary language). The people in Langley asking "does the activity at this military base or this attempt to import machine parts indicate nuclear weapons research?" would not be the same people asking "which village elders in this area would Bin Laden trust his safety to?"
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
I seriously doubt that the leaders are religious fanatics.
The beliefs of the leaders are totally irrelevant, since the FOLLOWERS are religious fanatics.
Remember it's the leader who is dead, so only the opinions of the followers matter. And as stated, they believe he has gone on to paradise so on the surface they will not care what you do to him.
But who will? Religious moderates thinking more of human dignity than religion, and those people would be angered by "wrapping him in bacon". That is exactly the kind of thing that makes the whole thing worse.
I say cremation and ashes sent into the sun, to literally send him to hell (and avoid any place on earth that could become a place of worship). Moderates can't really disagree with the sentiment and it could possibly un-nerve the followers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A flamewar? Am I blindly missing the dissenting opinions? Is anyone here arguing that he was a nice guy and we should have just let him go?
Never underestimate the anesthetic powers of self delusion.
About time! There are not many people that you can toast their death to but i am giddy right now. Fuck you bin landen. i hope you are suffering you goat fucker.
As coroner, I must confer, I've thoroughly examined her... and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead!
Oh, it was a man? Well, I never said I was a particularly good coroner.
Don't want to spoil your cheering, but do you know how many civilians the USA milliary killed in the Iraq and in Afghanistan?
Also, that most of the people in the world think that the USA is the number one terrorist country of the world?
You invaded two countries because one terrorist organization blow up some airplanes and you hunt down people in other countries with drones, killing not only those people without any trial or jurisdiction but 100s of civilians as well.
The US just declared "war on terrorism" and take the step to kill non military people in other countries with the means of the military. What was earlier the duty of the CIA or FBI (aka civilian police) to hunt down criminals and terrorist and put them before a trial is now the duty of the army and soldiers to hunt them down and kill them all. There is a difference, the CIA and FBI don't have tanks, kill-drones and apache helicopter, but the army can use every means possible, even a nuclear bomb. The CIA and FBI have oversight with civilian trials but the army don't.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Note to Slashdot editors: Take down the incorrect summary. Many news outlets are now giving detailed reporting that it was a U.S. raid on Sunday that saw bin Laden killed.
...to kill Osama bin Laden. I don't think many U.S. officials would have given a damn whose sovereign toes were being stepped on to quite literally get a shot at Osama.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
It's hardly fair to fuss over what they are wearing, when the US didn't even bother to declare war.
Obama said he authorized the mission a week ago. So Fox News is wrong on this count.
No they aren't. The U.S. has been waiting for DNA evidence. They went in a week ago sure it was him, but once he was dead they had to further verify without doubt they had him.
What exactly is wrong with the statement from Fox News in this regard? It seems perfectly accurate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Make sure your cutouts check for tags.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
The NY Times is reporting that the town is also home to a large military base and a military academy for officers. So yeah, what were the local sympathies.
Their loss I guess, they missed out on that million dollar reward.
Is the Guantanamo detainee who gave up the courier eligible? :-)
This is Slashdot. Some scholars think the term "Great Satan" for America was actually coined *here*.
mv /bin /dev/null
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ok, here's on "drunk uncle". Any other volunteers?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Does that mean the TSA can go home, now?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Can we do the Scurrying Rat theory and see who seems to try to slide into the successor position?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
But these people don't even look remotely like me, why should I care?
A [...] guy is dead. That's cause for celebration.
Fine, here's a source. And another. And another. And another.
You all need to read TFA. Fox clearly reports USAMA bin Laden was killed, not Osama.
The giant was not sleeping. What reality are you living in? Or do you like to cling to this fantasy because it helps you think that you are on the side of right and justice? It's pretty convenient to believe that because it avoids a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The reality is more like the giant was hard at work sticking its thumbs in everyone else's pie. An example would be the very fact that Bin Laden was armed and trained by the USA back in the 80s when Bin Laden was a good guy because he was fighting the russkies for us. That's just 1 pie. There are probably 50 others you can use as an example for that period or after.
Nope, the giant's been pretty busy at work being an imperialist bastard.
The only difference between "terror" and justice or liberation or whatever misleading labels the propaganda industry uses on death and killing is who is committing it. When we do it, it's "liberation" or "intervention" or whatever and when they do it, it's terror.
We have a special place right over here, set aside just for you. Step inside and to try to make yourself comfortable for awhile. :)
I think this is justice. We went to go get him, and a firefight broke out. He died.
Somehow I doubt the normal course of justice was observer in the process (police force, with proper arrest warrant, respecting the jurisdiction, etc).
What, should we have dicked around with UN proceedings for months, if not years, to determine that after all that, it wasn't even him that was responsible? Or that his capture was all under false pretenses?
Now, look... I fully understand argumentations along the line of "an act in the war theater, act that happened during the War against Terror".
The real danger, however, is to call justice what essentially is an act of war. This is a slippery slope... GITMO/Abu Ghraib showed where stepping down on this path actually leads.
In regards with "UN proceedings... months if not years...".
Buddy, you know, US isn't the only country to ever have had problems with terrorism: ETA in Spain killed more than 2000, IRA in UK killed more than 3000 people - this even letting aside the Lockerbie bombing (to speak about transnational terrorism). By comparison 9/11 claimed about 1600.
However, neither of these countries didn't amend - i.e. get around their justice system, see the PATRIOT act and related - in order to deal with terrorism.
Please, don't think I'm decrying the killing of ObL.... it is only that I refuse to think of this act as justice.
And, for the sake of the world you and your children will have to live: call it "eliminating a threat", call it "war on terror", call it vengeance, call it in any way you like but do... not... call... it... justice.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You're joking, but that's exactly how Russians do it. When they kill yet another high ranking Chechen "rebel" (funny how the same exact thing gets called a "rebel" in one case and a "terrorist" in another), they bury them in unmarked graves wrapped in pig skin, and let the fuckers know.
Fruit flies like a banana.
I respect your point of view. It's not going to stop me from tapping this keg.
Every death diminishes all mankind, but the death of a man who plots the death of others in every waking hour? It's a smaller loss. I am diminished less by the loss of him than by his presence. He is the person who lightens a room by leaving it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You know what I find most disturbing about this? The compound he was found in had NO INTERNET! That's just pure evil.
check this out:
Osama was killed in a mansion, apparently built for him in 2005.
This mansion is near in Abbottabad, just 2 kms on a road to Pakistan Military Academy, which is like the West Point of Pakistan.
How much was Pakistan being funded again? for their cooperation? OMG!
On hindsight, wonder if all the high tech gadgetry is worth without some good old HUMAN INT :)
I think you're confused on who I was referring to when I said sleeping giant.
Of course the US Gov't was doing what they do, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about all the people that didn't give two shits about Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Well I more or less equate his death to a bank robber who goes into a bank, heavy weapons and all, and is either leaving with millions or in a body bag. Once the cops show up, he's going to shoot his way out.
Do you think Osama would have just given up and accepted being arrested? Of course not. So he got killed while we were trying to capture him.
He never faced a court appointed judge, but neither did the bank robber.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
You haven't heard the complaining about the PATRIOT act because it's no longer politically advantageous for those who are the loudest. The TSA issue is still being linked to Bush as if Bush was running for a third term and there was going to be another election tomorrow.
However, the search and seizure issue has somewhat been hammered out with the courts in private enterprise being able to post notices and not violate any laws or rules when they search someone leaving or entering their premises. A crafty lawyer could probably convince the courts that this is different because the searches are mandated by the government and performed by government employees, but the reply to that is somewhat of a shell game in that government employees are used because they need the power of arrest and it's being performed at the request of the airlines. So it's really one of those splitting hairs things made popular by the meaning of the word is.
To keep a population in line, wage perpetual war against a vague enemy.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think he was inferring the brain development retardation that occurs from eating lead in order to believe either of those two conspiracies.
To surrender your rights you need only show up at the polling station and vote for one of the provided options.
To win back surrendered rights requires quite a bit more.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He shouldn't have used his real information on the Playstation Network.
They'd have got him much sooner if he hadn't been waiting for a white iPhone.
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
Christopher Hitchens debates Iraq with Reagan Jr.
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
Right to a fair trial (Guantanamo detainees).
Right to privacy (wiretapping).
Right to travel (indiscriminate no-fly listing).
The right of congress, not the president, to declare war (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists - congress' own damn fault for signing this one away, still illegal though).
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
While I don't feel particularly sorry for Bin Laden, I'm bothered by the belief many Americans seem to have that they have a right to enforce their laws all over the world.
Sending a special ops team into a foreign country to "bring someone to justice" is kidnapping, and the victim of such an operation is in their rights to defend themselves - even if they're guilty of the original crime.
For the sake of argument, let's say my country, Sweden, decided to try a US military officer for war crimes. While the officer was visiting, say, Germany, Swedish police would sneak up to him and try to arrest him. He would refuse to come peacefully, there would be a firefight, and the officer would be killed.
Would you just shrug and say, "Well, our officer was offered due process and refused it, so it's his own fault for being shot"? Or would you claim that your officer has no obligation to bow to the justice of a foreign nation?
...you cannot fight real bullets with lawyers not matter how many lawyers you have.
But we can sure try! Maybe using all lawyers will work? Please?
Do you think Osama would have just given up and accepted being arrested? Of course not. So he got killed while we were trying to capture him.
