Dennis Dale points out in The American Conservative:
Osama bin Laden’s fortress was heavily constructed–drone-proofed, it seems, when built in 2005. He avoided land-lines and stayed indoors. This is consistent with the need to evade the US and its technology. In contrast, his compound was very lightly guarded. This is consistent with a high degree of comfort–concerning the possibility of a ground raid.
Of course bin Laden discounted the chance of a US commando raid–anyone would have (in fact, that loud racket you hear is the sound of the president’s giant brass b**ls clanging together as he does his victory lap). There was no need to post a useless armed contingent whose presence could only draw suspicion. If and when we came it would be via airborne munitions.
What is striking is how completely bin Laden appears to have discounted the possibility of being raided by Pakistani forces. What confidence he had in the fidelity, authority and discretion of his benefactors, whoever they are!
By the way, by relying on Google Maps crowdsourcing, I got the precise location of bin Laden's compound wrong in the busy hours following bin Laden's execution. Google Maps put a pin on a similar sized compound a little farther out of town than the actual one, which lies between the center of Abbottabad and the Pakistan Military Academy. Bin Laden's place was more conveniently located to the venerable Abbottabad Golf Club than I had originally thought. I apologize to whomever lives in that big compound I pointed to. On the other hand, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that guy got to own that big estate by, oh, I dunno, accepting bags of cash from the CIA to look for bin Laden ...
Bin Laden's three story building was built in what was then an open field no more than a mile from t he front gate of Pakistan's West Point, which has 4,400 cadets and about 600 officer / instructors. There are also operational units of the Pakistan Army based in Abbottabad. The average person in Pakistan doesn't ask a lot of questions about what the Army is up to, with ample justification. On the other hand, Pakistan's military-intelligence complex asks lots of questions about lots of things, especially who is building a fortified compound right in the intellectual heart of their power. The only way they couldn't have not found out that bin Laden had decided to infiltrate their front yard was if they had done the deciding for him.
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51 comments:
You know, this whole thing doesn't so much make Obama look good (although it does) as it makes Bush look bad. He had 8 years to seriously look for and drill this guy in head, but instead spent a trillion dollars and 3,000 lives on a tragic misadventure.
And the tragic misadventure is all the worse because Bush & Co. used the goodwill of millions of decent Middle Americans to accomplish their political goals. We (most of us) were defending Bush against all manner of attack, but in the end, Bush & Co. weren't returning the favor by looking out for us.
Here's my version of "connecting the dots":
Body dumped in the sea = the whole story is total nonsense.
Analyzing the details of an entirely fabricated story is a waste of time. Might as well be looking for deep meaning in the Niger Yellowcake forgeries.
i'll connect some dots for you.
sarah palin is now finished as any kind of serious candidate for president, and the republicans should do whatever they can to get her to shut up and go away. she's dumb, she doesn't know what she's talking about, and every time she opens her mouth it's bad for republicans. she can't do anything but hurt them now, which was all she really could ever have done, but now it's certain.
remember the glorious days of 2009 when internet fools argued back and forth over who was less qualified to be president. it was always obvious that obama was smarter, the experience argument was almost a wash, so obama would just easily trash her head to head on sheer intelligence alone. but now, it's may 2011. barack obama has actually been president of the united states of over 2 years. oh, and a certain something happened this week.
palin, meanwhile, still zero days served as president of the united states. what important job has she been doing since the 2008 election anyway? oh that's right, nothing.
so let's see. intelligence advantage: obama. experience advantage: obama in a landslide. historical achievement advantage that will permanently and forever be a part of the history of the united states and remembered 200 years from now: obama.
palin: um...she gave some speeches.
good bye, britney spears of american politics. plucked out of the backwoods of america by sheer blind luck, your 2 years of undeserved fame are now very, very over.
Today's plethora of "details of the SEALS' attack," all of them coming from different admin sources, are all over the place. Two questions for the rest of you--maybe you've read more than I.
1) On Jerry Pournelle's blog, I read that copter(s) had to be refueled. To do that, we had to have help from some level of government inside Pakistan.
Is that true? Can someone tell me if it's at all possible the SEALS copter didn't have to refuel to go back across the border to a safe landing area?
