Abbottabad isn't some dirt village near the Khyber Pass. Wikipedia's article on the town says, "The city is well-known throughout Pakistan for its pleasant weather, high standard educational institutions and military establishments."
They knew.
Pakistan's Deep State had to know. You can't run a compound of that size in Pakistan without a bunch of gossipy servants.
The most likely conclusion is that the Pakistani Deep State was hiding Osama from us, while collecting billions to claim to help hunt for him in the anarchic Northwest Territories. They were sheltering Osama, probably because he was their meal ticket for billions from Uncle Sucker to search for him.
This is a crime against America of historic proportions. How many Americans have died hunting for Osama in the far-off mountains while he was being hosted in comfort in Pakistan's inner circle?
At minimum, can we stop paying off Pakistan's Deep State and go home from Afghanistan now?
P.S. It may also be relevant that there are two hospitals a few hundred yards to the west of Bin Laden's home. As a commenter pointed out, if his kidney disease was as bad as reported in 2001, he may have needed dialysis. In turn, that may suggest an explanation for the bizarre reports that the U.S. military "buried his body at sea" -- to prevent an autopsy from showing that he needed sophisticated dialysis to stay alive. (I will admit that trying to explain the "burial at sea" is just speculation -- I don't know what that was about. It would have been much less suspicion-inducing to bury the body on the fortress island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean.)
P.P.S. I explained the Mediterranean concept of the "Deep State" here.
Pakistan's Deep State had to know. You can't run a compound of that size in Pakistan without a bunch of gossipy servants.
The most likely conclusion is that the Pakistani Deep State was hiding Osama from us, while collecting billions to claim to help hunt for him in the anarchic Northwest Territories. They were sheltering Osama, probably because he was their meal ticket for billions from Uncle Sucker to search for him.
This is a crime against America of historic proportions. How many Americans have died hunting for Osama in the far-off mountains while he was being hosted in comfort in Pakistan's inner circle?
At minimum, can we stop paying off Pakistan's Deep State and go home from Afghanistan now?
P.S. It may also be relevant that there are two hospitals a few hundred yards to the west of Bin Laden's home. As a commenter pointed out, if his kidney disease was as bad as reported in 2001, he may have needed dialysis. In turn, that may suggest an explanation for the bizarre reports that the U.S. military "buried his body at sea" -- to prevent an autopsy from showing that he needed sophisticated dialysis to stay alive. (I will admit that trying to explain the "burial at sea" is just speculation -- I don't know what that was about. It would have been much less suspicion-inducing to bury the body on the fortress island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean.)
P.P.S. I explained the Mediterranean concept of the "Deep State" here.
P.P.P.S. I've got a bunch of posts below making this same point in different ways. I'm sorry about their being a little chaotic, but this analysis is breaking news.
Posts
96 comments:
You need to ask the next question - what did the US administration offer the Pakistanis so that bin Laden was given up now?
There had to be a deal - this wasn't a hinterland mission on the border.
Steve, when you edit this post, look at the HTML and reduce the height x width pixel counts on the image.
This, combined with the vanishing mysterious corpse "buried at sea" (ha!) is going to fuel conspiracy theories for decades. It's like they don't care how implausible the lies they tell us are, they hold us in that much contempt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03afghanistan.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fworld%2Fasia%2Findex.jsonp
NYT to Isteve: we can NOT go home.
suck it up
You need to ask the next question - what did the US administration offer the Pakistanis so that bin Laden was given up now?
There had to be a deal - this wasn't a hinterland mission on the border.
They say that the Paks were not informed of the attack beforehand.
Dear Thomas:
Thanks for the heads-up. I'll fix the problem.
Steve
Welcome. E-mailed you about it too.
Seems strange. If that was the case, very few would have to be in the loop, if not surely someone would sooner og later get tempted by the reward and tip off the US intelligence.
Seems also that he only stayed at this place for 4-5 months.
Great analysis, Steve. K. Shoshana asks what was given up, but if the Pakistanis were cooperating, wouldn't they have moved him to some desert cave first to make it look better? I am thinking the Pakistanis did no cooperate in any way at all or even have foreknowledge.
Right. The Pakistanis were not informed of the attacks beforehand. Which indicates that our government and military believed the Pakistanis would tip him off.
The Pakistani Deep State likely protected Bin Laden partly due to the lucrativeness of the War on Terror, but also partly due to the ramifications of handing him over. There is no way, NO WAY, Bin Laden could've been less than a mile from this compound and nobody knew about it. There's also no way he would've purchased a mansion so damn close to the compound.
Or, perhaps Pakistan was paid billions to warehouse the bogeyman for years....