You seem to have special relation with the guys that made it happen. Perchance, do you know who called the local cops (or whatever civilian organisation that enforce the law in that place), cops that intervened observing a total respect with the jurisdiction and the laws of the place during intervention? Ahhh... were they military and acting outside the civilian code of laws? Well, is this still justice?
How would you like your kids living in a society where "justice" may mean the military are allowed to administer it?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Really? Being a Russian national, I hear quite a few things on what our counter-terrorist forces do, good and bad alike. I never heard of purposeful desecration in the way you describe. Basically, they draw the line at "bury them in unmarked graves".
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Bush said that we couldn't look at threats in the world the same after 9/11 because these insignificant players looking for attention had killed 3000+ people in one day. Iraq was supposed to disarm, Saddam was claiming to be paying pensions to the families of suicide bombers in Israel. Saddam was claiming out of one side of his mouth that he had WMDs because he was afraid of neighboring countries invading Iraq and telling the UN he had none while refusing to let the inspectors do their job in the way they thought necessary.
What Saddam and Iraq had to do with the war on terror was when we shifted our focus from reaction to being proactive, he needed to be eliminated because he was more of a threat then Bin Ladan was prior to 9/11 and had a known connection to terrorist while claiming to have WMDs. And if Bin Laden got a hold of WMDs, the thought was that 9/11 would be minor in comparison.
So it wasn't anything Iraq an Saddam did directly, it was how we shifted out focus and approach after 9/11 that involved them in the war on terror.
He was the alleged mastermind of the event that killed thousands of innocents. Even beyond 9/11, this asshole advocated the killing of innocent civilians, and his actions killed innocent men, women, children including the muslims he claimed to be defending.
His actions made the lives of millions across the world harder (you think you have it hard with the TSA) . Worst affected were muslims. 9/11 spawned to wars which killed hundreds of thousands (probably in the millions figure). He also destroyed the legitimacy of causes fighting to address genuine grievances of muslims.
Hopefully, his death can bring closure to the 9/11 chapter for the American people.
Although at face value this is good news...like the incidents happening in the middle-east, it makes the outlook for the future both hopeful and uncertain at the same time.
Maybe Bin Laden shouldn't have accepted his Royal Wedding invitation...
If you're not confused, you're not paying attention
rm -fr /bin/laden *
Oops. Damn space bar...I meant to hit / why is the disk churning like that and why is it suddenly so bright outs*$QQE
NO CARRIER
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Use the farce luke, use the farce as the ignorance runs deep in you.
Bin laden was never trained or funded by the US in the 80's. He was never the good guy and was considered the odd ball. This is well established fact of you care to look for it and enrich your knowledge instead of feeding your ignorance. Yes, Bin Laden played a role in afghanistan against the russians. It ws a role he played by himself except in a few rare situations. He funded his ventures with his own money.
What in the hell are you even talking about? Is your mind even closely related to reality?
Does that mean the boys can go home now? Oh, wait...
No sig today...
So, it's over right? We won?
I know, it's such a bunch of nonsense. For the clueless: a "certificate of death" is OBVIOUSLY NOT THE SAME as a "death certificate".
You must work for government. I've actually been told this about my birth certificate. Took a full month to get it in order, which translated in a month's pay missed.
*sigh*
You are asserting that the operation was without the permission of the local government. I haven't seen that assertion in the news, but the details are still sketchy at this point.
Learn to love Alaska
It has been demonstrated that citizens of the so called "democracies"
Just curious, what would you call a true Democracy? Cuba, perhaps? Or North Korea? Or would that be Afghanistan under the Taliban regime?
It would have been much satisfying to have him go through a court and truly adhere our values and principles.
True but, unfortunately, he disagreed. He shot back.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is pretty good news, but I don't see why it's on Slashdot. Unless they tracked down his iPhone or used a cluster of ps3's to guide missiles to his villa.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
So Bin laden was found and killed because Sony leaked his personal details?
...Salman Rushdie is still alive!!!!! Bu-wah-hah-hah-hah!!!
> ground troops
Sounds like Jack's back: next stop Libya ;-)
You're not allowed to parade corpses around on TV - that's a violation of the Geneva convention, and not to mention fucking retarded.
If he died of natural causes, I think the US troops would never see his body again. Al-qaeda leaders would have disposed it (by cremation, possibly) to keep the threat alive.
Dilbert RSS feed
The people of a nation with a history of blatant human rights violations are taking to the streets in joy of their armed forces killing a man.
Due process is a bitch, huh?
New Zealander? Er.. you guys are OK
I can't believe you missed the easiest one!
I don't know about him, but I would have preferred they captured him alive, put him on trial at the Hague and THEN executed him for war crimes. Call me old fashioned, but if it was good enough for the Nazis it should be good enough for OBL.
And has anybody showed a pic yet? I want to see the body! Because frankly the whole things still smells funny to me. We have some of the baddest sneakiest super bad special force bar none, they can't sneak up on a single guy with bad kidneys and some hillbillies? Hell we got armor plated everything, they got what? An AK-47? they couldn't use CS and smoke his ass out? Drug the water supply? something?
I still having the sinking suspicion his ass has been dead since late 05, maybe even 04, and some snitch just led us to the graveside. Now if it turned out the terrorists had yanked our chain with false broadcasts for all this time do you think the US military would admit it? Hell no, it would make them look as smart as Gomer Pyle!
So frankly until they post at least ONE pic of his freshly dead ass I smell bullshit. We got to see Saddam didn't we? And the latest report I read said they were gonna treat the body with Muslim traditional burial, which means a quick (less than 24 hours IIRC) burial with NO pics of the deceased, isn't that just convenient? Especially since no mainstream Islamic group is gonna say nice things about OBL, and most are working hard to distance themselves in the media as we speak?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We couldn't help it but make it generally a PR farce from the start anyway, for some reason. How many people are even aware that preparations were well under way by the time "the reasons" happened? (and nvm slight continuity problems and how the ultimatum was a farce, also how getting in the way of some investigations possibly made those events easier)
:) ...well, still not on the level of Reagan team hampering Iranian hostage release efforts), what we got is so much more palatable.
And all also good reasons to invade Pakistan (one of very few of our "allies" to quickly recognize Taliban gov; others being Kuwait and Saudis, IIRC) and label ISI as a terrorist organisation, for a start... Pakistani ISI which fought alongside the Taliban (the largest support going towards the only mujahidin faction eager to fight not only against the Soviets) against the Northern Alliance, greatly contributing to them being unable to hold Afghanistan.
But don't forget how, immediately after the "causes", "rumors" began that Iraq could have played a role... Or how opium production skyrocketed after the intervention. How the compromised ISI was again, also, quick to helpfully point out their enemies, for us to deal with.
How ideology is branded as an "organization", which can be obviously fought like any organization
Oh well, admittedly such subtleties just confuse people (and the farce of October surprise in 2004 was hilarious, with OBL tape clearly designed to make reelection easier
How many people now realize that bomber gap and missile gap were a fiction comparable to mine shaft gap? How many even heard about Team B?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Bah. The real contest is between Elvis, Jim Morrison & Lord Lucan.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, '"The real America is too weak to take on anyone except military midgets," ... why there is such hostility to such states as North Korea, Cuba, and Iraq, an underdeveloped country of 24 million exhausted by a decade of sanctions. ... "theatrical media coverage...must not blind us to a fundamental reality: the size of the opponent chosen by the US is the true indicator of its current power"', supposedly (via...)
And it's not even that relevant how accurate his predictions are. More how they are representative of perceptions. Also, telling how he was apparently branded as "anti-communist" and "anti-American" by essentially the same people...
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's unlikely this is the first time said poster has asked that question.
Mr. President, they'd like their Peace Prize back. Now.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There is no video after 2002 showing him in a clear way.
My assumption is that OBL was long dead before now, and it is just now that he isn't needed any more as a scapegoat.
Let's not forget that he shaked hands with the CIA back in the eighties.
They'll just Photoshop one together 3 years from now. It's not that they think it's too ridiculous to respond to, that's just how long it takes the US government to produce a forgery which is easily uncovered by any hobbyist with a pirated copy of CS5. An undetectable forgery obviously takes decades to make.
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.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
Because, of course, the US was innocent of stirring up insurrection in the middle east, and destroying societies there, feeding revolutionary groups and arming them, causing countless deaths over the years.
The terrorists did all this for no reason, with no view of history right?
And all that putting the body on display.. Wow, way to really make a martyr and begin a whole new level of conflict and death..
The idiocy of some, supposedly 'sane' people is quite frankly astounding.
Very little is black and white.. Just some incredibly stupid people seem to think they are, and set off bombs, kill people, and advocate stupid grandstanding.
If they ever show the body, I certainly want to see the effects of more than a decade of diabetes.
Well ...
Another U.S. official told CNN that bin Laden has already been buried at sea. The official said his body was handled in the Islamic tradition, but did not elaborate.
At least those of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo and were later found to be innocent.
You seem to have forgotten that they were also trained in FLORIDA. The important thing is the people and organisation instead of going for an eye for an eye on the people next door to those responsible after they have already crossed the border.
We helped provide the AQ link to Iraq ourselves when they moved there to fight us - they did not manage to survive there apart from the times when Iraq was in chaos.
It would also need to be in accordance with local laws - if the Pakistani government gave their informal consent, in spite of the law, it's still a violation of Pakistani sovereignity.
I'm not familiar with Pakistani law, but I doubt it's completely legal to let a foreign special ops team into your country and let them do police work.
It's a damn shame that those forces (Navy Seals and CIA) do not get the $25 million reward or any other reward...
Hopefully they used bullets soaked in pig blood...
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Look who's trying to be "above it all".