2) From some newspaper sources, I read that it was over 20 minutes before the SEAL team made its way to the upstairs level where OBL was, that they engaged in a firefight with someone for the first 20 minutes. However, we are told OBL was not waiting for them with a gun ready as they burst into his room.
Huh? Wouldn't OBL have heard a firefight and have had guns at the ready by the time they came into his room?
This kind of lack of unity and cohesion in the narrative only serves to encourage the conspiracy crap they say they wish to avoid.
Jody,
Palin has been "finished" as a possible candidate for a long while now.
Dale: "his compound was very lightly guarded. This is consistent with a high degree of comfort . . ."
Video on tv of the interiors show it to have been spartan to the point of primitive -- kerosene grill on the floor, for instance.
Way too many people would have to be in on a conspiracy for the official story to not more or less be true. My best explanation for why they dumped the body in the sea so soon is that it was just an act of oversensitive stupidity, although I don't think it's crazy to think maybe they tortured him or desecrated his body and didn't want the physical evidence preserved.
The purported hasty dumping of Osama's body at sea makes no sense on the face of it. The cover story, that it was in respect of Islamic law, was poorly research and factually wrong.
It certainly goes against any common sense actions of exploiting the PR value and dispelling a fairly large amount of reasonable doubt that has accumulated over the past decade searching for Osama. For contrast, look how we dealt with Hussain and his sons.
In addition to accepting the odd official story about OBL burial at sea, the most likely alternative explaination is:
(2) Osama died awhile ago as many have suspected and reported, but we only recently obtained definite confirmation of such. Rather than let history record OBL peacefully died on the lam of natural causes embarrassing US efforts to find him, we made lemonaide out of lemons. We decided to misattribute another high value target assisination or stage a PR event to show the world you can run, but you can't hide (forever).
Given the history of our gov't and intelligence agencies over the past decade WoT, one needs to critically think about such events. Common sense, Occum's Razer and Who/Whom will get you past the squid ink most every the time.
The intelligence neccessary for this operation was gathered before Obama moved into the Whitehouse. I give him credit for acting on it and surgically striking Osama Bin Laden, but most of the credit goes to the CIA and SEALS. Bush also deserves some credit, as his interrogation techniques produced the actionable intelligence on Bin Laden's courier.
Obama has seen a 9 point bounce in his approval rating. 75 percent of Americans give him credit for killing Bin Laden, but only 35 percent give him a "great deal" of credit. I'd say Obama's hand is strengthened and that the Republicans need a candidate with gravitas to win.
Since I'm told that the secretive special ops Team 6 technically "does not exist," I think it would be great if New York City gave a ticker-tape parade to the SEALs, except it was an open, clearly empty limo driving down Broadway amid the hoopla.
That would show the world we have a puckish sense of humor, anyway.
The only possible explanation is that Pakistan was actively hiding Osama Bin Laden from us. Most likely to scam us into giving them more money to "search" for him. Nothing else makes sense.
It's suspicious that Bin Laden was so quickly thrown into the sea after his death. It's also suspicious that Bin Laden, despite not being armed, was shot to death instead of being captured. I know Whitehouse officials are telling us that they did want to offend Muslim customs, create a shrine at the burial site, etc..... but, as I remember, they had a very different approach to the Husseins. Saddam Hussein's sons were buried (no problems about a shrine back then) 11 days after the execution. Saddam was captured alive and, after a trial, buried too (couldn't he have become a shrine for the insurgents?). Something isn't right here.
"historical achievement advantage that will permanently and forever be a part of the history of the united states and remembered 200 years from now"
LOL, no.
Release the video of the entire operation:
just hide the faces of the US Seals..(the unit looked like America, I hope....)
Steve, the world's a giant chessboard tucked inside a poker game and we just took a triple agent off the table because the timing was right in 2011.
We protected OBL in the 90's and 00's because he was worth more alive than dead - then.
Clinton/Bush valued him as an Emanuel Goldstein.
USA and Pakistan knew where he was all along. This is how murky the rabbit holes really get at the top levels.