Steve, you seriously need to do some reading of "9/11 Truth" material if you think that whatever you're blathering about here is some big deal. The major scam is that Osama was not behind 9/11 at all, with the secondary scam being that he has been dead for a long time. Isn't this all pretty obvious, in retrospect?
I kinda assumed that you were sensible enough to already be aware of this, but just didn't want to talk about it for fear of losing your semi-mainstream/acceptable status, but apparently not...
@Shoshana: was thinking the same. I figured that either the US finally applied the right inducement in the right place in Pakistan and/or someone over there finally figured that UBL had outlived his usefulness...
Either scenario begs the question... What could we substantively have offered them or why would they figure Bin Laden was no longer worth holding on to? Did Obama go "Nixon in '73" and convince them that Real Bad Things would happen if they didn't deliver? Did they figure that we might just go ahead and get him anyway? Do they figure we might leave Afghanistan now?
Another possible scenario... We finally found UBL and whacked him without any actual cooperation with the Paks... and then "thanked them for their cooperation" after the fact. Would they realistically deny that story?
Steve,
Would you please stop committing these outrageous acts of journalism and analysis?
Please repeat after me (and CNN): "This is a major coup in the war against terrorism which hopefully marks the end of the terrible prejudice and oppression that Muslim-Americans have been subjected to by bigoted Americans for a decade."
Hey Steve or anyone, is there any data on the demographics of the Navy Seals? I get the impression it is not very affirmative action-y. Seems like it has a bunch of white males in it ... often from the South.
Nothing new about this. Our post-1989 wars have consistently been based on a reversal of enemy and friend. In every case we've been destroying our natural allies and officially 'friending' our worst enemies.
May I just ask: is the evidence good?
I don't believe for a moment he was 'buried at sea'.
At the very least, some biker-type Navy Seal would have claimed his head as a trophy - the flesh would be left to decay, and the bleached skull used as a drinking cup.Just think of the heirloom value of that artefact.
More probably the corpse will be dissected as part of a 'ritual' anatomy class at some undisclosed military medical skull.
Keeping with time-honored medical tradition, either the entire skeleton will be prserved and mounted, or the head and various organs ( especially genitalia) pickled in formaldehyde.
Don't think for a moment that military doctors are any less squeamish today than during the Indian wars.
I've been saying for years that Pakistan was protecting Osama bin Laden. It's hilarious how America considers them an "ally".
Pakistan created the Taliban as part of some sick Islamist experiment. Nobody with a brain thought that they would give Osama up so easily, if ever.
I'm furious about this, the idea that a deal may have been made with Pakistan. I'm usually not in favor of external regime change, but harboring the greatest enemy of the West?
The credibility of the West is at stake if there isn't regime change in Pakistan. Realistically it doesn't matter which regime replaces it and the West shouldn't be drawn in to the internal politics.
We should acknowledge that these areas aren't Germany or Japan, and that we can't build successful nations in areas where such a society is unprecedented.
But we can punish rulers.
Well, I'll wait until I read the morning papers for the details. But unless there's some *awfully* persuasive evidence, the claim that they unaccountably dumped his body at sea makes me extremely suspicious of the whole thing. Maybe it's true and maybe it isn't, but when someone has been caught in 163 huge previous lies, and they then tell you "the cat ate my homework," you tend to be a little skeptical.
Here's something else that seems a little strange. According to all the media accounts, our relations with the Pakistan security services have gotten extremely bad in the last month or two, and we've been forced to pull out nearly all our agants based there, of which we'd previously had vast numbers. I suppose our broken relations might have led to a deal with someone in which we were given Osama's location, but offhand one would think our lack of local agents and good security contacts would have made it much for difficult to locate Osama compared to any time in the last few years.
Maybe if Bush hadn't been so dumb, he would have just announced that he'd actually found Saddam's WMDs, and then had them immediately destroyed because they were so deadly and dangerous. I'me sure Judy Miller at the NYT would have written a gigantic full-front-page series discussing all the biotoxins and radioactives based on her exclusive top-level administration leaks from Irving "Scooter" Libby. USA! USA! USA!
Didn't a top-ranking Senator once tell LBJ that the easiest way to end the Vietnam War was just to declare victory and go home?...
"Either scenario begs the question...
What could we substantively have offered them or why would they figure Bin Laden was no longer worth holding on to?"
Nothing. The simplest explanation:
1: The Pakistani military protects Bin Laden.
2: The US finally finds out his location.
3: The US sends in the Navy Seals. They kill Bin Laden.
"The most likely conclusion is that the Pakistani Deep State was hiding Osama from us, while collecting billions to claim to help hunt for him in the anarchic Northwest Territories."
this is simply economically rational behavior
A heliborne assault by US Special Forces was the obvious #1 threat that OBL's security team had to defend against.
