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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
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?
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!
The prez just won his second term
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
AMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERICA fuck yeah! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
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".
No, our kids are eating lead...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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
rm -f /bin/laden
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)
My last day of work at the World Trade Center was September 10, 2001. I remember turning around, looking at a lone guitarist playing near that fountain with the Globe sculpture, it was a beautiful Monday night, around 9 pm. I had worked late, so I was going to show up late to work on Tuesday. I woke up to my phone ringing off the hook. I lost my job, but compared to what others lost, I lost nothing.
The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American. Bin Laden hated us all, just because we were American. So please, no political games here. This isn't about left and right, this is about a cowardly attack on all of us, as Americans. As a hardcore liberal, I embrace my fellow Americans who are conservative on this good news for us all.
Come together, as Americans, left and right, lose the useless political snark and sniping, and celebrate this asshole's death. Good fucking riddance.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Just think if we had done that from the start. Bin Laden still dead, without wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq.
"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.
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.
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
You really think America is in any perceptible less danger than it was before (not that it was in much danger before)? I don't presume to know the reason they were, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were hardly waged to keep America safe.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Bin Laden really shouldn't have used his real address on PSN
This space for rent.
Right? RIGHT?!
Oh.
Right.
FML
Yes, it is over in exactly the same sense that the Cold War was over .... when Lenin died.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
long after most Americans have forgotten why we went to war in the first place.
Pretty funny that you should talk about "forgetting", because then you say:
And of course we had to forget that most 9/11 hijackers were Saudis
Well you seem to have forgotten is that they were mostly Saudis - trained in Afghanistan, by Al Quidea.
Since that was where AQ was based, where the terrorists were trained, that was in fact the single best place to start in striking back and reducing the threat. I mean, here you seem to imply we should have attacked Saudi Arabia, even though there government there did not condone the terrorism. For a long time after we invaded Iraq there were cries in fact that we should ONLY be in Afghanistan. But you seem to have forgotten that too.
You seem to have forgotten we are not fighting the people of Afghanistan but AQ who has people based there, just as in Iraq for a time we were not fighting many Iraqis any more, but instead a coalition of AQ fighters from all over - including Syria and Saudi Arabia again.
Indeed your message about not forgetting is an important one, which is why I felt it necessary to provide historical fact over re-written sentiment.
Fighting terrorism now means having a TSA agent fondle you or getting photographed naked.
I hate the new rules too and think they are silly.
But to be fair, AQ has shown a fetish long after 9/11 of trying to work terrorism through planes, and so that is where the focus has been on protection. It's a matter of finding what is reasonable and what actually works, something I think they are a long way from yet. It's the right focus but totally the wrong technique.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
More coverage at ABC News, at CNN, and at Al Jazeera. The reports say that Bin Laden was actually killed about a week ago by a bomb in Pakistan, and the time taken to confirm his identity via DNA testing helped delay the news. In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
That's from the summary. NONE of the three sources state that, and none of the sources I read have said anything like that. I'm not going to jump to conclusions and say he was killed by a bomb in Pakistan a week ago, when the President said he was killed in a ground operation. He was likely killed by American rifles, whether face-to-face or initially from a distance.
While Osama has been hard to track down, lower echolon leaders have been killed left and right. Didn't change a thing. Partly because the US managed to always find a way to kill a lot of civilians (by accident they claim) to fuel new hatred.
Thinking the death of Bin Laden will change anything is like thinking the death of Roosevelt in 1945 meant the end of WW2. (For those lacking in history, it didn't).
The world has changed massively after 9/11 but it also has continued to change. Take the current unrest in North Africa and the middle east. Ghaddafi (however you spell it) went from terrorist leader to friend to target in less then a decade. Now there are calls from the left to watch the bombings in Libya but ALSO to interfere in Syria... wtf? I am sure Israel is wondering just what the hell is going to happen next. Do you think it is an accident Hamas is changing its tune now its allies are burning from within?
If anything this shows how silly the idea of control is in the world. Bin Laden became a symbol but had little control. He achieved next to nothing. The uprising against the oppressors in muslim nations is instead against both religious AND secular leaders (Syria is secular, its Iranian ally is strongly religious) and the uprisings are both religious and secular. About the only prediction that stands is that nobody predicted any of this.
What will happen now Bin Laden is death? A symbol is dead but the things that made him a symbol are not. There is severe dissatisfaction in the world and people seem more ready then ever to use violence to made their dissatisfaction known. You might hail this is a fight for freedom or extremists wanting to force their view on the rest of the world, but the fact remains that right now more struggles are happening then in a long time in history.
