To put that into a real world perspective, one terabyte of storage can hold about 220 million pages of text or about 2,000 hours of audio recordings. The SEALS seized almost three times that much.

The only way that many files could be sifted through rapidly is to use indexing software.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be an Al Qaeda operative this week. Anyone who had the Xanax franchise for them right now would do well. Makes one wonder if the attempt to get Anwar al-Awlaki was the result of that intelligence data dump.

Now that was funny.

Regarding that Rorschach image moment, perhaps I just need one of your business cards…do you charge for initial consultations?

I watched the video a couple of times and rewound it to re-watch the referenced 0.36 moment. The photographer in me kicked in and what I was was a masking technique, but nothing else significant. I have been a serious photographer for more than half a century and there is nothing wrong with my eyesight. Not sure what else folks might see but all I saw was a slide show of some great pinup photos. I like Roy Orbison, and hated to learn of his passing way too young.

As for Veronica Lake, she was one of my childhood favorites. That hair is SEXY!

You are *way* more of a true gentleman than I thought! Let’s see what Doc OZ er OS says.

Regardin’ what I saw, well, (clears hisn throat) Um,…I’ll tell you what. I just called rafflaw a gentleman. Let’s have him watch the video and see what he saw, if anything. If he sees what I thought I saw then I saw what he saw, since he is a gentleman and all. If he did not see what I thought I saw then then I did not see what I saw. Deal rafflaw?

Veronica Lake, you ask?

I went water ski’n there as a lad, no wait, that was Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas.

I never got the pleasure of seeing Ms. Lake’s films or pinups–that I remember( I done a Goolgle search). From her images online, she was an exceptionally beautiful woman and died too young and confused. Why does that happen so often to starlets…I can see why your old man, er, you father liked her.

I agree completely with your Declaration of War and leaving Afghanistan statements. As in some other rare cases, we will just have to agree to disagree respectfully.

Others have called you a gentleman recently and I agree. Since you became a guest poster, you have added abundantly to the topics and discussions. Before that time, you mostly posted late in the evenings after a long day of lawyering. I prefer your status of posting now.

Hoyl Cow, Ms. EM,

Our resident Ph.D. psychologist will have something to analyze about those of us that saw something in that Rorschach image moment at time 0:36 +.

Ugh, wait a minute, I saw nothing!

**********

Should I ask what you thought you saw???

BTW, what do you think of Veronica Lake?

Posted this afternoon:

{Quote:

Osama Bin Laden Dead: Was Killing The Al Qaeda Leader Legal?

Human rights groups, lawyers and academics have suggested, among other things, that this could violate an Executive Order that forbids the U.S. government and its employees from engaging in ‘political assassination’.

The Guardian quotes Prof Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, as saying that the attack had the appearance of an “extrajudicial killing without due process of the law”.

End Quote}

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/06/osama-bin-laden-killing-legal_n_858580.html

That video messed with my spelling: SB = Holy Cow!

Our resident Ph.D. psychologist will have something to analyze about those of us that saw something in that Rorschach image moment at time 0:36 +.

Ugh, wait a minute, I saw nothing!

There will never be another Ingrid Bergman, but any hands for Susan Heyward?

Bob,

She was great and the interchange beyond hysterical. Sad to admit that mine was Jean Rogers who played Dale in the original Flash Gordon serial. Never underestimate the sexual imprinting on a tender young male mind of a beautiful girl in slinky dresses. I could have killed Ming for daring to aspire to her. Liked Jean Harlow too.
This bears no correlation of course to the fact that my mother was a petite, yet curvy blond. Purely coincidental.

“Why do you single out Obama? You can vote against him next year.”

____________

I am not singling out Obama. Had it been any other president I would had done the same. I voted for a person who I thought was a bona fide constitutional lawyer who—with his attorney general—would right the many constitutional wrongs exacted on the U.S. and the world by the previous administration and its major participants, all of whom I learned to despise.

Mr. Obama and AG Holder are flimflammers reminiscent of a movie I saw in the 1960s (The Flimflam Man). They are political and legal con artists of the first order.

“I want to have a look at them (their) cards”
“They’re looking for more suckers”
“What have you got for a logical alternative?”

“Key Largo”

‘Nuff said.

Grace Kelly was beautiful, but my I think my favorite female actress of all time was Ann Bancroft.

“Prisoner of Second Avenue” need I say more?

Edna: We’ve been robbed.

Mel: What do you mean, robbed?

Edna: Robbed. Robbed. What does rob mean? They come in, they take things out. They used to be yours, now they’re theirs.
We’ve been robbed!

I thought (incorrectly) that I’d responded to this earlier.