Those defenses obviously failed.
More than that, the US was able to evaluate those defenses and take countermeasures, and proceed on the high likelihood (or certainty) that they had been neutralized.
1. What were the defenses set out by AQ, the ISI, and the Pak military?
2. How did the US figure out what they were?
3. How did the US eliminate them?
Very interesting questions. I hope the MSM gets around to asking them. Eventually.
Whatever the answers are, they are likely to be very awkward for the Pakistani "Deep State".
Thinking a bit more about it, here's an aspect of human psychology which I find a bit puzzling...
Steve and most of his commenters are always denouncing the American government and MSM for being totally deceitful and dishonest about huge things which everyone can easily check with their own eyes, like e.g. HBD realities or whether our inner-cities are really multicultural paradises or whether the unemployment rate has really been dropping fairly rapidly over the last half year. But they then seem to throw their skepticism overboard when it comes to things which (maybe) no one can ever check, which seems a little odd to me.
It's a bit like in the old USSR when the government officials claimed that the stores had milk and everyone knew they were lying and the stores had no milk, but almost all the people still tended to believe the government when it made foreign policy claims that no one could ever check, like Brezhnev saying he'd sent his tanks into 1968 Czechoslovakia in order to prevent a fascist coup.
Now I tend to be an empiricist myself, who looks to previous patterns of events to estimate future ones. Osama had been in the news for years before 2001, and if this were 2000 and the MSM announced that the government had killed him in a raid, I'd have certainly taken that claim at face value. But since then, after so many dozens of major government lies since then, almost all of which were eagerly lapped up and promulgated by roughly 100% of the MSM, before being eventually revealed as frauds and hoaxes, I'd have to be a very stupid person not to do a bit of extrapolation and interpolation. As near as I can tell, not a single government official or prominent member of the media has ever been held accountable or punished for producing or promoting these lies, despite their very serious consequences, so what exactly would be the downside of being involved in additional ones, especially additional ones that no one could ever check or disprove?
But no, let's cast these doubts and suspicions aside and instead follow the immortal words of eveyone connected with the 2000s Housing Bubble: "This Time Is Different!"...
I like the buried-at-sea trip. Less embarrassment for everyone. No terrorist shrine. No place for anniversaries. No place to leave flowers and build massive mausoleums. Great idea.
The Israeli tomb/shrine to Dr. Goldstein, the guy who shot up the Muslim mosque during prayers, is a continuing embarrassment for the Jewish government of Israel.
The Israeli government can't really ban pilgrimages and celebrations at the Goldstein shrine since that would alienate too many Jewish voters.
"The NATO (=US) killed Gaddafi's three grandchildren!"
"Horrible", "Embarrassing", "Cruel!", "I think we should..."
"Hey, look at that, we killed OSAMA!"
"cool!", "whoo hoo!", "U-S-A, U-S-A!"
We don't yet have proof bin Laden wasn't already dead, or hasn't actually been killed.
Should we proceed confidently to further analysis on the word of a government official? I think we need photographic, DNA and witness evidence of this extraordinary claim.
By the way, the "dead bin Laden" photo that has been circulating is another bad photoshop
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100085835/why-that-photo-of-a-dead-osama-bin-laden-is-almost-certainly-a-photoshopped-fake/
Steve:
Would you care to address RKU's second comment? His point is a rather interesting one.
As I post below, the U.S. government had the perfectly sensible option of burying the body on Diego Garcia island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, so I don't understand the rush to announce OBL had been buried at sea.
Are we forgetting that last week Mr. Donald Trump "owned" Barack Obama? To be a little less polite, The Donald made Barry his bitch....
And then miraculously US forces are acomplish something they haven't been able to do in 10 years. Osama Bin Laden was living 1000 feet down the road from the Paki Wat College, and nobody knew? Osama Bin Laden's body has been verified by DNA evidence and then the "evidence" (the body) was chucked out a window at sea?
People?
Suggesting OBL was "buried at sea" to avoid his cemetery becoming a shrine to Islamicists is just dumb.
Ain't no way Islamicists are going get to Diego Garcia except as "enemy combatants" ie prisoners. If you are really worried about creating a shrine, cremate the body after it has been exhibited to international journalists and DNA tests and other forensic tests have been done.
No one believe that the USG is so fatidious about Islamic burial customs.
It's high time we stopped trying to run an empire based on everyone liking us. I'd salt the earth of Islamabad.
I find it weird that they came Bin Laden 'wasn't a real Muslim', but then rush to bury him within 24 hours in accordance with Islamic law.
Diego Garcia burial-great idea.