Bush's post 9/11 "I'm not worried about where Osama bin Laden is..." comment was classic. OBL was the CIA's pawn to keep close, and then sacrifice at a later date when America's Inner Party really needed the distraction.
Well, since Steve has just posted his 247th Bin Laden item, I suppose I might as well provide my own speculation. I've never been very interested in AfPak or 9/11 issues, so please don't give my ideas any more weight than you think they deserve...
First, let's assume that a U.S. team really did kill Bin Laden a couple of days ago, which seems increasingly likely to me. If it was actually just some sort of PR stunt, the only necessary explanation is the crosstabs data that Axelrod got from his polling/focus-group people.
Assuming we "got" Bin Laden a few days ago, the coincidence of timing seems the most intriguing factor.
Every morning for the last few weeks, the NYT and the rest of the MSM have described U.S.-Pakistani relations as being at their absolute lowest point in ten years. We've been hunting Bin Laden for a decade and he's supposedly been living in the house for 6 years. Now, suddenly, as our Pak relations are at a breaking point, we swoop in and shoot him. Maybe it really did take us all these years to locate him, but that seems a pretty remarkable coincidence of timing. Furthermore, with our relations being so absolutely bad right now, the likelihood of our getting the Pakis to cooperate with our attack would seem to also be at their lowest, making it much more risky than before. The whole thing seems very peculiar.
First, let's take a step back. Everyone who follows the region knows perfectly well that the main reason we're so heavily involved in Pakistan is because Israel doesn't like the idea of Muslims having nukes, and the Pakistanis have a different opinion. After all, the Israelis have been crazy about Iran even *thinking* of getting a nuke (even though U.S. intelligence says they abandoned their program years ago), and the Pakistan situation is real rather than merely hypothetical. (Incidentally, some very knowledgeable people think that's what led a couple of decades ago to the "mysterious" death of General Zia, our top regional ally, who started the nuke program, as well as all his top generals and as accidental collateral damage, the U.S. ambassador and also a visiting U.S. general.)
There's a great deal of speculation that the U.S. is deliberately destablizing Pakistan via organizing local terrorist attacks, in hopes of gaining an opportunity to seize the nukes. Even the NYT has mentioned that "kooky paranoid conspiracy theory" in about 20 articles. As a specific example, there seems quite a lot of evidence that Davis, that U.S. mercenary who killed those two Pakistani agents tailing him a couple of months ago, was organizing local terrorist attacks, which is obviously why the U.S. was so desperate to get him back before he spilled everything under threat of execution for murder.
(continued)
Now where does Bin Laden come into this picture? Well, the MSM talks about Bin Laden=9/11 just as much as they used to talk about Saddam=WMD, but as far as I can recall, nobody's ever actually provided any hard evidence that Bin Laden was really behind 9/11, except in the most tangential way, by denouncing America and urging brave Muslim jihadis to punish it for its endless misdeeds. On the other hand, the "Bin Laden=9/11" theme has become such a gigantic part of the underlying ideological basis for everything that's been done in America by the current Bush/Obama Regime that if it were to crack and be revealed as just another WMD-type hoax, a vast number of other things might start to unravel, seriously threatening the well-being of some of the people running the country.
So: maybe the Pakistanis were keeping Bin Laden stashed away as their ace-in-the-hole insurance policy against the American Regime, which they could threaten to use if we stepped too far over the line. For example, there was a front-page NYT story a week or two ago that the Pakistan directly told the Afghan President to dump America and instead ally with Pakistan and China. I'd think that made the Americans a little unhappy, and if we threatened them, maybe they threatened us back, and warned about playing their hidden ace on worldwide Al Jazeera if we went too far. And that made the American Regime absolutely desperate to remove that trump card, using a very risky and dangerous nighttime attack into the absolute heart of the Pakistani military state to permanently silence Bin Laden and take the Pakistani threat off the table once and for all. And that explains why we made absolutely sure to kill him rather than capture him like Saddam, Noreiga, Sheikh Khalid, and all the other really high-profile targets.