A leader of a decade ago is dead, few will mourn him but he is a relic. There are new struggles to overcome. Iraq is still a mess, Afghanistan is a war zone. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. North Korea is facing collapse and won't go queitly, Libya is in civil war. Syria is about to erupt in war. The list goes on and on. Wikileaks Assange has disappeared of the radar of news but that is still far from finished.
No, I don't think we can breath a sigh of relieve just yet.
And that in a way is a good thing. The world has NEVER been a safe place. Better we are aware of it not being safe and work to make it safe even if we make mistakes then to live in false security.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education kinda rolls the clock back a few centuries.
Looks like he gave plenty of credit where it was due, and being Commander-in-chief. It WAS his call.
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.
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
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."
"They intend to change our values and way of life". Well, they have. Mission Accomplished indeed.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing at all.
The real question is why did you wait nearly a decade to question this?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Look, for once could we let the partisan crap go? A bad guy is dead. That's cause for celebration. It's not an invitation for every partisan whackjob to whip out his pecker and start pissing all over everything.
We all know the drunk uncle who has to be invited to the wedding, but who can be counted upon to leave the reception cuffed in a squadcar. For today, could you try not to be him?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1) In war, the same rules don't apply. There are rules, but they are different. For the "world rules of war" you can see the Geneva Conventions, though that doesn't cover everything and indeed fighters like bin Laden that do not wear a uniform and attempt to disguise themselves as civilians aren't covered by many of the protections. For more specific US rules you can see the Rules of Engagement. Regardless, wartime rules are different than peacetime rules. You don't have to agree with that idea, but you can't very well claim it isn't how it works, it has been that way in every nation for basically all of history and is codified in national and international law.
2) To get your chance at a fair trial, you have to not shoot the people that come to get you. Apparently there was a firefight and it was one that bin Laden and his people lost. You shoot at troops, or at police, they'll shoot back. They take the Malcom Renoylds advice to heart: "Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back!" This is true in the civilian/police world as well. If the police come to arrest you for a crime and you and your body guards open fire on them, they'll fire back. They'll then bring in more heavily armed police, and if you keep shooting, they'll eventually kill you. You want your fair trial you need to surrender.
You'll notice that Saddam Hussein did surrender to US forces when found and he was brought in alive. He was either unarmed or threw down his weapons and surrendered. Per the rules of war, he was then captured and not killed. He got his trial, which of course did not end well for him.
You can't honestly say that US troops should have just sat there, gotten shot, and not shot back can you? You really think that they could or should be given the order "Go in and capture everyone alive, no matter what. Doesn't matter how many of you die, no lethal force, just keep going in until they run out of bullets and you can take them alive." Hell no, if they got fired on, they had a right to fire back and the idea that you can shoot someone to knock the gun out of their hand is pure action movie BS. You shoot to kill.
I think the audio tapes were more because he had a close call due to video, and the US was dumb enough to talk about it on TV. I can't find a link to it but there was a new segment where they were talking about all the things they could glean from these video messages. My bet is bin Laden (or his security guy) said "Oh shit! So that's how they've come so close! No more video then, audio only."
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings alone took 150k-246k (mostly civilian) lives.
But this is a lost battle for me, so believe what you want to believe. Just the fact people need to discuss who kills more innocents should be enough to show neither side has much regard for human life.
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.
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
I'm not sure "choice" is a fair word to use.
In a perfect world, sure, I'm certain that the US gov't would have preferred to grab him alive, milk him dry for intel, and then have him found guilty in a trial and executed.
However:
- his capture would simply have resulted in an uncountable number of abductions of US citizens, mostly innocents, in an effort to trade them for his release. How would YOU like to have been the American president faced with telling Mr and Mrs Smith that their little Johnny or Joanna was just BEHEADED on Al-Jazeera when you could have traded this single, nearly-irrelevant, stinky old man for them?
- further, his capture would have opened up a whole new round of deep hand-wringing about how we 'dare' treat him. Could we dare make him uncomfortable, or would that be "inhumane"? Is forcing him to hear Backstreet Boyz for 24 hours a day cruel and/unusual?
- his trial would quite likely have been a mockery of grandstanding and posturing - offering him a world stage he's been too afraid to step up to for the last 10 years.