Steve, when you edit this post, look at the HTML and reduce the height x width pixel counts on the image.
In most browsers, if you adjust only one of the two attributes, then the browser will automatically adjust the other one proportionally.
Otherwise you have to get out CALC.EXE and figure the proportions by hand [which can be a real beeyotch if you're in a hurry].
Re: whether the USG's claim that OBL was just killed can be believed.
Perhaps surprisingly, Al Qaeda's public relations department is pretty good about announcing when prominent members of the organization have died.
They typically post "martyrdom announcements" on their website, often in the form of pre-recorded videos.
Obviously, this is done with an eye towards tactical and strategic benefits to their movement, rather than being tailored to the demands of Western news organizations. So they aren't always timely, as 24/7 news junkies see it.
In this case, I'd expect an official statement without too much delay.
Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal is the best source for such information. Here, for instance, is AQ (accurately) denying in January 2010 that Pakistani Taliban chief Hakeemullah Mehsud had been killed by a drone strike. The LWJ post includes an appearance of Mehsud on the martyrdom video of that Jordanian physician double-agent who killed a bunch of high-level CIA agents by exploding himself during a debriefing.
didn't you see "Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?"? all the afghanis kept saying that osama was in pakistan.
(not that i necessarily believe any of it....)
According to Sharia law the US Government can hit up the Bin Laden family for the burial costs:
"The expenses of lowering the dead body into the sea, or making the grave solid on the ground can be deducted from the estate of the deceased, if necessary."
But I hope they didn't feed him to the sharks:
"...it should not be lowered at a point where it is eaten up immediately by the sea predators."
Source:
http://www.al-islam.org/laws/burial.html
Sadly this and the rise of 'revolutions' in the arab world will only embolden the neocons.
Seems like it has a bunch of white males in it ... often from the South.
As Fox News was panning [quickly] through some amateur video of the plebes celebrating at Annapolis, I could have sworn that I heard them singing The Eyes of Texas are Upon You [scroll to about the 1:30 mark].
One other thing about the plebes singing "The Eyes of Texas" [concerning a Navy Seals assault team operating in deep within Pakistan] - you think of Texas as being one giant barren [landlocked] desert, but it does have a rather long coastline with the Gulf, and it has some pretty darned good swimming teams - the UT Men have won 10 NCAA Championships since 1980, and the UT Women won 7 NCAA Championships just between 1984 and 1991 alone.
one of the last areas of the military that has NOT been pc'ed - about 95-98% white, and the few blacks are mulattos - no women
The rangers have lowered their standards.
To be a Seal, you have to be able to swim...
Theo said...
We should acknowledge that these areas aren't Germany or Japan, and that we can't build successful nations in areas where such a society is unprecedented.
I love how Americans act as if Germany and Japan were wildernesses before they came and "liberated" them. Maybe Germany was culturally much more advanced than the US (with a 1200 year tradition) when it decided to destroy the German Empire in WWI, with WWII being the blowback of that massively irresponsible policy. Ditto for Japan.
RKU has a point. Obummer is even more passive and destructive to the US, but he sure is not as honestly stupid, but knows how to game the system enough to get a critical mass of people to vote him back in.
we can't build successful nations in areas where such a society is unprecedented
I think that that phrase sums up the entire raison d'être of the underground political resistance movement known as "HBD Theory": No matter how hard you try, you just can't squeeze water out of a rock.
I have long held that Obama [not Osama] has had it in for the higher echelons of the Pakistani military after watching the treatment accorded to his homosexual lover Mohammed Hasan Chandoo on their trip together to Pakistan in 1981.
And at State, there's the Pakistani/Saudi lesbian spy, Huma Abedin, whispering in Hillary's ear.
My guess would be that Obama/Chandoo and Hillary/Huma very desperately want to replace the troglodytic knuckle-dragging high-testosterone leadership in Pakistan with something more delicate & effeminate - something more in the image of "Davos Man".
Bottom line: Do NOT underestimate the importance of the homosexuality of Obama & Hillary as regards current American policy towards Pakistan.
Real American Heroes
From that article:
The Army Special Forces, known by distinctive green berets, has 234 African-American officers and soldiers in a force of 5,200 men. Blacks make up 4.5 percent of the Green Berets, compared with nearly 24 percent of the male soldiers in the Army.
The Navy has only 31 blacks among its 2,299 Sea-Air-Land, or SEAL, commandos, less than 2 percent of the force. African-Americans constitute nearly 17 percent of the male personnel within the Navy.
And, the Air Force' s special-tactics groups have only eight blacks in a force of 472 men, less than 2 percent. Servicewide, about 14 percent of the Air Force' s male personnel are African-American.