Anyway, that's must my own casual speculation. I'm sure other people can come up with alternate explanations of the amazing coincidence that we suddenly "got" Bin Laden just as our relations with Pakistan were at the absolute breaking point. Or maybe it really was just pure coincidence...
wes, when GW left office, i called him one of the bottom 5 presidents of all-time. every day, he proves me right. this entire episode makes bush look so bad, it's nearly incomprehensible.
i also called the invasion of iraq the biggest military blunder in the history of the united states, which it continues to be. is obama gonna let afghanistan give iraq a run for it's money?
will he double down on sheer, unbelievable foreign policy stupidity and start gallavanting around in pakistan now?
time will tell.
let the record stand that we should not take the US government's word on anything at face value. let obama prove that he killed osama bin laden. have we already forgotten that the US government assured us that there were WMDs in iraq? they lied to our faces. this process probably began in earnest around 1960 or so, when the white house was caught in a deliberate lie about not spying on the russians, after one of their aircraft was shot down by a surface to air missile (that they didn't know was possible) over russia.
I think it would be great if New York City gave a ticker-tape parade to the SEALs, except it was an open, clearly empty limo driving down Broadway amid the hoopla.
I love it. They say DNA testing means there'll be no more graves of "unknown soldiers". But there's no reason we can't have unknown heroes.
Let's declare VT Day, bring the boys home, and throw a party with one day's worth of the money saved from showering on these slippery f---ers.
On the murder....
http://911scholars.ning.com/profiles/blogs/if-the-official-account-of-bin
Robert in Arabia
The Obama admin loves squirting squid ink even more than the previous one. He has full immunity from the MSM, so he's gone to town with this approach as no other president could.
Obama's birth certificate is a perfect example. Why hide it for several years only to release it later? To manufacture controversy. To make the many other hidden lies, omissions and distortions seem less substantive when you reveal one shell is indeed empty. To undermine legitimate critics and thwart demands for transparency on issues that are embarrassing.
Obama's team has tossed up so many false dots one doesn't know which should be connected and which should be ignored. It's a great way to hide the many aspects to his history that would disqualify most other politicians.
OBL was the CIA's pawn to keep close, and then sacrifice at a later date when America's Inner Party really needed the distraction.
I'm already bored. I want pictures! I want video!
As a pimply 14-year old, I couldn't get over the irony of Pakistan being declared as America's strategic ally in the war against terrorism.
A decade and few cursory glances at history later, I realize that:
"The universe is perfect, nothing is wrong or could be. There seems to be chance or unpredictability from a human perspective but that is only because our time frame reference can not see the universe emerge through its whole life span in a matter of minutes. "
americaaa...americaaa!! fuck yeah!!
dubya's WMD kumbaya!! fuck yeah!!
obama's encounter of osama!!!!!
meh
I don't believe any of it. That doesn't mean it's not true. I don't beleieve anything these people say on principle.
The thing that matters is whatever they want is guaranteed to be bad. They want to stay in Afghanistan therefore we should LEAVE. They want to turn Pakistan into a new bogeyman therefore we should ignore them and LEAVE morer.
.
"Huh? Wouldn't OBL have heard a firefight and have had guns at the ready by the time they came into his room?"
Not if it was a prison.
Oh please, you're chasing your tails here. Obama knew about 8 months ago (says his own people) and then ... dithered for about 8 months over what to do (i.e. voting present again).
Obama did not suddenly become man of action. He's who he always has been, a guy who gives speeches that sends thrills up Media guys legs because he's Black and can talk in standard English. Thus he's a "Supergenius!"
When presented the plan on a silver platter and confronting plunging poll ratings, he chose cake and ice cream. Big wow!
It does not look good for Obama long-term.
First, people want to know why he dithered. Second, why the PC haste to dump the body to "avoid offending Muslims" (which is consistent with not flying the American Flag at Gitmo reported on Drudge to avoid "offending" the prisoners there).
It is more PC dithering and weakness, Obama's flaw.
Next, no pictures. Why? Because again he's afraid of "offending Muslims" who he values more than pumping up American voters. Another Obama flaw.
Obama is the super-genius who thought it a good idea to let the American people develop a majority opinion that he was not born in the US or was hiding something.
Why not release the birth certificate immediately? What does he gain by not doing so for three years and making most people think he's sneaky and hiding something?