Rafflaw: “If the Seals had been able to capture OBL alive, where would they take him? To Gitmo? Where would he be tried? The Republicans wouldn’t allow him to be tried anywhere but Gitmo and then we would hear about the kangaroo court process there.(rightfully so) I don’;t think there was any way we could have properly tried him here in this political climate other than in the military commissions.”

At the very least OBL was an enemy combatant subject to a military tribunal. More importantly, we don’t ignore the judicial process simply because we find it inconvenient.

As I remarked earlier “Where is the integrity of a legal system where members could invoke your exception any time they felt a trial would be inconvenient?”

The whole idea of terrorism has been turned on its head so that the people claiming to be fighting it are the ones leveraging it to further decimate our freedoms in the name of ‘protection.’ And make no mistake, it is a protection racket.

Do you know you are twice as likely to be killed by a falling vending machine than in a terrorist attack? And yet you stand there and say “how could we try OBL?”

Get a grip man and stand your ground.

The only one manufacturing outrage here is you. It’s not the killing of Bin Laden that bothers me, but the wholesale disregard for the law involved in the whole 9/11 event; all ten years of it.

First there was all the (accept it on faith) administrative road blocks put up to keep people, like F.B.I agents O’Neil & Crawley from finding out about or preventing 9/11.

Then there was the “bin Laden did it” but we don’t have to show you a prima facie case; just accept it on faith tripe.

Then there was the (accept it on faith) “if everyone’s at fault, then no one’s to blame” crap and other frauds contained in the 9/11 Commission Report.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/10/0080234

All you’ve been doing is cobbling together outcome deterministic back fill to fallaciously support your arguments.

Your little temper tantrum above is further proof that you’ve been singing the same old song: step into your histrionic imagination and accept it all on faith.

I have no patience for stupidity en masse; no matter who’s selling it.

This is manufactured outrage. The Democrat authorized the strike that got him where Shrub McFlightsuit failed. Not only a Democrat, but he is that “dirty Kenyan Muslim who hates America” brown guy. Sorry, I cannot get worked up over your argument. As I said before, if I had been on that raiding party, I would have lost no sleep if it had been me that offed him.

Bob,

With that line it shows that even at an early age you were destined to be a lawyer. I on the other hand was too
awash with strange feelings, for a 7 year old, about Grace Kelly.

Bin Laden was unarmed.

Further…

“Still, as the raid is now commonly understood to have transpired, the “firefight” that was said to have lasted for “most” of the forty-minute operation (as the senior DOD briefer alleged), or “throughout” it (as the statement that DOD prepared for Jay Carney stated), which was said to have persisted even as the SEALs “were making their way up the staircase in that compound” (as Leon Panetta told PBS), and which was believed to have “killed” bin Laden (as John Brennan claimed), was later revealed to have been, in fact, a volley of gunfire that erupted at the very outset of the raid; ended quickly; and involved only one resident of the compound: Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti, the courier to bin Laden who was the first to confront the Navy SEALs. The Americans shot and killed Al-Kuwaiti, and a woman with him, in a guesthouse they had to traverse before reaching the main house, on whose third floor bin Laden himself awaited. After the shoot-out with Al-Kuwaiti, the U.S. forces were never fired upon again.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/06/bin-laden-killing-white-house-pentagon-cia-botched-storyline/

Way to turn my High Noon metaphor on its head. Nonetheless, your comment to Mike Appleton tells me you know what I’m talking about.

But one important point you forgot about High Noon; Marshall Kane hadn’t been officially relieved yet. His replacement was due the next day.

Thus the line:

“This town will be safe ’til tomorrow.”

So technically, he was still Marshall and merely postponed his early departure.

Bob,

Yes I do know that an attest to its’ truth. I think I’ve been clear in saying that the whole thing made me queasy. That said I do believe that we need the Rule of Law and to enforce the Constitution, but for the life of me I don’t think that either has existed in the US or the rest of the world.

That you bring up High noon though is prescient on your part. That was the first movie I remember seeing and mostly understanding in a theater, I was 7. Cinderella didn’t count because what 5 year old couldn’t understand Cinderella/ Anyway High Noon was a great early influence in my life. As you no doubt remember Will Kane was no longer Sheriff and the town’s
rough legal system didn’t support him. He set out to kill Frank Miller and gang, not capture them, even though he lacked the authority to do either. He had resigned his position and there was no move to reinstate him. Actually that lines up with my point about the killing being justified

Should he have done otherwise? Not in my opinion. You don’t know how that movie influenced this lonely 7 year old, nor what fights I got into emulating the good LEO. :=)

Each of these two men were the architects of the two biggest foreign attacks on the US since the British set fire to the White House. I do not revel in the death of either, but the news they could do no more damage was a moment frozen in time for me. We only have a few of those moments in our lifetimes.

