Slashdot Mirror
Man Unknowingly Tweets the Osama Raid
Sohaib Athar, a.k.a. @ReallyVirtual, had no idea the helicopters he was complaining about on twitter were part of the top secret mission that killed Osama bin Laden Sunday night. 10 hours before bin Laden's death was announced Athar posted: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” From the article: "During the raid, Athar speculates that he was two or three kilometers away from the shooting that took place. Once news broke that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Athar tweeted, 'Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.'”
This is good to know. Otherwise his tweet might have ended up on some conspiracy theorist sites with a "black helicopters" tag or something...
A very interesting point is that it is said one of the 4 choppers was hit by enemy fire which I haven't heard about yet. President Obama said "no Americans were injured" so I would assume it was only a minor hit.
On another topic, CNN just announced a few minutes ago that there is a DNA match confirming the body was indeed Osama. They also announced that the FBI has updated its most wanted list, it makes sense I guess...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
http://twitter.com/#!/ReallyVirtual/status/64783440226168832
This is indeed a WTF story. If it's a joke story, the sarcasm should've been made more obvious in the summary. Far too lazy to RTFA for this idleness.
Directly contradict how? The man says a helicopter, a big bang. How does that contradict anything?
Here's the Google Maps satellite photo of Abbottabad, Pakistan. I can't find his compound. Can you?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Abbottabad&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=29.854268,56.513672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&ll=34.146769,73.209769&spn=0.0019,0.005493&t=h&z=18
Now we not only have MS shills, Apple shills, GOATSE shills, but also Fox news shills. When will it all end.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
But why would they take the body, promptly bury it at sea, then tell the world? I understand that they would want to minimize the impact in the islamic world by not defiling his body in any way which was recorded, but it seems like this would be something you show on television, that it's REALLY him. Who knows, maybe they made a deal with him and he's now in South America to live out his days in (even more) luxury. But that's the George Noory in me.
And I'm also quite mystified why so many people are celebrating this. It took almost 10 years, trillions of dollars, the invasion of two countries (neither of which he was found in), and an untold number of lives lost to find a 6 foot 6 inch multi-millionaire (with diabetes!) living in a private luxury compound (in a well populated city) which was at least eight times larger then anything nearby. I don't think there is too much to celebrate here.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I thought I read somewhere that Osama was killed a week ago, not on Sunday. They were waiting for official confirmation before releasing the information that he was killed....
Did I mis-read? Was I mis-informed?
Or is this tweet mis-matched to the event?
Osama had an iPhone and it kept track of his location. Good job, Steve!
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
No, you've heard wrong. The raid was yesterday.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I read about this dude, he's on vacation, "trying to get away from it all" and after all this breaks he's complaining that he can't get away from it all.
Dude, your problem is your idea of "getting away from it all" is warped, in that you're twittering every 30 minutes when you see a F-ing airplane. Give your cellphone a burial at sea, then chill on a lawn chair (they have those in pakistan, right?) with a religiously appropriate mood enhancing substance and enjoy the solitude.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, Osama's compound had no internet, anyways, so it's not like he could have gotten any early warning.
I'm sure there are plenty of creationists out there that will try to refute the big bang part.
/. is the official home of the conspiracy theory... I'm sure plenty of them feel this isn't real anyhow.
/. is the official home of the conspiracy theory
That's just what they want you to think...
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
When someone posts a pic of the goatee guy's anus transparencied out and there's Glenn Beck with an iPad playing on a kinect.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Remember that the 24-hour news channels rarely fact-check anything, preferring instead to report "breaking news". This has the nasty side-effect of turning hearsay into well-reported "facts", which then stick around and confuse people.
Of course. But that has nothing to do with my question, which is about the border of Pakistan and which bordering country OBL was closest to. Do you have knowledge of that? Or did you just want to post a conjecture about how narrow minded you think I am?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
To have him buried (as in "in the ground") - and then cover the entire area with cameras to monitor who comes to "revere him"?
Maybe even arrest some of them?
I mean... the entire thing sounds like something out of Pulp Fiction.
Best trained special forces in the world infiltrate a foreign country to get one sick old guy they haven't been able to catch for... what... 13 years?
In the process they manage to crash a helicopter. Or they've failed to maintain it properly so it crashed due to mechanical failure. Can't really say which option is more embarrassing.
Then these super-soldiers fail to capture him and instead shoot him in the head - so there goes visual identification.
So, a helicopter short, they haul his ass on foot, extract him back to their ship, supposedly identify him by his DNA - and then they dump the body overboard.