Friend, let me tell you something. I wasn't the first to bring up the issue and I certainly won't be the last. There are already people and groups, some of whom are suddenly considered mainstream in this country, who are saying that they believe that this story is a hoax, that "Obama is lying", etc.
When you find a human endeavor that is not political, let me know. I want to be on hand for the unique discovery.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Guantanamo is the biggest threat. It demonstrates the USA has no regard for the rule of law, but the USA flexes muscle around the world. That makes the USA a target. Simple really. Obvious. Now get back to your six packs people.
I don't therefore I'm not.
President Obama found and killed Osama Bin Laden, something President Bush couldn't ( or wouldn't ) do with the same resources, eight years, a map and a flashlight.
Considering that it has been well established that Bin Laden died of kidney failure in a hospital years ago, this is just more propaganda to prop up the failed Liar-in-Chief Obama. No one but the brain-dead are buying it.
Time to get out the Champagne and celebrate. This doesn't bode well for Pakistan though.
You know, I feel a little dirty responding to what is so obviously a troll, but what the hell:
When you say, This guy was on the CIA payroll, well, there you're saying things that just aren't true. Bin Laden's group was never funded by the CIA (check the bottom of page three at that link, going on to page four). Why would they need CIA funding? Bin Laden himself was wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of any mujahideen. And given the money to the Afghan mujahideen was all routed through Pakistan, why would they give money to a Saudi? Etc., etc. The meme of "the CIA funded bin Laden!" is one of these things that's just so idiotic it doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny and yet the folk myth simply will not die.
If you want your political views to be taken seriously by people, I would suggest revising your evangelism. This kind of talk will not convince people to listen to you: it will convince people you should not be listened to.
How you got modded +5, I have no idea.
Looks like you're woefully behind the times. They repealed the "you can't do that on TV, it's fucking retarded" bit years ago.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Good thing Obama took care of that whole Patriot Act thing...
Whether he was killed or not, this marks a sad day. We may never find out what happened. The administration found fit to announce this. Having never seen Osama in person, he could well be Santa Claus, or at least as real.
When the buildings came down, they fell at a speed appropriate to gravity (I use the word "speed" advisedly because it allows for air). The top fell at close to the ideal velocity which is really, REALLY, wrong for a building falling from a burning substructure and more likely from timed shaped explosives. Why? Never answered.
Eyewitnesses (including the ones who heard explosions at lower levels) were never called to the official inquiry. Why? Never Answered.
And so on and so forth. My take on all this is Bin Laden had dirt on US officials and needed to be removed. Until I see answers to the above questions and some more I have in waiting, I won't buy the "Osama was the evil mastermind" shit.
I don't therefore I'm not.
So, 3000+ people of all nationalities are violently murdered in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable...
... and it's our fault? Seriously, that's what you just said there: while innocent people are leaping off the top of the World Trade Center because a quick suicide is preferable to death in a fire, while you're watching those bodies fall, on that very day, you said "you know what, it's our fault"?
You are not evil. You are sick. You need help, and I hope you get it.
And oh so bloody convenient. I'm with hairyfeet on this one, though we're never going to know as they quickly dumped the corpse at sea. I've long believed that he copped it pretty early on in the campaign. But announcing his death at that point would have muted the ire of public opinion, and that didn't suit the political aspirations of the war mongering neo loony right in US government at that time. Much better to have his ghostly presence live on as a target for public hatred. Now, with the coffers empty and US dollars needed at home to try and right the economy, and with continuing loss of US soldier lives, it's the right time to announce his death. Something the government had to do in order to claim victory. But there are no pictures; a body quickly and conveniently disposed of in such a manner that it can never be recovered, and no evidence that can be ratified by an independent third party. This whole scenario is a work of fiction, now that the US government have decided it's the right time to kill him off.
Regulatory capture, seriously a bigger threat to democratic processes than terrorism. Study it, learn it, oppose it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
According to TFA, he was buried at sea, so I don't think you'll get to see the body.
Nope. The use of POWs, including the bodies of those under your care, for propaganda purposes, is still illegal.
What conspiracies?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Both had/were Weapons of Mass Distraction.
A Pic? You will never see a pic. They reportedly buried him at sea, and have him a traditional Islamic burial? Is being dumped at sea an Islamic tradition? The fact that they report him being dumped at sea to prevent his grave being a shrine or whatever, but gave him a traditional Islamic burial, make me call BS all day.
Buried at sea? Really? What is he Megatron or something. jeez....
All points of time and space are connected.
Didn't see anyone mentioned this on Slashdot but it may be of interest. According to http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/osama_bin_laden_dead.html
After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body." In order to confirm that the body was, in fact, Bin Laden, U.S. officials subpoenaed DNA from Bin Laden's sister (who had died in a Boston hospital) and found a match. All told, the operation took around 40 minutes to complete.
So the DNA used to compare is not Osama's DNA. Makes you wonder if they killed Bin Laden or one of his many relatives ... If they had to do DNA testing, it suggests his body was in a state that an easier method, such as fingerprint, was not available. Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this? How easy is it to fool DNA testing with another family member DNA?
Ok, this guy deserved to die? Hell yeah but shouldn't he be captured and brought to justice to stand trial? I mean, the USA didn't even try to say "We tried to capture him but he was killed during the firefight". The idea was hunt and kill. Where is the famous due process?
Scientia est Potentia
Bin laden was never trained or funded by the US in the 80's.
That's pretty much not true. Bin Laden, while he did use his own funds as well, was a Mujahadeen leader and it's pretty well established that the Mujahadeen were given vast sums of money and arms to fight the Russians (indirectly via Pakistan).
Google around to see that lots of people agree Bin Laden was a CIA asset at one point. That fact is politically embarrassing but plainly true.
Also, I stand by my definition that the weapon of the US government is terrorism. It's just not called that when they do it. They sometimes call it liberation or exporting democracy. (which is pretty ridiculous but what's more ridiculous is that the population buys it).
We are on the continent of farm land.
Then explain why people starved in the 1930's? You think African soil is not fertile? Yet people are dying there today. Starvation is an economic problem, not an agricultural one.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The twitter feed from his ghost is better: http://twitter.com/#!/ghostosama
All or nothing, black or white thinking eh? I see that the concept of "us" and "them" has been so firmly instilled in your mind. But remember that we have always been at war with Eastasia, and we have always been at peace with Eurasia.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Another thing to add to the long list of "Things that took less time than Duke Nukem Forever".
Habeus corpus, for one. Yes, it's still there, but now you've been accused of terrorism or any violation with national security implications. There's the whole unreasonable searches thing (the drug war has assisted in it's demise). Free speech is now more limited (see free speech zones). Eminent domain is now a tool for business, not just to make roads and the like.
SSC
Finally. after 10 years he is gone.
The interest generated in this report surely will test the capacity of the major new sites, and probably the internet infrastructure to some extent. Wonder what the load will be in comparison to say, the death of Michael Jackson? Will the IPv4 address space problem get amplified because of Osama?
"The reports say that Bin Laden was actually killed about a week ago by a bomb in Pakistan,"
Not correct. When I was watching the coverage of this last night the only channel I saw that was making this erroneous claim was Fox News. Might want to improve your sources there timothy.
Burial at sea? Are you fucking kidding me? I wanted my chance to poke him with a sharp, bacon covered stick :(
Anonymous Coward says it all.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Checkout this one: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/heres-the-guy-who-unwittingly-live-tweeted-the-raid-on-bin-laden/
We could if it wasn't so close to a political election. Events happening withing 4 years of each presidential election could have a great impact on who is elected the next term. Sure the news is good. But every side wan't to gain from it, so they can be elected to keep their jobs for an other term.
The democrats what to show it was their change in policies that made this happen.
The republicans want to show it was the effect of their original policies that were let plaid out which won the day.
Sub groups that are to stupid to come up with a counter argument will come up some conspiracy theories like he isn't really dead, or they have killed him years ago and just wanted to release the information at a political convenient time (not too close to an election to raise suspicion, and not to far away for the public to forget about it).
We as a culture has been brainwashed to be polarized. We are either Left or Right and the opposite side cannot be right. and Moderates are coined as people who are easily manipulated, and are not of strong opinion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The freedom to not have a fucking NIGGER president, that's what. I bet that next we'll have a queer or some weird shit and say that it's for "diversity" and "multiculturalism". But just what the fuck would you know, you pansy foreign faggot. Get the fuck off Slashdot.
Wahahaha!
Would you say that you have any prejudices?
Thanks for the laugh, you should be watching the Fox protaganda channel, cleaning your gun and drinking a Bud Light. Not playing the white trash bigot on Slashdot.
BTW, the freedoms you have lost include the right to privacy, any privacy, the right to be protected by and from the government, the tight to a speedy trial, or any trial at all, the right to free assembly, etc, etc, etc. All things that are granted to you in the constitution. And all things that Corporations have had granted to them as citizens who have more rights that you do, and through their new found right to anonymously donate as much as they want to political parties, now own your government.
Yeah, you go clean your gun while you still have one. You're gonna need it.
(I know, he's a troll, sorry.)
And what would that accomplish?
The reason why there was a price on his head was because he was a dangerous person. He convinced people that America was at war with the Religion Islam, and drove them to attack us.
Doing something heretical against the Islamic Religion would just prove to his followers (who are probably really pissed off right now) that he was right. Having his body treated in according to his religion, is a move to help mend the problems he has caused.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I couldn't find any reference to this in any of the linked articles, so I'm wondering where the claim came from.
An Abbottabad resident is being credited for inadvertently liveblogging the event as it happened, and his first reference to a helicopter flying over the suburb was 16 hours ago.
