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.
Clinton and Bush dropped the ball on bin Laden … I fail to see how they can gleen “credit” for this …
Isabel Darcy: “In US and British naval tradition, a short reading of pre approved Christian scripture by an officer accompanies the dumping.”
********************************************
That is the tradition if the deceased is a Christian. If of another faith, every effort is made to have a reading by a chaplain of that faith. It makes sense they probably had a Muslim chaplain standing by for just such an occasion, given the detailed planning that went into this operation in the first place. It is not likely something that obvious would have been overlooked. Also, the washing and preparation ritual would most likely have been carried out by members of that faith rather than “infidels.”
As usual, I agree with Elaine M’s posts and thank her for the links to Greenwald ,et al.
To the people who are saying they don’t give a rodent’s rear end about whether OBL was buried in accordance with Muslim tenets, I would say that what American’s think about his burial is irrelevant. What’s relevant is what the millions of Muslims think about US forces’ treatment of the body.
From what little news I can glean, it appears that OBL was buried within 24 hours, which is in accordance with Muslim tenets. Other than that fact, I have not been able to find any independent Muslim expert who thinks his burial was in accordance with Sharia. It looks like a typical naval burial at sea. Sew the body in shroud. Put a cannon ball or two in the shrowd and dump him overboard. In US and British naval tradition, a short reading of pre approved Christian scripture by an officer accompanies the dumping.
Bin Laden lived in Pakistan compound 5-6 years: U.S
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/bin-laden-lived-pakistan-compound-5-6-years-114333796.html
Osama bin Laden dead – but no body. Now for an explosion of conspiracy theories
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100085976/osama-bin-laden-dead-now-for-an-explosion-of-conspiracy-theories/
Nal
Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells Newsmax the information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden was obtained through “normal interrogation approaches” …
I bet a few short years ago your view of Rummy was he was a lying no good piece of shit.
Fast forward, he’s as honest as Abe Lincoln 🙂
Oh the hummanity
Change of Tune
The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces.
Officials also retreated from claims that one of bin Laden’s wives was killed in the raid and that bin Laden was using her as a human shield before she was shot by U.S. forces.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54162.html#ixzz1LIBvzdTs
Hi Raffkaw:
<< I am glad that they got him by Americans taking << him out. Now, let’s get out of Afghanistan.
Remember the televised and staged "rescue" of this young, wounded female soldier from the 'dungeons' of this hospital in Iraq?
For now I'll stick to Prof. Zinn's exhortation: "Governments do lie."
There are too many facts in this story that do not add up.
Bob,Esq.,
It’s late but this is the only time I had or will have for the next couple of days as we have voting tomorrow and I will be busy all day.
I went to the site and read/listened to the report. Jeremy Scahill seemed to know very little or to reveal very little about the present situation, although he recited some history quite well. He did do a good job of castrating the crowds of students outside the White House and by inference those at Ground Zero:
“I found it quite disgusting to see people chanting, like it was some sort of sporting event, outside of the White House. I think it was idiotic. Let’s remember here, hundreds of thousands of people have died.”(JEREMY SCAHILL)
Yet what he would deny the citizens, he allows the military:
“So, I think that, you know, there’s going to be a lot of celebrating within the Special Ops community for having taken down the man that was identified as the number one target of this operation.” (JEREMY SCAHILL)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Then I centered on TARIQ ALI and this particular quote: “What we needed, which Obama didn’t talk about, was: why wasn’t he (bin Laden) captured alive—they could have done that if they knew where he was; the Pakistanis could have been told to do that—and tried in a court of law? That would have been genuinely educative and revelatory. To try him, to prove him guilty, and then to imprison him, or whatever.” … Absurd on all levels. This Administration won’t even prosecute torturers and they’re going to give bin Laden a forum? Trust the Pakistanis to “go get him”? … Absurd thinking but then he is attempting to spin the fact that bin Laden has been hiding in plain sight in Pakistan.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The story does get a little better when Mosharraf Zaidi enters the discussion with the usual condemnation of Americans killing everybody in the world and the need for an uprising in America to stop the killing. (Bob we’ve been killing masses of people since the founding of this country … Native Americans, slaves, war after war after war.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Finally Joshua Foust and Matthew Hoh brought a little sanity to the discussion and some real constructive conversation … I’ll quote Hoh: “If you look at our last 10 years, our foreign policy has been schizophrenic, to say the least. So, we have to have a fundamental rethink of our foreign policy and how we conduct our operations around the world, not just militarily, but also diplomatically and economically.” His explanations that backed up that opinion were spot on.
So, I appreciate the recommendation and found Foust and Hoh to be worth the time, learned something from their comments and will certainly give their ideas further thought. However, nobody really gave any insight into how the raid was actually planned and carried out.
Portland, Maine Mosque Vandalized In Suspected Hate Crime Following Bin Laden Death
Evan McMorris-Santoro | May 2, 2011
TPMDC
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/anti-muslim-hate-crime-mars-bin-laden-news-in-portland-me.php?ref=fpb
Excerpt:
On Monday in Portland, ME the walls of the largest mosque in town were spray-painted with “Osama today, Islam tomorow [sic]” and other phrases, sometime following morning prayers on the day after American forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
The police chief is calling the incident at the Maine Muslims Community Center a hate crime.
The Portland Press-Herald reported “Long live the West” and “Free Cyprus” was also spray-painted on the mosque.
Portland has a relatively sizable Muslim population thanks in part to a large population of immigrants from Somalia and Sudan, Police Chief James Craig told TPM in an interview. The city of about 66,000 has three mosques.