At least Hitchens points out the obvious:
http://www.slate.com/id/2292687/pagenum/all/
But wouldn't Pakistan be better off not hiding OBL? It would save them the eventual embarrassment yet the country could still collect US taxpayer money.
I believe that he may have died in 2001 and that his body was frozen so that he could be "killed" for political points. How convenient it was to bury the body at sea. Now we will never know.
I believe that he may have died in 2001 and that his body was frozen so that he could be "killed" for political points. How convenient it was to bury the body at sea. Now we will never know.
Yep, Bush handed OBL's frozen corpse over to Obama because he was just feeling generous with his political points. Makes perfect sense.
"Yep, Bush handed OBL's frozen corpse over to Obama because he was just feeling generous with his political points. Makes perfect sense"
He was most likely frozen so that his not being dead can be a pretext for a never-ending war. Now the government decided to unfreeze him and "kill" him to get attention away from Obama's ineligibility to be president and to score political points in general.
OT from Drudge:
Group of deaf, mute friends stabbed at bar after thug mistakes sign language for gang signs
I normally enjoy the enlightened commentary here at iSteve, but some of these conspiracy theories are ridiculous. Diego Garcia is a British, not US, territory - the US realized that Islamic law allows burial at sea so that was a natural thing to do to avoid having a shrine. Perhaps the Pakistani Deep State was involved, but in some ways it seems OBL's strategy was to hide in plain site rather than in a cave in waziristan (kind of like Dick Cheney's secret location) and what better place to do that than right by the military academy. Also, if the Pakistani deep state was involved, wouldn't there have been air defenses on the compound? Also, how did the US copters avoid air defenses throughout their flight?
"He was most likely frozen so that his not being dead can be a pretext for a never-ending war."
Consider the size and scale of the Conspiracy that you are proposing. How many hundreds of people in Washington, Arlington, Langley, Bagram, etc. would have to be In On It? And you think that nobody's going to spill the beans to Cecil Adams, at some point in the next few decades?
Similarly, the Apollo moon landings might have been staged. But I doubt it.
These theories do not square with my understanding of how these institutional bureaucracies function.
> how did the US copters avoid air defenses throughout their flight?
Good question. Where did they launch from? Where did they recover to? (What's their range?) Who's in charge of those bases? Would these Pakistani Air Force officers (and their superiors) have viewed this activity by US copters as routine, or eyebrow-raising?
"But since then, after so many dozens of major government lies since then, almost all of which were eagerly lapped up and promulgated by roughly 100% of the MSM, before being eventually revealed as frauds and hoaxes, I'd have to be a very stupid person not to do a bit of extrapolation and interpolation."
Even so, I think we can be confident of one thing -- that Osama is dead. (When, where, how may be different matters.) No administration is going to run the risk of having someone they claim to have killed thereafter pop up in real life.
"Diego Garcia is a British, not US, territory - the US realized that Islamic law allows burial at sea so that was a natural thing to do to avoid having a shrine."
You are as ignorant of the Diego Garcia situation as you are ignorant of Islamic law. Burial at sea is only a last restort, when the body cannot be buried in earth. That clearly was NOT the case. And the British have little practical say about what goes on inside the US military base at Diego Garcia. Google "rendition flights" if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about (which you obviously don't).
Who can be naive enough to believe that we can't see the body because of "Islamic law" or fear of a grave being made a shrine? Talk about grasping at straws so you can believe without evidence. How naive are you going to be?
Show us the damned body, or it didn't go down the way we are told. The motivation to lie is huge, the willingness of the MSM to swallow any lie is enormous; it is not unreasonable to demand iron-clad proof. No politician has the right to demand unquestioning belief without evidence. Especially the current gang in the WH (not that the previous gang was any better).
Hey Steve or anyone, is there any data on the demographics of the Navy Seals? I get the impression it is not very affirmative action-y. Seems like it has a bunch of white males in it ... often from the South.
Black guys seem to be well represented in Special Forces.
http://i.imgur.com/n8eDR.jpg
Well, I'll wait until I read the morning papers for the details. But unless there's some *awfully* persuasive evidence, the claim that they unaccountably dumped his body at sea makes me extremely suspicious of the whole thing. Maybe it's true and maybe it isn't, but when someone has been caught in 163 huge previous lies, and they then tell you "the cat ate my homework," you tend to be a little skeptical.
Exactly.
"Hey Steve or anyone, is there any data on the demographics of the Navy Seals? I get the impression it is not very affirmative action-y. Seems like it has a bunch of white males in it ... often from the South."
I went to bed thinking that I'd love for Navy Seals to live in my town. Two miles aways NAMS have been shooting up the neighborhood for weeks. I'd love the Seals to do their thing here.
