Slashdot Mirror
Bin Laden Hideout Recreated In Counter-Strike
dotarray writes "Osama bin Laden's final hiding spot in Abbottabad, Pakistan, has been made into a playable map for Counter-Strike: Source. Honestly, we're a little surprised that it took this long."
[SERVER] MOTD - WHAT UP INFIDELS
[STS6] - Lock n' loaded
[STS6] - dey r camping tspawn watch out for ak-nubs
[UBL] - I hear something!
[UBL] - hey who teamflashe------
Boom Headshot!
[STS6 -> UBL] [984 HP]
[Announcer] - Counter Terrorist Win
[UBL] - fcking awp nubs
[STS6] - wanna join r clan? not!!!
[SERVER] - User UBL teamkicked reason/trolling
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Osama would be dead if he was put on trial in any country on earth.
Where any country on earth = Belarus; China; Ecuador; Egypt; India; Iran; Iraq; Israel; Japan; Malaysia; Mongolia; North Korea; Pakistan; Saudi Arabia; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan; Tonga; United States.
Here in Australia as well as most of the world he would not be put to death.
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/05/06/the-actuals-plan-for-bin-ladens-pucca-house/
The Floor Plans
Talk Abbottabad place to hide.
in military slang, "used his wife as a human shield" no doubt actually means "the wife was closest to the door when we kicked it open, so we shot her first".
The wife rushed the SEALs while OBL was standing there, and they shot her in the leg. They shot OBL in the left side of the head, twice. If they wanted to kill his wife, they would have, especially since she charged them. They didn't kill her though, they left her there with a wounded leg. At any rate, the "human shield" woman, regardless of whether or not she was being used involuntarily, was not the wife in his bedroom and wasn't covering OBL, she was covering one of the other men who died (possibly the courier who fired on the SEALs when they landed, or OBL's son).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I agree, I mean taking credit for 3,000+ deaths in one swoop who were also unarmed should give him the right to a fair trial
A few considerations:
First, if in fact somebody is particularly, notoriously, heinous, surely they won't exactly be looking forward to a fair trial? All those cases where the 'obvious' guilt of the suspect offends the public should be cakewalks for the prosecution, given the value of rule of law, is the short procedural delay really a big deal?
Second, there are situations(almost certainly not his; but that isn't the point) where the public/media are incorrect. That's sort of the reason that rule of law is considered superior to lynch mobs.
The third is more pragmatic: Against certain classes of opponent(internationally notorious mediagenic terrorist figureheads definitely being among them) fair trials are among the most powerful things you can do to them, the more boring, the better. You don't want the last few pages of their upcoming hagiography to be something out of an action thriller: 'went down in hail of bullets during a shootout with sinister international assassin squad, a true martyr of the movement'. You want it to be as unbelievably dull as possible. 'Taken into custody, charged with X,Y,Z, went before FOO district court, convicted, sentenced, just like any common criminal.' Obviously, getting shot kind of ruins your day; but it buffs the hell out of your legacy. Only cool people get assassinated. They more shadowy and badass the assassins, the better. Getting tried and convicted like any common scumbag, though, especially if the authorities stubbornly treat you neither better nor worse than anybody else being processed through the system, is basically the most banal exit possible.
Honestly, I think that international relations would be a much nicer game if the bulk of the casualties were among the upper echelons of political and military power, on all sides, rather than concentrated among a mixture of civilians and common soldiers who are allocated the overwhelming majority of the killing and the dying.
He had two guns: a pistol and an AK. They were just out of reach in the room. The only good having the guns to hand would have done him is to die with the gun in his hand and maybe taking an American with him on the way out. He'd have died anyway. When they kicked in the door he was asleep and surprised - which is the freaking point of using a Navy SEAL team and top-secret stealth helicopters deep in foreign territory. He declared himself a combatant in war on the US, and acted on that. He was "under arms."
You're offended they didn't fight fair. Well boo freaking hoo. The goal is not to fight fair. It's not to die for your country. The goal is to secure the objective. It's to make the other poor bastard die for his. How this went down was right and proper. The SEAL team doesn't have to let the bad guy pop some rounds off to make you feel better about this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Let's drop you from a helicopter in a terrorist compound, and see if you meekly ask the leader there if he'll kindly surrender and go back with you to a trial, or if you'd rather have a gun and shoot anybody who doesn't beg to be arrested the instant your boots hit the ground.
This was a military operation, not a police operation. There were time concerns, there were threat concerns, and the list of situational unknowns is a mile long. Rather than quoting bumper stickers, try to imagine yourself in the position those SEALs were in, or imagine being the one to order those SEALs into harm's way. Are you really going to throw your life or their lives away taking unnecessary risks for some philosophical argument about separation of powers?
None of that matters, of course, because guess what? The founding fathers made the President the Commander in Chief of the US military. That's how they doled out the powers. And guess what? The military's job is to kill people, and protect the lives of Americans (themselves included). If such a concept is uncomfortable to you, perhaps you should surrender your citizenship and go live someplace that doesn't have a military, and doesn't care about protecting its citizens.
If the president ordered the FBI to kill somebody on American soil, then you could argue about separation of powers. But arguing about a military operation, especially one as risky as this one? Seriously?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I'm one of those foreigners who're a little worried about what USA will do next in the name of "justice".
Wikileaks has exposed corruption in my own government, is perfectly legal, and is basically doing the job our newspaper journalists should do, so I want to support them. But according to the logic of many Americans, anyone who indirectly helps their enemies is also an enemy. If I donate money to Wikileaks, will I also be put on the list for "supporting terrorists"? Will the US government try to seize my foreign assets and arrest me if I put my foot on US soil?
The truth is that the only function of a trial is to ascertain guilt or innocence. The punishment is the part that brings about justice, and when there can be no doubt of guilt, there is no particular need for a trial.
There are a number of reasons there should always be a trial:
1. People are "certain" of someone's guilt and turn out to be wrong all the time.
Osama Bin Laden is actually a good example of this. Everybody's assuming he's behind the 9/11 bombings, but there wasn't enough evidence for FBI to put out an arrest warrant. Until his death, Obama was formally only wanted for the bombings against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. (FBI Most Wanted)
The video released shortly after the 9/11 bombings, where he allegedly took the blame for the attacks, was badly translated. Osama certainly seemd to applaud the bombings after the fact, but it's not clear what part, if any, he took in actutally perpetrating them.
The Guantanamo prisoners are another example. American politicians assured us they were "the worst of the worst", and now it turns out some of them weren't even held because they were suspected of terrorism; they were held only because the US military wanted information from them.
2. Allowing assassinations without trial provides the people in power with a convenient way to do away with their political enemies, as long as they can whip up a public frenzy against them. This can and will be abused.
3. A trial lets all the facts on the table.
... plus everything else which has been going on behind the scenes and we don't know about yet.
Perhaps Osama is guilty, but not of what he is accused of. Perhaps there are more guilty parties, but the people in power wants some of them to go free. Executing someone without trial is a convenient way to punish your guilty enemy, while letting your guilty friends get away.
In this particular case, embarassing facts that may surface during a trial include
a) Incompetence on the part of Homeland Security
b) Facts regarding the close ties between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family
c) The US government's previous support to the terrorists they are now fighting
4. Legality. If we start making exceptions to the law when someone is "obviously guilty", people will start abusing it for their own ends, or simply do it out of laziness, and point to the previous cases as justification. The only way to avoid this is to err on the side of caution and always follow the law, even when someone IS obviously guilty.
you should not compare the life of the soldier to the life of bin Laden but to the lives which could have been saved by interrogating him.