Cause, you know... that is supposed to be according to Muslim beliefs and so his followers wouldn't have a grave-site to visit and pay their respects.
I suppose they also had an imam on board, so it would be a proper Muslim burial?
I mean... they were obviously paying more attention to his religious beliefs than capturing the man they've spent billions of dollars chasing - for over a decade.
I'm not saying that it was all some conspiracy and that the whole thing was staged or something, but they are REALLY stretching the limits of "what can be adequately explained by incompetence" there.
All they managed to do is simply make him an even shadier figure now - by destroying evidence of his death.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Are you serious are is this a joke?
Last I read a DNA test took at least three days to complete. Amazing they were able to pull it off in just a few hours of dumping the body. And what DNA did they compare it too, btw?
:T:R:A:N:S:
He needs to put his hands pierced in the side of the long form before hewill believe.
I wonder why the most wanted man in the world didn't have an escape tunnel? And decided instead to go down fighting after hiding out for ten years.
:T:R:A:N:S:
It's not like it matters...
They have a new bogeyman...and he is the people.
I'm pretty darn serious about it. Look deeper. Just a week or so ago Panetta f was named for Secretary of Defense, and Petraeus to the CIA......
They say timing is everything. It is funny that we held Saddam's sons bodies for 11 days, but decided to bury OBL at sea withing 24 hours, even though he is/was the highest priority target we had...
You do know I assume that there's a meta-conspiracy to take out conspiracy theorists just because they're so damned annoying.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No, you should be expected to:
A: learn to read
B: learn about time zones
C: learn how to take multiple witness account and correlate them together
D: understand that you're not the sharpest tool in the shed
Those tweets are not the only first hand witness accounts of the action taking place. Everything that I've read supports the US government version of events pretty closely. The differences only help to support the story. I mean, if everyone gave out the identical same version of events, I'd be very suspicious!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
They say timing is everything. It is funny that we held Saddam's sons bodies for 11 days, but decided to bury OBL at sea withing 24 hours, even though he is/was the highest priority target we had...
Actually, it's not. You're not thinking very hard if you can't think of at least two very good reasons why we wouldn't want to hang on to the body that long, or why these two situations are very different from each other (I hang on to old cheese for months, but that isn't relevant here, either).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Um, how in the world is an IT guy making a Star Trek reference surprising? Why would an educated Arab making a comment referencing one of the most famous Arab poets (Kahlil Gibran) be surprising? (I've read through 'The Prophet', it's a poetry book that has as much to do with Muslim extremism as Shakespeare). I think you might need to take the aluminium hat off and/or come out from under the bridge and relax a little bit.
Surely, in the big scheme of things, Osama's death really doesn't matter that much. Don't take the mediatainment as seriously as it thinks you should.
Create the crypt but put a high intensity gamma source in it.
*Adjusts tinfoil hat*
Chakotay --wikipedia-- "subsequently resigned from Starfleet and joined a rogue group known as the Maquis. During his time as a renegade fighter against the Cardassians, Chakotay inducted into his Maquis cell the half-Klingon woman B'Elanna Torres who became his chief engineer. He also invited a Bajoran named Seska and the two became involved in a romantic relationship for a time. However, unknown to Chakotay, Seska was actually a Cardassian spy who had been surgically altered to infiltrate the Maquis."
It means that everyone knows it was a cluster f**k, but if I can distract people long enough, I'll be dead and won't have to man up and admit it.
Osama was one of the few people who could mastermind the destruction of three towers with just two planes.
More on that...
NIST NCSTAR 1A: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
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
I recall reading during a previous trip to Wikipedia that the Israelis buried Adolf Eichmann at sea to keep supporters from having a grave/shrine for _him_
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yes, all official stories are true.
Because all conspiracy theories are true?
Asymmetric damage causes symmetric collapse of buildings. It happened three times in one day, it has to be the truth.