“There is one more dimension to the criticism of Obama …”

Yes, you are correct. Actually, that’s a much larger factor for the constant criticism thrown at him than just being a Democrat.

The Right is just seething over this …

Bob, they kill enemy combatants in raids and attacks. Had he come out with his hands up, perhaps they would have cuffed him and taken him prisoner at which time the rules of the Geneva Convention come into play. Can we all agree that the chance of that happening were somewhere between nil, none and zilch?

There is a rough equivalent to the killing of Yamamoto and Bin Laden. There is no exact equivalent to either anywhere, but it is the best I could do on short notice.

The key words are “necessary and appropriate.”

So, he is one of “those people” with a double whammy against him; he is a Democrat and he has brown skin.

Actually comparing bin Laden to the empire of Japan would be a false equivalency.

Further when you said:

OS: “Osama bin Laden declared war on the western world and its culture. It was a global war. He was taken out, just as we went after Admiral Yamamoto and other high value targets in previous wars.”

To be clear, OBL’s declaration of war is not equivalent to our declaration of war against Japan; nor was it similar to the existing states of war with Germany and Italy as a result of the Tripartite Act. Yamamoto was shot down during a genuine state of war; not a mere rhetorical device used to justify expansions of executive power.

Per Bradley Manning, you said:

OS: “Bradley Manning is a US soldier and US citizen, subject to the UMJC and the US Constitution. Bin Laden is/was a foreign national and any conflict with him is subject to the Geneva Convention, not the ordinary laws of US courts.”

Actually, bin Laden, as an enemy combatant, would be subject to the UMJC as well.

Mike,

You do know that you can’t justify a wrong by citing precedent of other wrongs; right? It’s good that you bring up Scalia since that man ripped my heart and soul out when he did what you described above. Let’s just say that the way he twisted the minds of the masses was so repugnant, that while watching the scene in the film “Hannibal” where Anthony Hopkins is feeding Ray Liotta his own brains, I commented loudly to the person I was sitting with in the theater — “That’s Scalia!”

But I digress.

Keeping with the topic of movies, the film that did express the moral & legal dilemma facing those attorneys who could not simply be realists and ‘accept’ the court’s ruling was “High Noon.”

Melodramatic? Hardly.

As Mike Appleton correctly observed: “In the real world, a true commitment to the rule of law under Kantian principles demands a large dose of existentialist stubbornness.”

There’s simply no choice in the matter. Thus when Will Kane in High Noon explains why he has to go back and face Frank Miller, he says…

Will: “I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing.”

The law affords no room for whim or caprice. And you’ve ended this debate by acknowledging such to Mike Appleton by saying:

MS: “Mike A. you are no doubt correct which is why I never could have made it as a lawyer. My approach to life is to trust my gut. I react to things viscerally, even though informed by my thought processes tempered by my experiences.”

I’m well aware of the decline for respect of law and order in from the post Watergate paranoia era to present, but that is in no way a license to abandon the law whenever we find it inconvenient. That’s simply resigning yourself to live in Hadleyville U.S.A.

“I want to know why the same people who are now complaining about legal technicalities over raid on Bin Laden’s compound did not raise the same questions of Bush when Saddam Hussein’s two psychopath sons were killed in a similar raid.”

I completely agree. Particularly since those who are now complaining were the one’s calling anyone who criticized McFlightsuit and his misadventure in Iraq as traitors, unpatriotic and unAmerican …

Well, I think one part of it has to do with the fact that, once again, a Democrat did what a Republican said he would and couldn’t (I guess taking his eye off the ball doesn’t factor into it). Their hatred of Obama – and Democrats in general – runs so deep that there is nothing, absolutely nothing Obama or a Democrat can do that is worthy enough for genuine praise. Just genuine criticism.

From where I sit, the 2001 resolution by Congress makes more sense than some of the others. We were facing a guerrilla war on an international front. I fail to understand singling out Obama for special criticism for going after Bin Laden. This sounds more like sour grapes than a legitimate gripe.

I want to know why the same people who are now complaining about legal technicalities over raid on Bin Laden’s compound did not raise the same questions of Bush when Saddam Hussein’s two psychopath sons were killed in a similar raid.

Yes, that was my point, there has been no *formal* Congressional declaration of war, which is why–as you know–we have instead been in endless “military engagements authorized by Congress.” Those engagements are forevermore open-ended in the black hole that is the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its accompaniment—the ‘Patriot Act’.

In one of the Greenwald posts I linked above, he provides links to the similar material to which Swarthmore mom provided (thanks).

Hail King Obama, Hail.