Thinking a bit more about it, here's an aspect of human psychology which I find a bit puzzling...
Steve and most of his commenters are always denouncing the American government and MSM for being totally deceitful and dishonest about huge things which everyone can easily check with their own eyes, like e.g. HBD realities or whether our inner-cities are really multicultural paradises or whether the unemployment rate has really been dropping fairly rapidly over the last half year. But they then seem to throw their skepticism overboard when it comes to things which (maybe) no one can ever check, which seems a little odd to me.
Right, it's amazing to see the residual trust that so many supposedly independent thinkers have in their government.
Thinking a bit more about it, here's an aspect of human psychology which I find a bit puzzling...
Steve and most of his commenters are always denouncing the American government and MSM for being totally deceitful and dishonest about huge things which everyone can easily check with their own eyes, like e.g. HBD realities or whether our inner-cities are really multicultural paradises or whether the unemployment rate has really been dropping fairly rapidly over the last half year. But they then seem to throw their skepticism overboard when it comes to things which (maybe) no one can ever check, which seems a little odd to me.
Right, it's amazing to see the residual trust that so many supposedly independent thinkers have in their government on issues like this and 9/11.
There's a fundamental epistemological problem; there are simply a lot of things we can't know. Apparently most people can't live with uncertainty.
Also, if the Pakistani deep state was involved, wouldn't there have been air defenses on the compound?
Only if they were willing to go to war to protect him. It's one thing to house him, it's another to defend him
@Robert Philabaum,
exactly my thinking as well.
People don't trust Obama on much of anything because he has not delivered. If gas was $2 a gallon, unemployment 4%, wages increasing and prices falling, people would not quibble over stupid "burial at sea" for bin Laden. Because he has not delivered, few trust Obama on this.
Deep State? That's a Turkish fantasy. The reality is competing, mostly tribal power centers, with a thin veneer of Westernized people no one pays any attention to and who exercise no real power. Pakistan is tribal and the tribes and factions (Shia-Sunni) kill each other all the time. A "Deep State" would not tolerate that, but it is exactly consistent with tribalism.
Pakistan is a bunch of tribes with flags and nukes. Most of whom hate the US and have been waging "deniable war" with us for decades. Bin Laden was their creation and protected as such.
yeah, we've all been conned... by the FBI. Osama, the triple agent, has long been dead, or was terminal and being care of by the Pakis for years. And Uncle Sugar knew.
How convenient, now Obama has him "killed" and "buried".
You don't need to be a conspiracy buff not to swallow this BS.
"They knew.
Pakistan's Deep State had to know. You can't run a compound of that size in Pakistan without a bunch of gossipy servants."
Of course they did, but wait a minute, don't tell me you don't believe the CIA/USGov/and/or/Mossad did not know in advance about 9-11.
RKU:
Maybe I'm just looking at comments you couldn't see yet, but I'm seeing a lot of skepticism here, particularly about the weird burial at sea. The MSM can't be trusted to report critically on this stuff, alas. OTOH, they were surely careful to have the right guy before they announced this, so I assume the guy is truly dead.
With luck, this will provide political cover to get ourselves the he'll out of afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. I don't expect this to happen, but it should--this is the best possible time to declare victory and go home.
Also, if the Pakistani deep state was involved, wouldn't there have been air defenses on the compound? Also, how did the US copters avoid air defenses throughout their flight?
1) I have heard reports that the Seals WERE worried that the Pakistani Air Force would attack them, and
2) We DID lose one of the choppers in the attack [although it's not clear yet just why it went down].
Good call, Steve, This is Senator Toomey at National Review:
“[Pakistan’s] cooperation with the United States has been important at times,” Toomey conceded. “But at other times, there’s no question that enemies of the United States have been using Pakistan as a sanctuary.” Toomey voiced concern that bin Laden was found “in a compound 800 yards from a Pakistani military academy.”
Re demographics of Navy Seals:We're not going to get anopther lecture about those flinty Scotch-Irish again are we?? HERE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Murphy
Did the Seals,ala Black Jack Pershing,dip their bullets in pigs blood prior to going on their mission??
Diego Garcia is a British, not US, territory
this hasn't been an important distinction since sometime in the early 1940s
Show us the damned body, or it didn't go down the way we are told.
Your mindless partisan hostility is echoed across the aisle. Think about that.
The body was buried at sea because they didn't want an autopsy done.
Why no autopsy? Well, it's been reported over the years that Bin Laden has kidney problems and needs dialysis. If someone autopsied the body and determined that Bin Laden had been receiving dialysis all these years, the fingers would point back to Pakistan. This was done to help out the Pakistanis.
We knew we'd been scammed and now the government doesn't want the public to know. No autopsy, no problem.