So either the claim that Bin Laden died a week ago is false, or the helicopter was brought down in a separate incident. Or the 'liveblog' is a rather elaborate hoax.
rm -f /bin/laden
What the hell? They forgot to add a -r option as in
\rm -rf /bin/laden
Now we have to manually delete al Zawahiri and then the next one in line and then the next ....
Atleast they seem to have unset noclobber
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Iraq's oil money made it possible for Saddam Hussein to compensate the families of suicide bombers US$25,000:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html
Cutting off that funding helped to reduce the number of ``martyrs''.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
... long form death certificate.
I'm glad the SOB is dead, but think about this. 1. This happened in a country NOT friendly to the United States. 2. We didn't tell this country we were going to mount a military operation in their country. 3. This happened a week ago, people in the area heard the explosions, saw the helicopter(s). 4. Al Jazera said NOTHING about a military operation inside Pakistan? Like I said, I could care less as long as the SOB is dead, but think about it.
I can't speak for the rest of the Republican party, but within my (rather large) circle of Republican voting friends, we all think DT is a total self-serving populous douche bag! I wish he would shut his claptrap even though I know it would never happen.
Life is not for the lazy.
Reminds me of this: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pershing.asp
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Dick Cheney died?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have often wondered the practical reasoning behind such prohibitions on pork in ancient Mesopotamia. The Torah also contains such restrictions on pork consumption in addition to other hygienic considerations. That is assuming hygiene is the reason. Now , however, it is blended into an anomalous religious requirement handed down by God.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"bury them in unmarked graves"
After seeing what modern weaponry will do to the human body, I'd bet it was one person to many graves.
They say the Navy submitted his body to sea. My guess is that was a polite and politically correct way of them saying "damn, this pork soupy mess is starting to smell like fish. Dump this chum overboard. Yes sir, no problem sir... *splash*"
Life is not for the lazy.
There are plenty of millionaire Congressmen and contractors who get paychecks from the Treasury, and are thus "funded" by the US government--even the owners of Saudi Arabia used to get billions in "aid". Whether bin Laden was employed, trained, or equipped by the CIA is question that can never have a satisfactory negative answer because of government secrecy.
I'm with you on this. It is REALLY hard to live longer than a year or two on Dialysis, no matter how rich you are. It's horribly hard on your blood tissue itself, and on your body in general.
IIRC, I saw something on TV a few weeks ago (hmmm) that said that the last time that there was any recording that could be verified to be OBL was sometime in '04; so I figure he probably bought it around that time, maybe even before.
Yeah, why is it that there is never PROOF of stuff like this? Too bloody convenient...
not sure what a "birther" is - cultural reference I don't get....
Any physics based answers to my questions?
I don't therefore I'm not.
That was worth the 1.2 trillion dollar we have spent so far on the war on terror.
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.
Actually, last night I looked around a couple news websites just after Obama's speech. I wanted to see how they were reporting the issue. The only one where I saw any mention of a bombing one week ago was Fox News, and they didn't say much more. Today, I was unable to find that piece of information on their website.
The guy took credit for the Sept 11 attacks. For 9 years. That sounds like a guilty plea to me. You don't get a trial if you plead guilty.
Well here it is, ladies and gentlemen. Ten years later and I get the same feelings again. No, not patriotic fervor, but a feeling of utter dread and confusion. Why is there a crowd of people gathering on the whitehouse lawn cheering "USA?" Why is this being construed as a "victory" in a "war?" Why do we still have forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan?
How, might I ask, did a criminal act (though an extremely potent criminal act, I must admit) get turned into a catalyst for insane nationalism? It was misconstrued as an "attack on America," and we were treated and brainwashed by hysterical propaganda designed precisely to unite us in support of costly, pointless foreign wars. Osama bin laden did not "attack" anything. He set up an international criminal organization and pulled of a terrible crime. He pulled off several. In many countries. Sure, he was doing this for political/ideological reasons, but so was Timothy Mcveigh, and the Unabomber. Did the Unabomber "attack us?" Why wasn't there a "war on terror" when Timothy Mcveigh blew up a government building? Is it because he was a white, Christian American? Why didn't we unite in flag-waving awe when Osama tried to blow up the world trade center the very first time? Was it just because he wasn't successful that time?
Folks, we've been duped. We let our rhetoric turn an event into something it never was. There should have been no "war on terror," Osama shouldn't have been killed by US forces in Pakistan, but arrested by the CIA or some other foreign law enforcement agency and put on trial in some suitable, neutral Arab country. The USA should have never invaded Afghanistan or Iraq. It should not have conducted military operations in Pakistan, nor killed "extremists" there with drones. This has been a massive, unbelievably terrible series of diplomatic blunders on the USA's part, and we just made another one. Good grief.
I'm sorry, if you have definitive intelligence on where this asshat is, you go get him with the best intentions of putting him in ziptie bracelets and throwing him in the back of a helicopter. If he so much as looks in the direction a weapon, you put two hot ones each in him and his friends before he can kill anyone else. NPR reports that one of these cowards used a woman as a human shield during the course of the raid - this isn't the act of a rational person, and rational people don't put down their weapons and give up.
There's no way that guy comes out of there alive - he's responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people through his organization of terror. You think he's gonna wave a white flag and take a trip to the Hague because a SEAL team comes knocking on his door?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That reminds me of a cutscene from an episode of Family Guy where a terrorist (not sure if it was Bin Laden in particular) shows up at the Pearly Gates, and is introduced to 72 guys at their computers talking about Magic The Gathering.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I knew you would come up with BS like this. Are there any US citizens held in Guantanamo? Wiretapping has been a tool of law enforcement ever since the telephone was invented. The law requires a warrant in most cases but there are exceptions. Nothing is absolute. I have not heard of one case where someone accused of a crime through the use of illegal wiretaps has been convicted. Back in the early 40's FDR ignored an express declaration from Congress to not allow wiretapping to investigate suspected foreign government agents. He promptly wrote a memo to the Justice department directing them to use the taps anyway and they did. The constitution and our laws are not suicide pacts. I think the US actions over the past 10 years has been an effort to demonstrate this fact. FDR also blatantly violated the neutrality declaration Congress issued becuase he thought the protection of the country was more important. I saw a documentary where they asked Presidents Carter, Bush 1, Clinton , and Bush 2 what they thought of FDR's actions and they all agreed he did the right thing and they would have done the same thing if they had to no matter the cost to them politically. FDR came within a hair of being impeached. Even Carter supported this! Look at FDR's actions and then look at his legacy today as an example of a President putting the countries safety ahead of the waffling politicians who are more intent on winning elections than they are of actually serving those who elect them. The law enforcement agencies may violate this rule but the court system and it's remedies are in place to provide a second firewall. No-fly lists have been used since the 70's. Remember terrorists had a fetish for airplane attacks throughout the 70's. The system has been updated to take into consideration the nature of the threats today. The "right to fly" is not a human right. If there was a plane hijacking the first thing people scream is why didn't the government do anything to prevent it. When the government actually makes an effort in this direction they get non-ending complaints. People want perfect protection but don't want to do anything to actually prevent it. The President has always had the ability to initiate conflicts and there are provisions in our government that these types of situations apply to. So I will ask the question again, what rights as a US citizen have I lost?
Rubber bullets do not work how you seem to think they work.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Yeah. Blame us for helping Afghanistan fend off the Soviets. That was terrible of us. Just terrible. Obviously we're just getting our "just desserts".
You can only do, in any situation, what would reasonably seem the right thing at that time. You can never, ever know the entire outcome of every action you take. The thing you can try to decide is, "Is this the RIGHT" thing to do?
Help Afghanistan fight off the Soviets was the right thing to do, just as helping the Libyans fight off Qaddafi is the right thing to do. But, it's entirely possible that in helping the Libyans, that some terrorist will rise from their ranks in the future and attack America. We shouldn't let that stop us from doing the right thing.
"One helicopter suffered a "hard landing" inside the compound after experiencing a mechanical failure and had to be destroyed on the site, according to one defense official."
I'm pretty sure that is just a pretty way of saying that it crashed...safely.
Also I love how this sounds: "He said a “small team” of Americans went after bin Laden in Abbottabad on Sunday. “After a firefight, they killed Usama bin Laden and took custody of his body,” the president said."
10$ says that's a movie!
BS. You are free to speak and protest anything you like any where you like. These free speech zones are setup to make sure that organized protests do not obstruct the actions being protested. The people being protested against have the same right as those doing the protesting. You say "habeus corpus" is gone and then turn right around and admit it is still there. How do you reconcile your complaints using totally false statements that you yourself admit are false? Eminient domain has been around since the county was founded so if you have a problem with it go protest against it but don't try and associate it with losing your "rights".
So.... you take it upon yourself to continue the partisan bullshit? How noble.
If he's only "effectively" dead - e.g. in a secret cell deep underground, being interrogated for intelligence.
He's *probably* dead. They are probably telling the truth. But I wouldn't be too upset if they were lying this once, and had actually captured him, and simply didn't want the world to *know* they captured him.
"In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots."
Cuz it aint official until Texas says so...
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Not to award prizes to someone *before* they've actually done anything? They gave the Peace Prize to him based on what they thought he *would* do, not based on anything he'd actually *done*.
That defies all reason.
That said, if it's true, I'm glad that justice has been done and a mass murderer is dead. I can't hold that against Obama.
because right now, since he was dumped at sea, they are probably feasting on him:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2067970&cid=35707738
hagfish, the ocean's morticians, the fate of all bodies that go to the deep
nastiest things on earth, consuming the nastiest human being
appropriate
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's two stories floating around because the world is full of idiots who get things wrong. Nothing suspicious about that.
