International, Military

BIN LADEN DEAD

Various news organizations are reporting that Osama Bin Laden is dead. President Obama is expected to announce the news. Bin Laden was reportedly killed in Pakistan by an operation involving Navy Seals but the story is still unfolding. YahooReports indicate that he was shot in the head after he and his bodyboards resisted an attack by the elite unit.

The fact that he reportedly went down fighting will likely add to his image as a martyr — though people who follow him need little encouragement or reason.

Bin Laden was a murderous fanatic who used religion to spread hate. His passing from this Earth would be welcomed news and, even for the most agnostic or atheist among us, there is a lingering wish that there is place for the damned to greet men like Bin Laden after the untold harm that he caused not just to his country but to many countries. Hundreds of thousands of dead can be credited to his dark legacy and beliefs.

While liberals and conservatives differed on the means used to fight Bin Laden, there was never any division on the commitment to fight terrorism or the shared loss from his crimes. On September 11th, the plane that hit the Pentagon struck just after I passed the building on my way to work. I made it about a mile away after blowing my tire on the curb and changing the tire as huge columns of smoke filled the air.

In the end, Bin Laden remained the authentic symbol of radical Islam — an extremist filled with hate living with fellow troglodytes in caves and crevices.

Bin Laden’s death will force some accounting of what has been gained and what has been lost since his infamous wave of terror began. Too much of the damage of 9-11 proved to be self-inflicted, including our use of torture and the launching of two wars that have cost thousands of more American lives and hundreds of billions as the nation sinks into debt and economic distress.

There is no indication that our continued loss of money or personnel in Afghanistan will decrease in any way as a result of the news. While the Afghanistan war seemed personality driven with Bin Laden as the face of evil, it has taken on a type perpetual war due to a lack of political courage to end it.

The world is far better without the likes of Osama Bin Laden. However, he left an ample legacy (and legions) to guarantee that religious hate will continue to shape the future of that region and the world at large.

369 thoughts on “BIN LADEN DEAD”

  1. Bda,

    I got the impression from the CNN reporter last night that the info on the “trusted” Courier’s nickname was obtained from a “detainee at Gitmo” … not from one of the overseas prisoners and that the info was old but that it took them years, having only a nickname to go on, to finally, with assurance, put the nickname to a face. Then they had to link this guy up to his brother who others indicated was also trusted and then attempt to locate them. It was recognizing the Courier coming out of the compound last August that caused their attention to focus on the compound. She was reporting all this in an attempt to illustrate just how long it took to develop dependable intelligence.

    I have hunted all over for that clip but can’t find it. Blitzer jumped in and rather shut her down and we heard very little about it after that.

    That is why I like to watch the news coverage as things are unfolding … people tend to say things that they aren’t allowed to repeat again. Love live news.

    (Your Mama raised you well 🙂 … please tell her I said so.)

  3. Bob,Esq. 1, May 2, 2011 at 6:09 pm

    “What rings even more hollow is the notion that somehow U.S. military choppers and gunships could fly into Pakistan undetected.” Pakistani writer Tariq Ali questions how bin Laden could have been living inside a fortified compound within a mile of Pakistan’s premier military academy.

    How did military choppers and gunships fly into Pakistan undetected.

    The helicopters took off from a Pakistani air base in the north of the country.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487485/Bin-Laden-compound-on-fire.html

  4. Bob,Esq.,

    I think it might mean that we will never know the whole truth. Then again, it may be too soon to tell. It’s been less than a day since the death of OBL.

  6. One unwary phone call led US to bin Laden doorstep

    When one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted aides picked up the phone last year, he unknowingly led U.S. pursuers to the doorstep of his boss, the world’s most wanted terrorist.

    That phone call, recounted Monday by a U.S. official, ended a years-long search for bin Laden’s personal courier, the key break in a worldwide manhunt. The courier, in turn, led U.S. intelligence to a walled compound in northeast Pakistan, where a team of Navy SEALs shot bin Laden to death.

    …

    [KSM] did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation …

  7. Elaine,

    What’s your take on this comment?

    JEREMY SCAHILL: But I think there’s two questions here. Were the Pakistanis giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden in this town that Mosharraf has just described, a heavily populated town with big military presence? And what was the full role of the Pakistani government in ultimately killing Osama bin Laden? Because it was Special Ops forces and not the CIA, it would indicate that there had to have been very high-level discussions between the U.S. and Pakistan about this, but the Obama administration says no intelligence was shared with any government, including the Pakistani. So this mystery, I think, is going to continue to deepen.

  8. Ms. Elaine

    I refuse to answer based on my rights under the Fifth Amendment 🙂

  9. Bob,Esq.,

    I watched the entire program this morning. We get Democracy Now on our cable TV Monday through Friday. I consider Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, and Jeremy Scahill to be REAL journalists. I think real journalists are becoming a rare breed.

  10. “I’d accept information from someone who goes by the moniker “empty wheel” before I’d accept information from someone at Fox News who was an emptyhead!”

    Lol – good one, Elaine!

  12. Bdaman,

    “NAL your article is by someone who goes by the moniker emptywheel. Sounds like an experienced journalist to me.”

    I’d accept information from someone who goes by the moniker “empty wheel” before I’d accept information from someone at Fox News who was an emptyhead!

    😉

  13. Update: Putting the AP’s reporting here together with the DAB, it seems like al-Libi did give up the name, perhaps earlier than reported. But still not waterboarding.

    How does emptywheel know there was no waterboarding.

  15. Here’s what a senior administration official said last night about when they got the intelligence on the courier.

    Who was the senior administration official?

  16. NAL your article is by someone who goes by the moniker emptywheel. Sounds like an experienced journalist to me.

  18. ha ha my 5 year old is typing this while i call the letters out. we were looking at the photos above and I asked her did she know which one was the president and she pointed to obama. i asked how she knew that and she said cause he’s brown just like you. 🙂

  19. The Osama bin Laden Trail Shows Waterboarding Didn’t Work

    In other words, while the CIA may have learned the courier’s nickname earlier, they didn’t learn his true name until “four years ago”–so late 2006 at the earliest. And they didn’t learn where the courier operated until around 2009.

    From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

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