Our government claims we buried Bin Laden at sea because we didn't want a shrine for terrorists. Bull. We let Saddam Hussein and Al-Quaeda in Iraq super terrorist Zarqawi get burials - in Iraq. What's so different here?
Our government also claims they couldn't find a country that'd take Bin Laden. More bull. There are lots of ways to find a secret undisclosed location to bury a man. Zarqawi was buried in a secret grave, so why no Bin Laden?
Yes, we got scammed. Now we don't anyone to know.
After we killed Saddam Hussein's sons in 2003, it took us 11 days to bury the bodies. The Hussein boys are Muslims, but we get 11 days to bury the bodies. For Bin Laden, however, we claimed we needed an immediate burial at sea because of respect for Islam. Why the two standards? What's do different about Bin Laden and the Husseins?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/world/after-war-uday-qusay-funeral-for-hussein-sons-call-for-death-america.html?ref=udayhussein
how did the US copters avoid air defenses throughout their flight?
Because they didn't have to, NY Daily News is reporting:
At least one Pakistani official said that the helicopter carrying U.S. Special Forces to Bin Laden's mansion took off from a Pakistani air base...
http://tinyurl.com/3o8qa6d
Apparently the CIA found the place by tracking OBL's couriers. If that's true, I wonder if the case of CIA agent Raymond Davis (who the Pakistanis freed after we paid the families blood money) is related to this. I say "if that's true", because if we were actually tipped off by an informant, its better for his safety that the story is the CIA found OBL with its spy toys.
Steve, I don't think we were scammed - Pakistan pretended they were our friends, and we pretended to believe them. That's the way it has to be as long as we have 'operations' in Afghanistan. How else are we going to conduct these - from space?
Even so, I think we can be confident of one thing -- that Osama is dead. (When, where, how may be different matters.) No administration is going to run the risk of having someone they claim to have killed thereafter pop up in real life.
Not necessarily. Personally, I'm not a fan of the Saw series, but I'm sure there are at least a few people in Fedgov who are.
The courier was reported to have been "monitored for years".
Its likely not an issue of Pakistani intelligence, although it was reported that this monitoring was secret due to traitorous elements within it.
Its an assumption that Pakistan actively concealed Osama, although very possible not at all the full case until we get details.
Too many unanswered questions:
(1) how many people were in the house when it was attacked?
(2) did they kill all the inhabitants?
(3) if they did not kill all of them, where are they now?
(4) they say that Bin Laden's body was buried in the Arabian Sea. What about the bodies of the others that died? Where are they?
(5) why the haste in burying the body? The Islamic law justification sounds like nonsense for the idiots who watch the idiot box.
(6) how is it that 4 chinooks flew to this spot in the heart of the Paki military establishment and no one in the Paki establishment knew about the operation?
(7) why the coyness in releasing any pictures? When Saddam was captured we had live images of a dentist checking his teeth.
There are too many unanswered questions. It is amazing that the stupid journalists do not ask even the most obvious ones. Such is the worship of Obama among the lobotomised MSM that the sheer joy at this "triumph" which might ensure re-election has now completely taken over any critical faculties that may have survived in their cranium.
The gullibility of the average American is the thing that really scares me.
"Your mindless partisan hostility is echoed across the aisle. Think about that."
You're not very bright, Udolpho. There was absolutely nothing "partisan" in that post. You think this is about Democrats vs. Republican? Really? Do you notice that all of the partisan GOP talking heads are taking this nonsense at face value? They seem to believe this nonsense. It isn't "partisans" who smell a rat when the PTB won't produce a body or even video. As mentioned above it is amazing, simply amazing, to see otherwise skeptical, rational people becoming drooling, simple minded true believers when the topic becomes one of national security and/or foreign policy. Partisans my @ss.
Thanks for all the demographic info on the Special Forces guys. As I thought, mainly White guys, mainly from the South. And funny and informative site, stuffblackpeopledontlike
I think we need to raise the issue of who actually got the job done in chat rooms, Huffington post, and among our friends. It's a small act to try and honor those that really keep the country safe.
apparently, the electricity was out in abbottabad starting a couple of hours before the raid and was restored 15 minutes after the raid.
sounds like some pakis somewhere knew what was going down.
"Anonymous said...
Also, if the Pakistani deep state was involved, wouldn't there have been air defenses on the compound? Also, how did the US copters avoid air defenses throughout their flight?"
Given that we probably sold Pakistan its air-defence systems (which they almost certainly immediatelyl re-sold to China, by the way), we may have had some insight into how to defeat them.