Answer: that's the sort of small-time weaseling that a State Senator from an all-Black district would pull. It does not work on the big show (See Richard Nixon).
Now Obama is vulnerable to charges he (admits) "I actually believe my own bull-shit."
Obama is Mr. Multilateralism. America is just another country. No lapel flag pin because "patriotism is stupid," and no attention during the National Anthem because he's too cool. He's said over and over again that Pakistan is an ally. But his action showed he does not actually believe it -- when it came time to pull the trigger he did so.
By treating Pakistan like an enemy.
jody said...
i'll connect some dots for you.
sarah palin is now finished as any kind of serious candidate for president, and the republicans should do whatever they can to get her to shut up and go away. she's dumb, she doesn't know what she's talking about, and every time she opens her mouth it's bad for republicans. she can't do anything but hurt them now, which was all she really could ever have done, but now it's certain.
I see that Sarah Palin scares certain people shitless.
And the new book out about Gitmo linked off Drudge contains more Captain BS tidbits:
*Holder wanted to try the CIA interrogators (who produced the jihadi alias for the guy bin Laden trusted, the courier). Rahm did not.
Emmanuel is gone, Holder remains, the CIA is going to leak like a sieve against Obama predictably.
*Holder wanted to try KSM and all the other guys in civilian court in NYC to basically let them walk. Figuring it would be "good for America" ... Emmanuel won that round but got pushed out. Black solidarity beats rational politics.
Obama is a SUPER GENIUS!
Then there is (sorry for broken up comments, stupid Blogger!)
... the whole "Gitmo must be closed, no interrogations" stuff that Obama promised, and pushed hard. All of that, waterboarding, black site interrogations, Gitmo, the Patriot Act, all the things Obama hates and spoke out at length against, were ...
INSTRUMENTAL in FINDING bin Laden.
Everyone knew he was somewhere in Pakistan. It's a big country filled with people. The question was where. To find the guy meant doing and using all the things that Obama Captain Bullshit hated.
Which makes Obama weak -- when push came to shove he dumped the bullshit (Pakistan is an ally, no waterboarding, law enforcement for terrorism).
Look at bin Laden getting shot. Obama GAVE THE ORDER TO KILL HIM. You can't be Captain Save the Planet Wonderful Nobel Prize winner and do that.
I'm generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, not because there are no conspiracies, but because they're all too easy (and entertaining) to fabricate. Nevertheless, and just for the sake of argument, one could point out that when the US wanted into Afghanistan and Iraq, OBL was a useful bogeyman. Nearly a decade on, assuming that the US wants to (more or less) leave Iraq and Afghanistan, a vanquished OBL provides a psychological pretext for doing so. We slayed the dragon, and we can now leave the cave, our honor intact.
Maybe OBL lost his usefulness -- whatever that was -- to the Pakistanis, and they sold him out. Maybe somebody in the DOD decided OBL was now more useful dead than alive. While I'm not convinced that this scenario is true, I suspect pretty strongly that there is an awful lot about our relationship to Pakistan, and the propaganda utility of an evil mastermind lurking in cave, that our leaders would prefer we not think about too much.
Which makes any coherent Republican attack obvious and simple -- get in the gap between Obama's actions:
*Kill Bin Laden, no prisoners!
*Waterboard away!
*Black sites!
*Pakistan is our enemy!
And his BS speeches and policies. Ask him WHEN (he will NEVER EVER DO THIS because Holder is BLACK!) he'll fire Holder for wanting to prosecute CIA interrogators who helped find bin Laden. Ask him when he'll start treating Pakistan like the enemy they are on a regular basis. Ask him when he'll resume waterboarding to find the rest of the crew. Ask him when he'll start shooting Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other nasties we have now.
One final point ...
Getting the real name (not the alias) of the guy bin Laden trusted the most only came about because we picked up Hassan Ghul in IRAQ and he sang like a canary (at a Black site) about the guy acting as bin Laden's key courier. The guy who was in fact, staying with bin LAden. Without that guy, we would never have found bin Laden.
Somewhat OT, Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall tweeted:
"What kind of person celebrates death? It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side..."
Mendenhall didn't hold back, even making a reference to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We'll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.