- finally, in reality, what are the odds that he really was going to EVER be captured? He was not a luxury-loving sybarite like Saddam Hussein, whose narcissism made it likely that - at the end - he wouldn't take himself out. Osama was a different creature, having fought in his 20s with the mujahedeen, and having walked AWAY from wealth and luxury in favor of hardship in pursuit of a 'cause'. Seriously, what is the real likelihood that he could have been so totally surprised and immobilized in less than the 0.5 seconds it would have taken him to put a bullet through the roof of his own mouth?
As I mentioned above, organizationally he's probably largely irrelevant; but symbols matter - and his extinction lends credibility to the near-magical capabilities of American intel-gathering amongst the Al-Qaeda faithful, as well as a useful air of implacability to the resolution of the US gov't, even across administrations.
So no, I doubt it was a "choice" by anyone, except OBL himself. Good riddance to him.
-Styopa
Ok, here's the problem. Let's say that there actually was a successful raid which led to the killing of bin Laden.
First, the body was buried at sea, according to the US military, which means there's no proof he's actually dead. In other words, he's going to turn into the Elvis of Islamic terrorism. Either there is a conspiracy, and he's not dead, or conspiracy theorists will claim that he's still alive somewhere. We live in a world where (some) people believe that the President of the United States forged his own birth certificate with the collusion of the state of Hawaii; you think a 19-year-old terrorist recruit in Whatthefuckistan is gonna just take the word of the United States government that the leader of Al Qaeda was buried at sea?
Second, I guarantee that within two days a new bin Laden tape will be released. The guy had less value as a strategist than he did as a symbol, and I'll bet that there are pre-recorded tapes yet unreleased, and that there will be audio tapes with a "voice purported to be Osama bin Laden". Probably talking up Ayman al-Zawahiri as the operational leader of AQ.
Third, while there is potent symbolism for the West in killing bin Laden, keep in mind that he headed an organization which advocated suicide bombing as a tactic. Bin Laden's death is going to make him a martyr in the world of radical Islamic terror. While there may not be a single figure that can replace him right now, there are plenty of other affiliated groups, with plenty of other members, and a successful attack can be planned and carried out by an uncharismatic moron just as easily. For that matter, an unsuccessful attack can have a significant impact, too. Ask Richard Reed.
Fourth, to the West, this looks like the USA is still the baddest motherfucker around, and we always get our man. To people who live in Pakistan, the Middle East, and other, non-Western places, this looks like the only superpower in the world spent ten years and billions of dollars to kill one guy who pissed it off, in a campaign culminating in the use of clandestine intelligence and spec ops, in someone else's country. How's that for international diplomacy?
I'm not saying I'm sad the guy's dead, because I'm not. I think it's great. I just wish he'd gotten hit by a truck, or ate some bad dates or something. I have a strong feeling that this is not going to make our lives any easier.
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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).
Who precisely are we supposed to declare war on? You declare wars on countries. Even when it was running Afghanistan, the Taliban wasn't even running the whole country and it had almost no recognition anywhere.
Declarations of war are courtesies between nation-states who maintain diplomatic relations and who actually attempt to negotiate with one another in good faith. For terrorist groups, you either ask the country that they are sheltering in to get them, or you ask permission to get them yourselves, if they can't pull it off. If there is no government, you just go and get them.
The OP point is still valid. These guys don't wear uniforms. If there was a government that could handle actual law enforcement, we probably would ask Afghan law enforcement to arrest them and turn them over. As it stands, the very idea of that is currently a bad joke and will be until we secure the country and the Afghans figure out how to not be corrupt and borderline useless in running their own country.
Killing civilians is a terrible thing, but the reason that they are dying is the one of the reasons that terrorists are so awful, even to their own people. Uniforms are worn so that the enemy knows who is fighting them, and who is not. If they did wear uniforms, and acted in an manner that followed various conventions and laws of war, they would probably be treated better when captured, and fewer of their own civilians would be killed.
Of course saying that the killed civilians are "their" civilians isn't even true. The terrorists don't care about anyone outside their own group. Their neighbors are just human meat shields for them. If those same meat shields were not ignorant of the Taliban or al Queda's true nature, they probably wouldn't have the sympathy for the terrorist groups that they do. In the end, there are probably more people alive today, despite the collateral damage, than there would be if people like the Taliban were allowed to keep running their own little patch of Hell. Neighbors are much more efficient at killing civilians than any military. Just look at some of the places we haven't launched Hellfire missiles in, like Sudan or Rwanda.