Also, I wonder if the final descent into the LZ was made with engines off. Helicopters have a pretty steep glide-path, but they do have one. Sounds like the kind of tactic that bad-ass SEALS might use to make a stealthy entrance - and it would explain why one of them made a hard landing - however this is purely speculation on my part.
"Black guys seem to be well represented in Special Forces."
You prove that by linking to a picture with 4-5 men two of whom are black?
In Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan there's a scene at the end where an old Ryan (I assume I'm not spoiling it for anyone) is standing at the US cemetery in Normandy, in front of Miller's gravesite. Spielberg manages to squeeze 3 Stars of David into just 2 shots. Having seen plenty of pictures of that cemetery I can assure you that was selective shooting, not a random sampling of the cemetery. Spielberg intentionally picked that site for the shot.
"Thanks for all the demographic info on the Special Forces guys. As I thought, mainly White guys, mainly from the South"
The link proves they're overwhelmingly white, it says nothing about disproportionately being from the South. It wouldn't shock me if Southerners were slightly overrepresented in Spec Ops, but I doubt it's dramatically so. British/Irish surnames do seem to be overrepresented relative to their share of the population, but they seem to come from all over the US, not just the South.
Steve - you don't need the notion of a "deep state" to explain this.
Pakistan does not have *a* government which all moves in the same direction at the urging of its president or dictator, the way we think of government in a Western country. Pakistan has multiple centers of power, which only sometimes aren't actively shooting at each other; and each center of power has multiple factions vying for control in a more or less deadly fashion. Bin Laden was a pawn in this game. Perhaps even a rook. But he was still one of the chess pieces, not one of the players.
It's entirely possible that (some part of) Pakistan's government housed and protected bin Laden, while (some part of) Pakistan's government eventually allowed or assisted the U.S. to take him out, as part of some internecine conflict.
Abad is a large enough city that the new family won't stick out too much.
It could be that my reading material has been too full of propaganda a la "The Shi'ite Awakening", but I hadn't heard of Pakistani Shi'ites engaging in much retaliation. Basically, the Salafis can whomp on anybody (Barelvis recently), the Barelvis can kill secularists and the Ahmadis can get their officially non-Islamic asses out. The Shi'ites have to settle for being junior partners in a secularist coalition, sometimes supporting communism.
Don't know the exact number but Asians pop up especially in the Green Berets.
An Asian is among the SEALs who have died in the WoT.
@Captain Jack Aubrey
Some guy upthread said that the only blacks in Special Forces were mulattos. Those guys look pretty much pure black to me.
Anyway, what does any of this matter? It seems like some flabby people here are trying to live vicariously through the military.
You remind me a lot of Neocons. Going on and on about the military even though you sure as hell haven't served in it.
The book Black Hawk Down, besides being a great read, is a good place to go to get a decent demographic picture of military special ops units. The Battle of Mogadishu consisted of members of virtually every special ops unit in the military - Rangers, Delta Force, Air Force PJs, Night Stalkers, and members of SEAL Team 6. IIRC, in an operation of about 200 miltiary personnel there was only one Hispanic (Lorenzo Ruiz, KIA) and one black (Mike Kurth). One black American, Cornell Houston, did die in the battle, but he was a part of the 10th Mountain Division's rescue convoy, not special ops.
It's a portrait of the military 18 years ago. Today's special ops may have more Hispanics and maybe a few more Asians, but the black share of the US population hasn't changed much, so it's probably more or less the same. This site has a list of most of the KIAs in the War on Terror, including their units and even pictures. It gives you a good look into who's doing the dying, but it's hard to get past the faces of the individuals and focus on their race or special ops status.
"You remind me a lot of Neocons. Going on and on about the military even though you sure as hell haven't served in it."
Uh oh, this young man took is shotgun out, and it looks like his family is having ChickenHawk dinner tonight.
There damn well better be black guys in Special Forces Groups, as some of them have responsibilities for Africa.
There's a distinction between Special Forces (familiarly the Green berets, a US Army formation, utilizing unconventional tactics, with a special emphasis on raising and training foreign nationals/foreign internal defense) versus Special Operations forces (all components have an SO function), which are your "supermen/super soldiers" direct shooters.
Some guy upthread said that the only blacks in Special Forces were mulattos.
i said the seals, sweetheart
As for reminding you of neocons- no we are only SICK AND #%#$ TIRED of having the media distort reality - and anytime a merit based system proves 'too white' - like firefighting, regular army officers - immediately the neocon/liberal alliance seeks to 'fix' it
and yes, I am proud my 'people' - the anglo saxons, are more willing to fight then send other ethnic groups to fight for selfish ethnic self interest, like one certain group we are all pretty tired of.
Forget it, man.
It's Pakistani Town.
(What did we expect?)
Post a Comment