Among his other bin Laden tweets:
"I believe in God. I believe we're ALL his children. And I believe HE is the ONE and ONLY judge."
"Those who judge others, will also be judged themselves."
"For those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn ... I ask how would God feel about your heart?"
"There is not an ignorant bone in my body. I just encourage you to think."
Obama is the super-genius who thought it a good idea to let the American people develop a majority opinion that he was not born in the US or was hiding something.
Something just occurred to me ... I haven't paid much attention to the most recent birth certificate (or whatever it is supposed to be). But I had also forgotten about the original certificate of live birth (or whatever it was supposed to be) which circulated originally (a year or more ago). What do reasonable people think that was/is?
Note to mouth-breathers: DNA testing can take as little as a few hours and doesn't require that many resources. It can easily be done with some basic lab equipment in an afternoon.
Also, for those wondering why the Hussein sons were treated "very differently", there's a quite simple explanation: this is a "very different" administration. Different people made that call.
The motive that "he died long ago but we decided to take credit now by staging a big SEAL operation" is retarded.
Saddam Hussein's sons never got the respectful Islamic burial. Nobody worried that their grave (or their father's) would become a shrine. This crap about respecting Islam and burial site terrorist shrines is nonsensical. If we didn't care about it during the middle of a protracted civil war, why should we care now?
A lot of Muslims think burial at sea is disrespectful. Why inflame them and create more terrorist sympathizers? Why not a more respectful land burial or at least giving the body to the family? Unless, of course, you don't give a damn about Muslim sentiment and are using that as an excuse to dispose of a body quickly and permanently.
The Whitehouse gave us some baloney about not being able to find a country to bury the body. That's stupid, as we could just find some secret location. Like we did with Al-Zarqawi's body. That would've solved the shrine problem too.
Bin Laden also had no gun. Why not capture him and put him on trial, like we did with Saddam and with numerous terrorists? Maybe at least we could torture Bin Laden and get some useful information??
Osama Bin Laden was killed and disposed of quickly to cover up something important. That much I guarantee.
I don't see the point of destroying the body so quickly. There are plenty of people who don't believe Obama was born here, or who think 9/11 was an inside job. Obama just barely resolved the birth certificate mess, after fighting litigation for years. Does the concept of evidence mean nothing to these people?
"We (most of us) were defending Bush against all manner of attack, but in the end, Bush & Co. weren't returning the favor by looking out for us."
Bush enjoyed acting the tough guy cowboy, but when it came down to making tough decisions he shrank from duty. The war against Afghanistan after 9/11 was only a given. The victory in Iraq was a given - daddy had done that before. But when it came down to acknowledging that Iraq wasn't going well, or getting more troops into the field (via draft or some such) he didn't have the balls. He didn't have the balls to stand up to the business community on illegal immigration, the Dubai ports deal, or much of anything else - assuming he even wanted to. The failure to secure the borders and reduce Muslim immigration, and the willingness to sell ports to Dubai undermined every argument Bush ever made about the pressing need for national security.
You start to wonder just how much crazy shit he did during his 15+ years of alcoholism - and if you're an alcoholic, you do a lot of crazy shit - and how much blackmail material people had on him.
"I'd say Obama's hand is strengthened and that the Republicans need a candidate with gravitas to win."
Which may actually be a bonus, if you believe that Republican pols don't care about the interests of the middle class. Riding into office on the coattails of a struggling economy won't be so easy now. I prefer for the Republicans to have to earn their victory.
"so let's see. intelligence advantage: obama. experience advantage: obama in a landslide."
But you're only comparing Obama to Palin. And, for the record, she also has zero experience leading the United States into a $1.4 trillion budget deficit.
"historical achievement advantage that will permanently and forever be a part of the history of the united states and remembered 200 years from now: obama."
I doubt the people living 200 years from now, in the geographic area now known as the United States, will give a flying gerbil about us or feel any connection to us, in the same way that most Americans don't really feel much in common with the natives who lived here a few hundred years ago.
"Release the video of the entire operation:
just hide the faces of the US Seals..(the unit looked like America, I hope....)"
Ha! How can you expect the unit to look like America when not even the situation room looked like America? I make out 13 faces in that pic: 12 whites and a guy who is only half not-white.
