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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.
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!
AMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERICA fuck yeah! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
Do you think that just by killing bin laden Al Queda will just magically vanish?
One wonders if he was moving around pretty frequently, and this just happened to be where they caught up with him, or if a mansion outside the capital is actually a good-enough hiding spot. If the latter, he must have had the same sort of 'deep roots in the community' that have historically allowed organized crime leaders to live more or less openly for long periods of time...
Of course, that's how boss battles work, isn't it?
World War 2 ended when a prisoner escaping from some castle gunned down Cyborg-Hitler, after all.
rm -f /bin/laden
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
I think being attacked would in fact make recruiting easier. It's quite easy to demonize people who are killing your friends and relatives and fellow countrymen all around you. Why wouldn't these people hate the U.S. and want to fight back?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Bin Laden really shouldn't have used his real address on PSN
This space for rent.
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
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.
The difference is that drugs are big business. Wherever there's a fortune to be made, there will always be plenty of willing participants. But when you're looking at living in fear of drone strikes, with your leaders dying ever few months, recruiting gets harder.
If the Israeli experience of the last few decades hasn't shown you how ass-backwards this kind of thinking is, I don't think there's anything that will get it through your skull ....
Sorry? What exactly did Saddam and Iraq have to do with the 'War on Terror'? I mean, other than pissing off the fundamentalist Muslims even more than before.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move.
I could see it going either way. Bin Laden was a charismatic figure head of an ideology. Sometimes death creates a martyr, but more often in history it kills the movement. When it does create a martyr, it is because the movement is rising anyway, like when John Brown's death became a catalyst in the growing abolitionist movement. More often the cause dies quietly, like when Guy Fawkes failed to draw people to the cause of Catholicism.
In this case, it appears Middle Easterners have largely given up on the political ideas of Bin Laden, and instead have started turning towards democracy as a way out of their problems. It's hard to know public opinion for sure in that region, but there have been many uprisings of people demanding democracy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No they need Obama Skull fucking his dead corpse. That would send a message.
Yeah, because if people in the USA saw some Al Qaida member skull fucking the corpse of someone in our military (or even a political leader), we'd get the message that they are bad-asses and concede the war and back down immediately.
Abbottabad is about 50 km north of Islamabad, and 150 km east of Peshawar. It's also the location for a number of major military establishments. Which, of course, raises a whole lot of very interesting questions about the Pakistani government's knowledge of, and possible complicity in, his holing up there.
If we heard that a United States General had been captured, crucified, and fed to rats, would that soothe the average American or aggravate him? Would he be more or less likely to support violent retribution or volunteer to fight?
Trumpeting a triumph in victory against our foes is all well and good, but purposeful desecration of the body? We're better than that. A slap in the face against deeply conditioned religious beliefs? I would hope we're smarter than that.
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.
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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