As for the people outside the white house with flags, if you live in the D.C. area, you can be to the whitehouse within 1/2 hour or an hour if you want. Do you realize how many people live in D.C. and the surrounding 'burbs?
According to Wikipedia, "The Washington Metropolitan Area, of which the District is a part, has a population of nearly 5.6 million".
In any large city, even during hours when "most" of the population is asleep, there will be some percentage (I would guess 5 to 10%) of people who are not asleep for one reason or another.
In light of those things, it's completely not surprising that a crowd could quickly go to the Whitehouse for a celebration/demonstration. You absolutely do NOT need a conspiracy to explain that.
do you know who called the local cops
Wow, you sure have an odd idea as to how this went down, as if OBL was having a party and the cops made a visit on a noise complaint. Perchance?
lIt'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.
I would argue it is in fact the wrong focus. It is focusing on millions of innocent travelers. Lets put it another way. With all the bomb detecting and gun detecting technology employed, how many terrorists were caught... ever? How many terrorist bombs were detected?... ever?
zero.
Of the terrorist that were actually stopped, it was done by passengers!
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
I get the impression that Pakistan is a "House Divided." That is to say, that there are those within the government and military who are allied with and sympathetic to rule of democratic law, and the U.S. as a strategic, democratic ally.
Then, there are those who are sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism, Sharia law, and Al Qaida.
My point in bringing this up is that, in the case of Pakistan, I think that you are probably right that there are collaborators who have helped Al Qaida, within the Pakistani government. I think there were also those in the Pakistani government and military who helped us to make this operation possible.
I think that we have an opportunity in Pakistan to help move the government more towards the advocates of democracy and freedom, without going to war and trying to remove the government.
Do you french kiss your mother with that mouth?
He calls it a "freedom kiss"
There are a few. And if you have to ask, you haven't been paying attention. But just to name one, the right to be secure in our persons and effects. It is now legal for the government to eavesdrop on our conversations without a warrant, and for the FBI to sneak-and-peek your house without notice. I'll cite the loss of freedom of association as well, since even talking to a group considered a terrorist organization is now a crime. So there's two. There are others. Maybe other folks can chime in with their favorites.
Oh hell, ok, one more. If the FBI asks for your information from a business or other party, that party can't tell you it's been done. So there's freedom of speech being abridged as well.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
All or nothing, black or white thinking eh?
Yes, tha's *YOU*. You have an all or nothing, black or white thinking. If the countries who have their governments elected by the people do not follow the policies you think they should follow then they aren't truly democratic, their peoples' opinions do not count, it's only *your* opinion that's valid, ain't that so?
I repeat, if you think that the NATO countries are not true democracies, then what exactly is your notion of a truly democratic country? Give me one example, please. One country which, in your opinion is truly democratic.
Not sure what the motivation for making this up would be. There are likely going to be reprisals for this act.
What was the motivation for making up the Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman stories?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I will explain nothing to a whaco who thinks the American military could fall.
I want to be retired when I grow up.
Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan?
According to Bush, Iraq had nukes, so I certainly don't think it was out of the question for him to take that tack. Now, it would be stupid, but I certainly don't put it past him...
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Al he wanted was a Pepsi.... just one Pepsi... and you wouldn't give it to him
He was the one who said that bin Laden should be killed, not taken into custody. As Truman said, "The buck stops here." He made the call.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE74107920110502?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
Members of an elite Navy Seals team dropped by helicopter to the compound were under orders to kill not capture bin Laden, who had eluded U.S. forces for 13 years, a senior U.S. security official told Reuters.
"This was a kill operation," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
-
Because a trial would attract a lot of attention - and Mr. Bin Laden might have told the world stories the US would not like to see on Wikileaks.
You mean Stalin right? Lenin was dead before the Cold War started.
I won't buy the "Osama was the evil mastermind" shit
Then you are stupid as fuck.
I want to be retired when I grow up.
You seem to misunderstand something about my response. I don't care about FDR. I care about what freedoms, guaranteed by the constitution, where taken away. You know, the question you asked me...?
With regards to Guantanamo, the issue is not whether there are US citizens, but whether the right to a fair trial has been taken from a US citizen. People held in Guantanamo and similar related "legal basis", have no means or rights to even claim citizen-ship. You could be picked up tomorrow, and you would have no discouse - no right to habeas corpus - no right to a fair trial.
I am aware that wiretapping is a useful tool for law enforcement. It is also something for which you need a warrant. Wiretapping without a warrant is an illegal breach of the right to privacy. Whether anyone has been convicted, or those recording have even been used in court, is entirely irrelevant.
No-fly lists are fine, as long as they are made as part of a judgement passed on an individual, or imposed on foreign nations or groups as part of a proper legal process. The no-fly lists hinder American citizens from travelling, with no proper basis in law. While there is no right to fly in natural philosophy or the united states constitution, the right to move and assemble freely is pretty well recognized. Of course you cannot disallow a primary mode of transportation without just cause - someone having the same name as someone else, who may or may not once have met someone accused of being a terrorist is not a convincing reason...
Regarding the right to declare war ("The President has always had the ability to initiate conflicts"), then I am pretty sure that when Congress alone was given the right to declare war, signing over that power to the president for fighting some hardly-nspecified enemy was not part of the deal. Congress can declare war, and they cannot hand over that power to the President, the postal office or you and me. They did, and that took away the right of the citizenry to decide on a case-by-case-basis, through their legislative representatives, whether they would go to war or not.
I have a question, btw:
> The constitution and our laws are not suicide pacts.
I have some problems parsing this; does this mean that the constitution is not set in stone and that sometimes it is OK to just disregard it? Does it mean that you do not even believe that there is such a thing as freedoms guaranteed, but rather freedoms suggested? Or what exactly are you saying about the law, here? That it should be waived whenever someone is in office you really agree with, or you feel we are not safe enough?
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Until now, most of the public has suspected that Osama was 'hiding' inside Pakistan. OK, someone in the Northwest Territories was keeping him in a hut in some small village. Without the knowledge of the Pakistani gov't. But now the secret is out. No way is a large compound built to house 'someone' without Pakistan's intelligence service looking the other way.
Its going to be pretty difficult for Zardari to deny the complicity of his security forces in concealing bin Laden. And that could lead to political instability in the country. A country with nuclear weapons.
Have gnu, will travel.
In a falsetto voice after he got neutered by big daddy.
NPR reports that one of these cowards used a woman as a human shield during the course of the raid
What's more cowardly, using a woman as a shield or shooting her dead so the person hiding behind her can't shoot you?
It makes much sense to go in with a desire to capture for subsequent trial, but frankly given the option of dying with a gun in my hands or suffering years or decades of torture at Guantanamo I'm going to try and take a SEAL down with me.
Lets face it, chances of a fair trial: 0. Chances of death penalty: close to 1. Not exactly a lot to lose.
Hi:
Its amusing that I heard about this first from Slashdot before any other news source.
So can I stop undressing and getting sexually assaulted at the airport now?
..the winning streak of the worlds hide and seek champion
Is there actually an enumerated right to privacy in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights? Don't get me wrong, I whole-heartedly agree with you; but I think the closest the framers got to actually writing in a privacy was in the form of limiting powers of search and siezure.
You're right, of course. And the courts (Katz v. United States - 1967), and common sense, has agreed that search and seizure extends to conversations - recording one counts a search. Hence, there is an implied right to privacy, now based on case law.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
I don't know where you get your information from, but I get my information from personal experience, we don't have much of a First Amendment left in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg:
(1) I went on a demonstration against the upcoming war in Iraq. The City was letting music performances go on the Great Lawn in Central Park. We requested to have a rally on the Great Lawn, the only place in NYC that was big enough. The City refused, using their traditional BS excuse that it would harm the grass. (Jimmy Breslin, the last great newspaper reporter, called up the groundskeeper at the country's biggest lawn, in Kentucky, and asked him if the lawn would take it. The groundskeeper said no problem, he has crowds like that all the time.) So we couldn't have the rally.
(2) Then we had a demonstration against the Republican Party convention. Bloomberg routed us up Fifth Avenue, past the New York Public Library. At the library, the cops attacked some innocent people, including some bystanders, and charged them with attacking an officer, a felony. They wanted to pull that old stunt about charging them with a felony, and offering them a choice between pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, or going to jail on a felony if they tried to exercise their right to a fair trial and fight the false charges. Then it turned out that the cops had videotaped the arrests, and the videotapes showed that the accused were actually doing nothing wrong, and the cops made an unprovoked attack and swore to false charges. Oops. Charges dismissed, but the cops weren't prosecuted for perjury.
(3) ... I could go on, but what's the point? You'll have a bullshit answer for everything. The "Free Speech Zones" in Boston during the Democratic Party convention, where the cops offered the demonstrators a park surrounded by barbed wire, where nobody could see or hear them. Amy Goodman's arrest in Chicago. "Bong hits for Jesus."
Don't try to get me to support your favorite cause, eminent domain. Go complain to the Republicans about that yourself.
Uhm... Muslim terrorist groups regularly split, reform, reconsolidate, split again.
In other words, SPLITTERS!.
The underlying reality, however, is that it's mostly an alphabet-soup shell game to confuse the kafir. You want a cease-fire to negotiate with the PLO? No problem. While the PLO is negotiating, the PFLP will be the ones on terrorist duty. PFLP ran out of missiles? "Temporary truce" while Hamas takes over. Hamas getting too much heat in Gaza? No problem, the "Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades" and "Palestinian Resistance Committees" and "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" are all waiting to take over.