"When presented the plan on a silver platter and confronting plunging poll ratings, he chose cake and ice cream. Big wow!"
I have to agree with Whiskey here. OMG, what's happened to me.
Obama couldn't take a chance that OBL might suddenly leave that compound.
He's been in free fall in the polls and I think he knows the economy will not be healthy in the run-up to election.
A bombing of the compound would have accomplished nothing. The SEAL team is the best.
It may not have been a free throw or a lay up, but it was no heave from midcourt nor a three pointer with the defender's hand in his face. After all the good intel and months of practice, it was more of a 12 footer over a shorter guy.
It's obvious.
Whilst everyone was looking in the caves and mountains, Bin Laden lived (in considerable comfort), precisely where people weren't looking - good, cunning 'poker or even chess-playing' strategy.
Obviously paki high command were 'in' on this little deception - and 100s must have held their tongues for years (despite massive cash rewards - how's that for loyalty).You see i a war between 'christians' and 'muslims', the pakis know which side they are on.
"LOL, no."
in 200 years, nobody will remember anything about obama's policies, nor the policies of the president before, nor the policies of the next president. however, in every american history book, there will clearly be a several page story on 9/11, the era of osama bin laden, how america changed drastically, and the president who found him and killed him, barack hussein obama. you can bet your ass on that, friend. that's a permanent part of every american history book from now until forever. anybody who thinks otherwise must be deluded.
"I see that Sarah Palin scares certain people shitless."
sarah palin should scare the living shit out of every republican voter. she's a guaranteed loss for the republicans in 2012. they couldn't secure a more certain defeat by running her than if they ran mccain again.
"Note to mouth-breathers: DNA testing can take as little as a few hours and doesn't require that many resources. It can easily be done with some basic lab equipment in an afternoon."
DNA testing can be done in the field in the time frame they suggest, but it's not basic lab equipment and is expensive. military units are the main buyers of the equipment that could have been used to ID bin laden given the situation and time. the military is a primary developer of DNA testing methods, as it wants a way to identify guys who are dead, whether they are hit by artillery shells and all that's left is paste, bits, and fluids, or whether they are broken and decayed mush from 2 years ago just found in the field recently. i think this is where mitochondrial DNA testing came from.
"The motive that he died long ago but we decided to take credit now by staging a big SEAL operation is retarded."
almost as retarded as spending 10 years, 1 trillion dollars, and hundreds of american soldiers' lives, only to in 24 hours, attack, kill, and dump in the ocean america's arch enemy. that really, really makes no sense, no matter how many spins and turns the white house uses. that's serious career lawyer spinmeistering, and remember that almost all those guys are career lawyers. it sounds like them trying to make up plausible excuses for a screw up which now appears to have been quite colossal. they easily, easily could have taken possession of the body, kept it all "need to know, eyes only", done an autopsy, documented everything, then 1 week later, buried him in some random location nobody would ever know.
i can buy that it all went down like obama says, but if it did, it was preposterously stupid to just dump his body in the fucking ocean in like 12 hours. WTF, man. also note, the white house is already changing the details of it's story.
"But you're only comparing Obama to Palin."
yeah, that was pretty much the idea. when i compared palin to obama, i...compared palin to obama. i wasn't talking about the field. i was burying sarah palin, some obscure nobody with no brainpower who, through total luck, we all had to hear run her mouth for about 2 years. listening to her brain moving ideas into her mouth was like listening to the manager at a chili's or a friday's talk about what she would do as president. i'm dead serious.
"Ha! How can you expect the unit to look like America when not even the situation room looked like America? I make out 13 faces in that pic: 12 whites and a guy who is only half not-white."
yeah, that was funny. even funnier was pointing out that the SEALs were, almost certainly to a sailor, european men, and wondering why obama didn't send in the diversitroops like his advisory panel suggested. the average person seems to get pissed that anybody would bring that up right now, but, i think we need to think like the liberals would, who view US politics as a life or death, winner take all battle for the soul of america, where any means are justified. we should hit them back in the mouth whenever possible even when it's rude. that's what they would do to conservatives.
i wonder if richard lapchick would give seal team 6 an F for diversity. rivals.com would certainly rate their draft as an F. way, way, way not enough afroletic blathletes on that roster.