Hate crimes are uncommon in the Portland, Craig said, and crimes targeting Muslims almost unheard of.
Elaine,
Thanks. I will read the Matt Taibbi piece as he is another of my favorites.
Zakaria is not for everyone but I find his insight helpful when attempting to understand a culture so different from my own.
I have a couple of relatives by marriage who are from India (Muslim, not Hindu)and they tend to speak in much the same manner as Zakaria which I can best describe as a proclivity for “understatement”. Whereas Taibbi tends to go for the overstatement.
In my opinion, the truth resides somewhere in the middle.
It would be wildly interesting to see both men, together, on the Daily Show.
Blouise,
I think Zakaria is a mixed bag.
You might find this piece about Fareed Zakaria by Matt Taibbi interesting reading:
Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto
June 24, 2009
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/24/fareed-zakarias-manifesto/
Excerpts:
From a distance I’ve always vaguely admired the skills of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who is maybe this country’s preeminent propagandist. Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull, the outrageous commonplace, and rendering horrifying absolutes ambigious and full of gray areas.
*****
This writer has done work like this before, using a big canvas to rework an uncooperative chunk of history in the wake of a crisis. Zakaria is probably best known for his post 9/11 “Why Do They Hate Us?” article, a sort of masterpiece of milquetoast propaganda that laid the intellectual foundation for a wide array of important War on Terror popular misconceptions, not the least of which being the whole “They hate us for our freedom” idea. One of Zakaria’s central arguments in that piece was that poor struggling Arabs were driven to envious violence by the endless pop-culture reminders of American affluence and progress. It was just too much to take, seeing all those cool blue jeans and all that great satellite TV.
In one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that?
I thought the old Arab’s comment was funny, but Zakaria imbued it with serious significance. “This disillusionment with the West,” he wrote, “is at the heart of the Arab problem.” And while witty Arab potshots at tacky southern strip-mall meccas like Houston were significant enough to put high up in Newsweek’s seminal piece about the root causes of 9/11, things like America’s habitual toppling of sovereign Arab governments and installation of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran were left out more or less entirely (Zakaria managed to write a whole section on the Iranian revolution without even mentioning that the Shah come to power thanks to a CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, whose crime was ejecting Western oil companies from Iran).
Not that Osama bin Laden and his followers aren’t all homicidal lunatics who should be doused in barbecue sauce and tossed in a shark tank, but Zakaria’s piece did a monstrous disservice to Americans by glazing over the sources of Arab anger. He portrayed America’s enemies as jealous dupes, who chose to swallow the religious extremism fed to them by those opportunistic mullahs who stepped into the power vacuum left by ineffectual socialist strongmen like Nasser. (The neat rhetorical trick of making the current political bogeyman, Islamic terrorism, a descendant of the last political bogeyman, socialism, should not go unnoticed by admirers of the propaganda art).
As is the case with almost everything Zakaria writes, there was a grain of truth in such a portrait, but it had the convenient benefit of almost completely absolving America of wrongdoing in the ongoing Shakespearean death-struggle for oil that is recent Middle Eastern history. Appallingly, Zakaria even compared America’s bloodlusting pursuit of Middle Eastern resources (a history that includes numerous CIA-backed coups and more than one brutal war) to the frolicking of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby — ie toppling governments and arming Saddam Hussein against Iran is like a bunch of ginned-up rich folk knocking over the china. “America has not been venal in the Arab world,” he wrote. “But it has been careless.”
*****
His description of the root causes of this financial crisis are about what you’d expect from a man who invoked
The Great Gatsby to explain the mentality of the murderer of 4,000 people. When he mentions the objectionable behaviors that led to the loss of trillions of dollars in wealth and untold numbers of lost jobs and misery, he does so with distant, clinical language, like he’s describing something seen through a telescope, disappearing over the horizon. In fact his method of describing the “moral crisis” that led to the financial implosion was to begrudgingly admit that many people were less than nice. Here’s how he put it:
“Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.”
This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money.
Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”
Slarti,
Got it and you were right … insightful read
I came across him (Fareed Zakaria)the other night … maybe a week ago … while channel surfing. He was on Leno, I think or maybe it was Letterman … anyway, he was talking about choosing to become an American citizen as opposed to finding himself here as an accident of birth.
It caused me to stop and reflect on all we have that I simply take for granted …. things which he deeply appreciates. It was a very good interview. I record his program on CNN but I think I should subscribe to his blog.
Once again, thanks.
Blouise,
Just replace ‘(dot)’ with ‘.’ in the denatured link I posted (it wouldn’t post live for some reason…).
Slarti:
Try going to cnn.com. Then Press “World” in the top Navigation Bar. Then go to “Global Public Square” in the upper right quadrant. You’ll see a photo of Zakaria with his article adjacent.
Slarti,
Fareed Zakaria is one of my favorites … I’m going to try and find the link you were attempting to post … thanks
“A man only learns in 2 ways, one by reading and the other by association with smarter people.”
~Will Rogers
mespo,
In re: self-made genius — if there is one.
“No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.” – Hunter S. Thompson
Fareed Zakaria “Al Qaeda is dead”
globalpublicsquare(dot)blogs(dot)cnn(dot)com/2011/05/02/al-qaeda-is-dead/?hpt=T2
(I’ve tried to post this link a couple of times with no success…)
Also catch the Daily Show if you haven’t – it’s hilarious. I agree with Jon Stewart – Al Qaeda’s window of opportunity is closed (which isn’t to say there’s not a enormous amount of damage that they’ve done which needs to be fixed…).
HenMan,
This is our kind of guy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13257940