There are similar front groups backed by the Iranians all over the place, who argue with the Muslim Brotherhood front groups, who argue with the Al Qaeda "allied" groups. The only thing they all seem to agree on is the idea that Islam has some right to order the kafir to convert-or-die, and they're perfectly happy to take turns doing it.
Fair enough. But you will live to see it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, my opinion is irrelevant. As is yours. The only relevant opinions are the ones of those who manage to get themselves elected. Therefore democracy doesn't exist except in theory. There is no way that the "people" can force their elected representative to even do the bidding of the majority - much less any minority. It's all about who knows who, who bribes who, and who is willing to do what in order to pursue their own personal interests. The FARCE is that it's all done "in the name of the people".
This is not a new concept. Even Benjamin Franklin said that democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what is for lunch.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why not? To quote one decorated commander:
"We won by sending wave after wave of men at the killbots until they reached their pre-programmed kill limit and shut down!"
- Sig
One problem is, the US is not at war with Pakistan, or with Al Qaida (because they're not a state). I don't think the Geneva convention says anything about how to deal with terrorists.
You think he's gonna wave a white flag and take a trip to the Hague because a SEAL team comes knocking on his door?
Knocking, indeed. Using 4 helicopters. And some say the reasons the home was not bombed is that Obama wanted a proof and wanted to avoid civilians killed unnecessary - which is commendable indeed.
Now, commendable as it is and also an undeniable success, the story itself is at best a war story, and not about bringing one to justice. My objection is mixing the two in presentation: war is and will be war, a beast totally different from justice.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It is beyond me why you are modded up. First, you capitalize He, implying that either he thinks of himself or his supporters think of him as God. We don't...it was the right that started that off with their stupid commercial during the campaign. Most of the left is fairly disappointed about how middle of the road he has been. (And seriously, grow up) Second, in his address he clearly commends the people who have worked so hard to make this happen. Third, he didn't appear on some ship claiming mission success. He just got on and told everyone what happened in a very presidential manner.
You may not like the guy's policies but you have to give credit where it is due. Think if your guy was in office right now...you don't think he would deserve any credit?
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Operation Desert Storm didn't make him look good enough to not be a one-termer.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I didn't said that what I stated was a good thing, I was just pointing what happened and what is happening. If someone told me 10 years ago that we would be seeing an american president begging for money to the chinese I would have laughed at him and his insane rabid anti-americanism, but that is what happened in 2009. For all his misdeeds, OBL didn't take away by himself USA's prosperity, habeas corpus, due process, respect for human rights and country's Constitution. All of that was self inflicted damage, unless you think that is a good thing that the US Constitution doesn't apply 100 miles from any US border, or that the president by himself can order the killing of an american citizen without intervention from the judiciary branch.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
...this event shows that war is not the correct way to wage this fight.
In the lead up to these two wars, many said that we should focus on intelligence and surgical special ops, as well as treat this as an international law enforcement matter rather than wage two wars. Instead, Bush (and now Obama) have decided that we need to use a jackhammer to push in a thumbtack. The wars are insanely expensive, anger people enough to provide al Qa'eda with endless volunteers and donors, and for what? So we can shoot up wedding parties and torture cab drivers by the thousand? The wars are stupid, expensive, and counterproductive. This should be an intelligence/law enforcement matter, not an excuse for the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
No, they only had Saddam, an AQ supporter and mass murderer in his own right. Then, once he bit it, the Iraqi's saw AQ for what it was and ousted them, driving their international political status down to where we have them ensconced further and further into the world's butt-hole of mountainous AF.
A real long-term win for AQ.
You are joking. We would hold a trial and then kill him. In the mean time, he would be able to put out messages...and him being captured would inspire anger. This would go on for months and then we would kill him and he would be a martyr anyways. This way it is just over and done with.
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Your 'questions' weren't. As in either actual questions or physics based. Merely postulations based on nothing but your perceptions. I saw no data presented, only your opinions. An opinion is therefore adequate rebuttal: I've worked with steel my whole life - it can be melted with a hand forge, much less air-drafted jet fuel. I watched the buildings fall in real-time. They fell like the near-top structure had turned soft and then the rest was pounded by tons of debris. Another opinion free of charge. You're a conspiracy idiot.
As coroner, I must confer, I've thoroughly examined her... and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead!
Oh, it was a man? Well, I never said I was a particularly good coroner.
You know, one of the first things I thought of in response to this news was a "Wizard of Oz" reference, too... "Ding Dong, Bin Laden's Dead"...
Bow-ties are cool.
Yes, but the U.S. government would argue that terrorists are not fighters in the employ of a state, and therefore are not protected under the Geneva Conventions. I'm not saying I agree with them (I don't); I'm just saying that I doubt the conventions will have any impact on how the U.S. government handles things.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
OBL has had help from many moneyed and powerful people, most recently from elements in the Pakistani government. That mansion they found him in appears to have been built specifically to hide him. I doubt he was in very many caves. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he eventually got a new kidney at some point.
Just stop with the conspiracy theories, people. I'm sorry the world isn't nearly as interesting as you'd like it to be, but at some point you need to grow up and face the sad reality of it all.
Fine, you want to do the history walk-back concerning the US and violent ME Islam? Islamic pirates pillaging US shipping and killing and capturing US civilians while being harbored by local leaders. So, in the case of US and violent ME Islam, they indeed started it.
How many bong hits does it take for you 9/11 Truthers to get going?
Must be some really righteous weed, man. Hydroponic?
Not sure what the motivation for making this up would be. There are likely going to be reprisals for this act.
What was the motivation for making up the Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman stories?
Simple home-front moral building, in light of dwindling support for a war that had (and still has) no end in sight.
Harry S. Truman -- Term in Office 1945 to 1953 -- Oversaw the United States' Victory in Europe and over Japan.
Richard M. Nixon -- Term in Office 1969 to 1974 -- Oversaw the United States' diplomatic reconnection with China, creating a strategic balance of power placed the Soviet Union solidly second to the United States for the remainder of its existence.
Ronald W. Reagan -- Term in Office 1981 to 1989 -- Oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the firm establishment of the United States' as the world's only Superpower.
William J. Clinton -- Term in Office 1993 to 2001 -- Oversaw the United States' longest period of Economic growth since World War II, leading to the countries first Balanced Budget in a Generation.
Barack H. Obama -- Term in Office 2009 to 2017 -- Oversaw the United States' victory over organized Terrorism by securing the d e a t h of Osama Bin Laden.
--------------------
I'm sorry folks, but in politics "to the victor go the spoils".
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Yes, and here we can have rallies, referendums, polls, petitions and so forth in order to try to change that. You can even toke if you want to take the chance on a ranges of sentences to serve before going back home if caught.
There, the woman gets acid thrown in her face, beaten with a rod or rocks or simply killed for the effrontery of not wearing a burka.
You find those situations equivalent?
Clinton tried, but the neocons claimed that this was merely an attempt at distracting the country from their trumped up impeachment charges.
I'm done with Slashdot. Too much is enough. Thanks for the ten-year ride.
ETA in Spain killed more than 2000
Nope. Around 800-900... over the course of several decades. We do call it 9/11 because all of those deaths happened on that day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks
...By comparison 9/11 claimed about 1600.
Your are only off by about half. it was nearly 3,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
Third, he didn't appear on some ship claiming mission success.
In an interesting coincidence Bush's Mission Accomplished speech was on May 1, 2003. Now, one of the mission's is finally accomplished.
And are they REALLY gonna try and sell us that the US fricking military, the same bunch that documents EVERYTHING in triplicate, didn't take any God damned pictures? This whole thing is total bullshit and a complete snowjob! And notice how the MSM is just happily spewing whatever the government hands them to spew? Not even a SINGLE VOICE saying "Okay lets see the pics"?
THIS, this right here, is why Payton Manning is a hero, as the ONLY way you will get an ounce of truth from this corrupt cabal is to steal it from them! If anybody actually believes this cover story I have some nice bridges you may be interested in. We have had NO PROOF since 2004 the man was alive except the CIA's word for it, that's it. ALL THE VIDEOS had just a voice over a still image and it was common knowledge the man had been treated for failing kidneys as early as late 99. anybody who has had relatives on dialysis will tell you they don't live that long thanks to how bad the machines damage the blood and they sure as hell ain't gonna last that long in the middle of bumfuck Pakistan with lack of state of the art medical facilities, I don't give a shit HOW much money they have!
The other posters are correct, what we are seeing here is an Emmanuel Goldstein screwjob. The PTBs have decided they no longer need their "minute of hate" and know that they couldn't quit after building OBL up to be the bogey man, so they just so happen to kill the bogey man, who they dump at sea so there is no way in hell to do an autopsy or even check to see if there was/is a body at all. It is just too bloody convenient and after all the lies Wikileaks has exposed if anybody buys it they are blind deaf and dumb!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
First, this is one of the few times I am happy some has been killed. He deserved it.
2nd, I was at the Phillies game where everyone did the "U-S-A" chant. Very powerful moment. I'll never forget it.
3rd, screw politics. Bad guy is dead. Fin.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
As a "Lit Major" you'll make a great Java programmer.
I prefer perl personally.
In his double wide with a bottle of Maker's Mark.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
He was the leader of a major terrorist organization. Rather than antagonize them, treating the body with respect shows we're reasonable and encourages peace.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
cavreader? Lundse seems to have ably answered your last post.