Is that true? Can someone tell me if it's at all possible the SEALS copter didn't have to refuel to go back across the border to a safe landing area?
From the pictures I have seen it seems that some choppers have in-flight refueling nozzles. SO theoretically they could have refueled in the air. Just an observation.
"You know, this whole thing doesn't so much make Obama look good (although it does) as it makes Bush look bad. He had 8 years to seriously look for and drill this guy in head, but instead spent a trillion dollars and 3,000 lives on a tragic misadventure"
Why does it make him look good? He didn't do anything. He never does anything. He only talks at a teleprompter.
He was never in the military and from what I've seen, is generally despised by members of the military, even more than was Clinton. He was, however, in the CIA in Pakistan, so maybe that makes up for it.
He was the first president to skip the American Legion inaugural ball although he is supposed to have "honored" the Medal of Honor recipients at another occasion. Did what protocol absolutely demanded but in his comfort zone.
He's a slimy piece of work, but he's not responsible for this "kill." This is the work of some PR shills. OBL has been dying or declared dead for at least 10 years, so I guess they had to use him before he passed too far in memory.
But now that the Big, Bad Witch is Officially Dead and thrown in the vast ocean (so they say), can we have less groping at American airports of John Does, Miss America and sundry 5 years olds, by TSA strangers?
Not Udolpho said....
Osama died awhile ago as many have suspected and reported, but we only recently obtained definite confirmation of such. Rather than let history record OBL peacefully died on the lam of natural causes embarrassing US efforts to find him, we made lemonaide out of lemons. We decided to misattribute another high value target assisination or stage a PR event to show the world you can run, but you can't hide (forever).
Given the history of our gov't and intelligence agencies over the past decade WoT, one needs to critically think about such events. Common sense, Occum's Razer and Who/Whom will get you past the squid ink most every the time.
That's my own guess too. The moment the news came out my BS detector went on panic mode. Seals my ass.
What happened was the CIA just threw a soft ball to Obama. Now he's a two-termer.
Please tell me Steve you don't really believe any of this.
'...kerosene grill on the floor, for instance.' No dialysis machine though? Not to mention suicide belts and similar paraphenalia so beloved in certain circles.
Whole narrative feels like Cass Sunstein conoction to gauge how much bull can be spoon fed to American public. Results are encouraging.
Ha, ha, ha!
Our old "Scots-Irish" friend "Whiskey" seems awfully worked up about something. He posted NINE(!!!) near-consecutive comments here, and I've never seen him previously try to do such massive filibustering. I wonder what about this particular thread got him so extremely agitated...
Ha, ha, ha!
Wahabbi/Salafi types don't turn graves into shrines. Years ago, I read about Afghan villagers turning mujahidin graves into shrines, but if OBL's body had been buried in the Arabian peninsula, the chances of it turning into a shrine would be almost zero.
Luke Lea said, "Video on tv of the interiors show it to have been spartan to the point of primitive -- kerosene grill on the floor, for instance."
Note to self: inform husband that not everyone considers a kerosene grill on the floor evidence of the opulent life-style American wives demand.
I wonder what about this particular thread got him so extremely agitated...
His headgear wiring is frying because of a glitch in his program:
OBAMA=BAD
OSAMA=BAD(ERGO, OBAMA=OSAMA=OBAMA)
MILITARY=GOOD
MILITARY KILLING MUSLIMS=DOUBLE PLUS GOOD
OBAMA KILLING OSAMA=DOES NOT COMPUTE! DOES NOT COMPUTE!
This goes for the whole wretched birther/deather complex. The White House can't even get away with petty embellishments (the "firefignt"; Obama "shielding" himself behind woman; etc).
Yet they'd have us believe in Rube Goldberg-like conspiracies going back years. All because they can't stand Obama and what he represents. They're like the friggin' OJ jury.
Note to birther/deathers:
YOU'RE NOT HELPING!
Well, I suspect the Democratic Party is grateful for your efforts.
'Obama "shielding" himself behind woman...'
Typo or Freudian slip?
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