I once had an Industrial Arts instructor question my class on what would be a better situation if the building was on fire - that it was framed in wood, or steel. The correct answer is wood, since wood retains practically all of its structural strength until it is consumed by fire, unlike steel, which loses its strength very quickly when exposed to high temperature. So here we come to the heart of the issue - a Roman blacksmith from 2,000 years ago would make a more useful investigator of the building collapse than most "truthers" since he understands the fundamental fact that metals soften and can be reshaped when heated (by the blacksmith's hammer, or the weight of 10 building floors above) - no melting required. When the sprinkler system either doesn't come to the rescue, or is overwhelmed, it's over. For all of the fancy computers, the internet, and leadership of English majors and Philosophy professors, the "truthers" fail to grasp that simple fact. They are baffled by things a blacksmith knows. Because of this they are forced to invent ever more improbable and elaborate explanations that fail the common sense test - "the building was secretly rigged to implode"..... even though when done commercially it requires weeks of work by teams of people, drilling into the beams, stripping away insulation and structural materials, etc., etc. .... all unnoticed. Trapped by the absurdity of it, the escape routes range from magic thermite mixtures to space aliens. All of this, as part of a conspiracy that killed 3,000 Americans, has somehow been kept secret despite the fact that the US wasn't able to keep secret the waterboarding of a total of three people in 10 years without multiple leaks and widespread howls of outrage that the US bordered on being as bad as the worst criminal states ever, worse than even Germany which attempted genocide and killed millions. Ya, it must be "true". My guess is, whatever they're selling, you're buying.
Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
NIST NCSTAR 1A: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
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
(Did you read my post?) No, I'm thinking that whatever money was spent on the Iraq war, can't be counted toward the cost of killing Bin Laden. MonsterTrimble tried to make it sounds like trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden. I have heard a lot of whackjob conspiracy theories and I have heard some very plausible explanations for why the Iraq war happened, but so far nobody has suggested that Iraq was invaded as part of Bush's brilliant round-about way of gathering intell about Bin Laden's address or guard-changing schedule.
Just my luck, it'll turn out to be true. Next month we'll read a story that someone in Pakistan knew where Bin Laden was and was willing to cough up the info. But instead of settling for the half-million dollar reward, he said he'd only reveal the coordinates if the US government could make his dream come true of running a profitable ice cream store in Bagdad. But Saddam Hussein hated ice cream and would never let it happen. After much negotiating, Bush reluctantly agreed to invade Iraq.
Some turmoil followed, but was eventually sorted out. The informant was finally able to enter Iraq in 2005 and open the store, but the economy was shit and the store didn't make a profit. After filing Chapter 7 in 2008, the informant tried again and opened a yogurt store and it worked and he made it into a good business. Then in October 2010 he got an idea to use the success of this yogurt business to subsidize the building of a new ice cream campaign. At first it didn't work, but then in mid-April he was going over the 1st quarter 2011 results and realized he made a slight profit on ice cream itself if you ignored the start up costs, and his accountant explained that he had to, since those were written off in 4th quarter 2010. So he called the White House to make good on the deal, got the runaround since the person who answered the phone thought it was a prank call when he asked for President Bush, but it eventually got ironed out and he spoke to President Obama on April 23 and gave him Bin Laden's address. The hit squad sprang into action.
That's believable, but is it true? Maybe, maybe not. If it is, then MonsterTrimble's claim that trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden will be validated and everyone can say I'm a damn fool for arguing with him. But I submit to you that we don't really have any evidence that Saddam Hussein hated ice cream. So how do you explain that?!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It's not that it is silly to pay attention to religious conventions when any sane, intelligent and educated person knows that there is no such thing as god(s).
It's silly that they are supposedly adhering to religious conventions of someone they just shot in the head.
Someone whom they present as a reason for waging a war or two.
And it is even sillier if they actually prepared for such an occasion in advance by making sure that they have an imam on board, while apparently failing to bring along a skilled helicopter technician.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm replying to this because I'm out of mod points, and it's a legitimate point made here.
Quite telling, regarding their brainfarts. The modern theory of big bang was kick-started by a priest (also a mathematician and astronomer; though such hypothesis was also very convenient for somebody who dedicated large chunk of his life to Abrahamic mythology), no problems there... (likewise with evolution, even to a "truth cannot contradict truth" degree - if tl;dr, at least check 3 sentences starting with "How do the conclusions", 2 with "It is necessary to determine", and 3 with "Today, almost half")
Of course, for most of the creationists you are probably most likely to stumble upon, they are not even protestant generally speaking, they just like calling themselves like that (just because they are not catholic, I guess? And what about that "christian" label...). Protestants do not interpret the bible literally, if you do that you are a heretic. Of course most of the heretics found their faith ridiculed in the old world and migrated to the new, but being illiterate fools, they forget they weren't even really protestant, and that they in their teachings defied the words of Martin Luther... And now, given the degree of orthodox ignorance that's required to feel in any way at home in many of the churches... (nvm how people somehow think primitive uncivilized societies of superstitious illiterates were capable of securely maintaining even proper records, short of burying stone tablets and forgetting them because of the illiterate part)
One that hath name thou can not otter