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
Have you ever seen them in the same room together? HMMM? I thought not. Plus his name is just a bad Westernized version of his original Arabic name, Ubuntu bin Linux.
Is that supposed to be an argument that the drug related sentences are too harsh, or the violent/dangerous offender related sentences are too lax? To my mind, it is the latter.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You have a different view of law than most people. If no one is ever prosecuted or threatened with prosecution, then it isn't illegal. Even the courts agree (one reason sodomy laws sat on the books for so long is that nobody anywhere actually enforced them, thus, according to legal doctrine in the US, it wasn't "illegal" in a manner that could be challenged in court). The US even has similar things in place, where an Executive Order allowing it would have had the force of law. You can't violate someone's sovereignty with a brief operation executed with permission and oversight. Well, unless you are an ultra-national (in the derogatory sense) where you think every treaty ratified in accordance with the Constitution is a violation of US sovereignty, as well as all those evil diplomats in the US on "foreign soil" and with evil diplomatic immunity.
Learn to love Alaska
Obama certainly lost all standing with his Muslim brothers. I wouldn't want to be him. Talk about painting a big target on your own back. This actually took guts. He won't be visiting any Arab or Muslim countries any time soon.
I actually would like to send a shout out to President Obama. Good Job!!!
wake up and hold your nose
There is a common theme to some comments made about terrorism and the situation in the middle east which I would like to examine.
Lets take two scenarios.
Scenario I - A man craftily and with active malice orchestrates the simultaneous hijacking of four planes and then has three of them successfully crash into highly symbolic targets and kills lots of civilians (about 3000 for those who care about numbers). This man then glories in these deaths and uses this attack to recruit and motivate more like minded individuals.
Scenario II - Small radicalized subgroups in a country attack another country and kill a few hundred people over a duration of years. The attacked country responds by sending in military and bombing suspected locations where the radicalized subgroup is harbored and over the process of a few years kills thousands of people and making the lives of 100s of thousands more miserable. Many of the thousands that die are not directly killed but die of disease, untreated wounds, and the general anarchy of the situation. Most of those thousands are not part of this radicalized subgroup and are civilians. But many of these civilians harbor deep antipathy towards the country that is attacking them even going as far as believing that it would be a moral good if the attacking country were to be removed from the face of the earth. The originally attacked country justifies their aggressive response by saying that it is the only way they know to deter radicalized subgroups from continuing their attacks against them and they have the right to defend themselves.
There are some who argue that the man in scenario I and the originally attacked country in scenario II are essentially equivalent in the moral weight of their wrongness of their actions and others who argue that they are fundamentally different. There are some who would argue those who suffered in scenario II are justified in participating in actions similar to scenario I.
I believe that scenario I is much more representative of true evil than scenario II even though the suffering in scenario II is greater and I see it as the difference that differentiates first degree murder in cold blood and other lesser forms of murder. Each ends up with people dying, but the first should get you put in prison for life, the second may only put you into jail for a few years. I am not saying that scenario II is not evil, but it is hard not to be sympathetic with those who are responding to aggression against themselves with their own aggression even if the response is of disproportionate magnitude greater than the provoking attack.
I will say one more thing about this. I have noticed that people's opinions about scenario II are very much dependent on their connections to and feelings about the people involved. The person in scenario I is pretty much universally despised.
Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan?
According to Bush, Iraq had nukes, so I certainly don't think it was out of the question for him to take that tack. Now, it would be stupid, but I certainly don't put it past him...
Umm... no. The rationale was that Saddam was trying to develop nukes, and that it was best to act before he succeeded.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Uh, sorry, but your figures of terrorism victims are way off:
ETA: have killed 820 since 1968, including 340 civilians.
IRA: have killed about 1800, with 1100 being from security forces.
September 11: killed nearly 3000 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
ALL THE VIDEOS had just a voice over a still image and it was common knowledge the man had been treated for failing kidneys as early as late 99. anybody who has had relatives on dialysis will tell you they don't live that long thanks to how bad the machines damage the blood and they sure as hell ain't gonna last that long in the middle of bumfuck Pakistan with lack of state of the art medical facilities, I don't give a shit HOW much money they have!
Hmmm? Where have I heard that before? Oh, that's right! My post you just replied-to! ;-)
;-)
But seriously, this whole thing makes about ZERO sense.
They were "worried" that his gravesite would become "a gathering place for terrorists"??? My feeling is that LET THEM come to the shrine, and then follow them. Is our "intelligence" REALLY that UN-intelligent? Of course not. So???
Also, I just heard Gen. McCaffrey say on CNN that our Men In Black Helicopters, TF160, were in on this...
Second "Oh-oh". (First was that whole "Burial at Sea" schtick).
And please: OUR intelligence assets don't have Pakistani Military Training bases under constant surveillance? His "villa" was 100 METERS away?!? That's essentially "on-base".
"Duh, I wonder what this three-story villa with the seven-foot-high fence and all the Mercedes-es going in and out is all about? Maybe someone important (and rich!) lives there"
Please.
Nope. IMHO, OBL died in 2004 or 2005 of complications secondary to his renal failure and the Dialysis used to treat it. This is all some sort of sick dog-and-pony show.
The REAL question is "Why?" Why would the U.S. government risk Martyring OBL, thus painting a giant-sized bullseye on the entire U.S.? Even the most brain-dead, gung-ho, jar-head, military-type should have heard the maxims "You can't kill a Martyr.", and "One Dead Martyr is worth Ten Posturing Leaders."
And now our government has converted OBL into ODM...
So, again, "Why?"
Cui Bono?
On a utterly unrelated note, I guess from your email addy that you are a bass player too? Guess all great bass players think alike, eh?
Images don't mean proof nowadays. Been on the Internet lately? Many can photoshop to the point even pixel by pixel comparison leads to 50% probability.
The technology today can create 98% accurate reality, that's why social medium has taken off: we need *trust* to filter the cruft.
Images are just that, data, you still need interpretation and trust to make it into information. And then you need opinion and analysis to figure out if it's proof. If we can't trust our President, why don't we just shut it all down today. Conspiracy theorists will apply, but if they are right, in due time they will have their day--otherwise it's another just egos clashing.
Just sayin'.
Maybe you're right about the USA, nothing lasts forever. It's been a hell of a ride though and it ain't quite over yet. I've heard the suicide thing before but I'm not so sure they didn't have help. It hardly matters though. No one really misses his ass any more than Bin Laden and Sad Hussein. Truly it's not an eye for an eye as he can never repay for all his evil. As I said I don't feel happiness over this, just satisfaction that at last the evil son of a bitch is dead.
What's wrong with Guns and Bud Light?
Glad at least someone thought so. I'm sure I got downmodded because of my comment about Israel, but it's a hard truth about the world. We meddle in the affairs of foreign nations both by undermining ones we don't like and supporting ones we do--the enemies of the states we support in turn see us as attacking them by proxy. To ignore the fact that our support of Israel has drawn much fire from the Islamic world would be foolish; and it's all because the dominant religion in this country sees the existence of Israel as necessary for their doomsday cult to reach its conclusion.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Who said Pakistan "never" prosecutes incursions into their territory?
I'm just saying that if Pakistan's government willingly looked the other way when a US special ops team slipped into their country, it doesn't make the ops team's actions legal. The special ops team has no right to apprehend someone under those circumstances, and the target of the operation is in their full rights to use force to defend themselves against being kidnapped - even if they are guilty of a crime.
A suspect is only obligated to surrender to the police or an equivalent government-sanctioned force, not to any vigilante who knocks on their door.
All of this could be academical if it turns out the USA intended to assassinate Bin Laden from the start, as some sources claim.
True - the big players, like China and the USA, are often able to ignore international laws, even the ones they agreed to follow, and get away with it. I was just pointing out the error in believing that everything was fine and legal with the killing of Bin Laden.
Ah, I missed that :)
Far from being "over with", it's put the actual mastermind being all of Al Queda's evil in charge of the organization.
If he could "put out messages", there's a bloody huge security hole. Unless you imagine he was psychic. Finding the security holes within the military would have saved more lives in the long-run.
Sure it would inspire anger. So does killing him. However, capturing him forces the anger to be rash and without forethought, giving us the advantage. Killing him gives those seeking revenge the time needed to plot something far more deadly. That gives them the advantage.
"Book Of Five Rings" states quite clearly that you should ALWAYS keep your foes off-balance.
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)
I'm just saying that if Pakistan's government willingly looked the other way when a US special ops team slipped into their country, it doesn't make the ops team's actions legal.
And I'm saying it does. If the people that make and enforce the laws give you permission to do something, it's legal.
I'm also asserting that anyone who uses the word "sovereignty" is a nutcase that should just join a militia and move to the middle of nowhere. There is not any violation of sovereignty to perform a military operation with permission. And those that discuss sovereignty are almost always anti-UN anti-treaty nuts who would prefer Hitler win WWII than the US get involved.
Learn to love Alaska
Yep been playing Fender P Basses since I was 14, 4 and 5 string (although I got a really sweet JP90, Jazz neck on a P body, real punchy tone) because you just can't go wrong with the Fender P bass. Its a classic for a reason!
But what is frankly amazing me is how NOBODY is calling bullshit? Nobody at all? Man I knew the media was corrupted but...damn. Hell if they would have had this media in 72 we'd still be in Vietnam! Nobody questions the whole burial at sea bit (and I'm with you, wouldn't you WANT the terrorists to gather in a nice easy to photograph and monitor spot? Hell it is what the Europeans do with Nazi shrines!) and nobody is even asking for a single picture to prove the man was even found. Seriously WTF is going on here? We have what possibly may be a trillion dollar coverup and not one single reporter has the balls to say so? What has become of this country?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Bin Laden was self funded and organized funding from wealthy arabs in the gulf states. He did this because the Mujahadeen didn't care for him. He is only lumped into the same sentence as the mujahadeen because the definition of it includes him and his actrions. However, the mujahadeen was not an organized force so to say, it was more of a collection of common groups fighting for a common cause. Bin laden's role in the mujahadeen was primarily recruiting and financing. The US did not train and fund him.
Did you forget a mirror was in front of you again? PLease don't get upset at the image mocking your movements and break it again.
Nope, you're wrong. This is justice.
Law is a means to an end. It enforces order first, and morality second.
Illegal justice is justice nevertheless.
I started out playing piano at age 6 (boy, do I wish I'd kept THAT up!), then guitar at age 13, and bass at 16. At this point, though, I don't play anything on a regular basis. Sigh...
And, as far as bass goes, I cut my teeth on Prog Rock, where the Rick was undisputed king. Unfortunately, I was cursed with stubby little fingers on equally ham-fisted bear-paws (I swear there were actually two paths of human evolution; one simian and the other ursine!); so long-scale basses with wide necks are simply not compatible with my body-style.
Of course, that didn't stop me from buying a beautiful white 1980 Rick 4001, which I can only play for about 45 minutes before my hand starts to cramp, or to continuously covet six string basses, LOL!
Yeah, this whole thing is best illustrated (literally) by a graphic a friend of mine sent me this morning, when I rhetorically asked him "Why does that make me suspicious?" in an email regarding the "burial at sea". The graphic depicted a sheep sitting in his sheep-living-room, watching CNN on his sheep-TV, which was "anchored" by two MORE sheep. The caption of the picture, which was supposedly the commentary on the TV, read "Osama Bin Laden was found but he resisted capture and had to be shot in the head. Then his body had to be rushed out to sea and buried within 24 hours due to Islamic traditions. Osama Bin Laden was found but he resisted capture and had to be shot in the head. Then his body had to be rushed out to sea and buried within 24 hours due to Islamic traditions. Osama Bin Laden was found but he resisted capture and had to be shot in the head..."
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
Hah! You dolt. "acts of remembrance"! What kind of confusion of ideas led you to this conclusion? Burning someone's body in effigy is an "act of remembrance"? You utter ninny. If (or when) Americans start parading Bin Laden through their streets and burning him in effigy, will you try and convince us all that his "martyrdom" rallied them to his cause? HAH!
If they collapsed under the weight of the upper section, they would not have fallen as quickly as they did. There are too many holes in the official story and I'm yet to be satisfied.
I don't therefore I'm not.
I don't know how stupid fuck is, but I think you's have to be more than a little thick to buy any of the shit that comes out of the US administration.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Indeed, i heard no mention of a bomb in any of the referenced videos.
/planning/ the operation a week ago - in combination with the d.n.a. verification delay. (In fact, if you watch the bbc(?) Assange interview, also posted here sometime today, the newsline footer says it happened a week ago, too.)
.. Not to say i'm certain of anything, in the natural world, but it helps to take /some/ things on trust, if you want to sleep at night. Let's agree to attack the credibility of the news-media-military-industrial complex, on better grounds, next week .. when the smoke has cleared a bit.
As far as the "week ago" part, I'd put it down to journalistic error, based on the mention of
But then, my conspiracy-theorist credentials/credibility are rather weak (i even presume the moon landing actually happened!)
AQ has shown a fetish long after 9/11 of trying to work terrorism through planes
Can you back this up?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I never claimed we were fighting AQ in Iraq before Saddam fell, if you re-read my post. You obviously came with a talking point to spread, not to add to the discussion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can you back this up?
Come on dude.
Underwear, shoe, package.
Ring any bells?
Repeatedly over the years since 9/11 there have been actual attacks plus dry runs at attacking air travel, despite it being something of a stupid target at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of the terrorist that were actually stopped, it was done by passengers!
Proving my point that air travel is the right focus for prevention of terrorism, since more actions have been stopped there than on land in the U.S..
The right technique may very well just be to let passengers take care of things themselves. If you enhance that ability then that may be all you need.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden
True.
Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region
Not true.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
USA took longer to find Bin Laden than they took to put a man on the moon...
Possibly true, but the moons not dead yet...
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Wow... you need to step back in that time machine and head back to the 50's there bud...
Stone
True, the US government can often do what they damn well please, since they have by far the largest military budget in the world.
But don't think we haven't noticed how that budget is putting your government deeper and deeper into debt, and the day when you will be denied new loans is getting closer and closer.
How are you going to pay your army then? Declare a state of emergency and let the state take over the industries (i.e, turn socialist)? That's the path Nazi Germany went down, and we know what happened to them.
No, that would mean someone could just bribe the government into looking the other way, and it would suddenly become legal. For example, a corporation could bribe the government of an African nation to look the other way while they dump their toxic waste, but that doesn't make it legal. Or the government could choose to look the other way while someone rigs the election to their benefit, but that doesn't make it legal.
The government is put in power by the people to act on their behalf. The laws act as instructions for the government. When the government breaks the law, they're acting without the people's consent.
There is not any violation of sovereignty to perform a military operation with permission.
Well, if the Pakistani government gave their permission, perhaps we can't criticise the US military for going there, even if it was against Pakistani law. After all, it's the local government's responsibility to enforce their own laws.
But neither can we blame a suspect for defending himself when a special ops team, without legal authority in the country, suddenly shows up outside his door and tries to take him away. If the special ops team kills the suspect when he defends himself, it's manslaughter or worse.
So far, we know too little. We don't know what permission, if any, the Pakistani government gave, we don't know if the special ops team went there with the intention to kill or to capture Bin Laden, and we don't know if they identified themselves or just snuck into the building and started shooting. Perhaps we will never know for sure.
In the case of Bin Laden, most people don't care about due process. But I'm worried about what the US government will do next. What if they go after people like Assange? Leading American politicians have seriously suggested assassinating foreign citizens. What's next - threatening to kill anyone who blows the whistle on places like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Will I be put on the list if I donate money to Wikileaks?
In the case of Bin Laden, most people don't care about due process. But I'm worried about what the US government will do next.
Next? Next? Haven't you been following the news for the last 40 years? This isn't the first step on a slippery slope, it's just another action consistent with what's gone before and will come later.
Learn to love Alaska
Mock all you like, you and all the other Atlantean Lizards will be unmasked one day and your nefarious schemes laid open for all to see.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They said a corpse was wrapped in a white sheet and dumped unceremoniously into the ocean, or sea, or other body of salt water. Wonderful. No body or gravesite to bring mourners and followers. I believe that burial at sea is a wonderful idea.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Your clarification could use some corrections as well. AQ (terrorists herein described as AQ for purposes of simplification) was in Iraq for a time. The tide turned in the surge mainly due to the actions of the local militias. Granted, we bribed and strong-armed them onto action, but mainly they were getting really sick of the foreigners destroying their lives and afraid of the kind of indiscriminate killing that our surge numbers would produce. They drove out and killed most of the foreigners because they can tell the difference and we largely can't. Now they're having a quiet civil war that is just barely kept in check by our presence. The populace wants us out so they can move on with winning or losing and the politicians we've backed want us to stay so they don't get slaughtered by the next strong-man to emerge when we leave. What we can claim to have done is initiate a war based on false pretenses that attracted AQ there. Once there, we attacked terrorists and anyone else with a weapon in-hand. In the process, over a million locals have been killed (not just Iraqis, because a significant minority were foreigners) and the society has been pretty much turned inside-out. Hardly anyone would say that Iraq is more stable and less friendly to terrorism than before we invaded.
Afghanistan has hardly been a more successful campaign. It's now the number one opium growing region in the world. We and our proxies are in active negotiation to re-establish the Taliban as part of the power bloc controlling the region so that we may leave without looking like the cause of another civil war there, which will almost inevitably lead to regional powers that are friendly to AQ. I say region, because Afghanistan cannot properly be called a country in the way we think of it. It's a conglomeration of tribes that share some allegiance to regional authorities which sometimes broker relations with the outside world. We treat it as a state because we had to attack it and on a political level we have no understanding of a non-state entity.
Finally: Iran now has more influence over both of their neighbors than before. We did kill Bin Laden and a bunch of other terrorists. It has so far cost the lives of over 7,000 U.S. soldiers, 32,000 U.S. wounded, probably a million+ civilians and over a trillion dollars.
You mentioned that the airport security response is in the right direction, but largely bungled. I would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same scenario. Response in the right direction but costing so many lives and dollars at a scale so large that we just don't comprehend the tragedy. Yes, we should attack and kill terrorists. We should support democracy over tyranny. The reality is that we support tyranny because it's easier to deal with one client than a few million who are not as easily bought-off. If we stop supporting dictators, a lot of the fuel for the fire of terrorism will be removed and we won't have to go to war in the process.
It could well turn out to be the biggest example of unintended consequences ever.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Point taken.
Tell me a situation where "hate" is a rational and appropriate way to respond.
If someone has made themselves a worthy target of hatred, then it is right to hate them.
You say all those other terms aren't "hate" - I say they're merely window-dressing, a veneer of misguided faux-civility over one's true feelings. Hence, I maintain my argument that everybody hates something or someone, therefore we are all "haters" and the term is meaningless.
It is possible to have both emotion and intellect, but the more you have of one, the less you will have of the other. ...
The brain cannot handle hate and thinking at the same time.
Since when?
Bow-ties are cool.