Osama Bin Laden dead
 

He's dead folks, killed in a skirmish today, the body's in US custody. DNA testing done from a sample of his dead sister confirmed it's him.

It's blowing up all over the internet, I'm still a smidge skeptical it's not true. Only because he's been reported "dead" like 10 times since 2002.

Anyway, hope it is. Hope his beard is sewn into an american flag. Hope his turban is used to wipe Uncle Sam's ass. etc.

Apparently he died a week ago and we just got the body.

There's a million different stories, many of them are likely misinformed. I'm watching Obama's address to the nation on CNN right now, he claims US soldiers entered a firefight with him and killed him today, then took the body into custody. But the story will be all filled out soon enough I'm sure.

Good. Very good. Ten long years. I really hope there is a hell and he's there.

Long overdue. Too long overdue. Just way too fucking long overdue.

I wish I could shake the hands of every one of our brothers involved in this operation.

I think since the US has custody of his body, we make it a memorial accessable to everyone. Placed over the body will be a toilet, and one by one, everyone can pay their respects to him.

If we had it for a week, why not tell us Friday afternoon instead of Sunday night. A dead bin Laden, and a bump in the economy, all in one weekend.

I'm still processing it. I sort of gave up hope. And now, well, what happens now?

You guys know what this means, right? It means we're getting the fuck out of Afghanistan. Obama has just the excuse he needs - we took out the head of Al-Qaeda, which means they're pretty much destroyed*, so why stay in Afghanistan when finishing off Al-Qaeda was the objective all along?







*Of course, the withdrawal was inevitable anyway, and it's debatable whether Bin Laden was really in charge the last 10 years.

This is only meaningful if we can revert to the pre-9/11 world. Strategically this is meaningless, Bin Laden hasn't been the man with the plan for a long time now. If we continue to live in this state of paranoia and fear, then his spectre still haunts us.

9/10/2001 never forget.

Mineral deposits, billions and billions of dollars worth of mineral deposits. We're not giving that up, not with the heathen Chinese right next door.

Bean burritos on me!

Anyone up for the osama Bin laden memorial pig roast?


:D

Al Qaeda is still around, and some other asshole will surely replace Osama.


I hope that there will not be an attack because of this. And if there is, I hope the don't hit somewhere important like Texas City

He's been replaced numerous times. Al Zawahiri comes to mind.

Of course he'll take it and run. Sure, it may allow the Taliban to come back, but that won't be on his watch.

I just bought 2lb of coffee for a buddy in Afghanistan. I hope I won't have to send it.

CNN reports bin Laden was buried at sea and "handled in the Islamic tradition."

http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/CNNInternatDesk/~OrTP5

I'm not really sure how to react to this. It seems uncharacteristically "respectful" toward him. :confused:

They're IDIOTS. All the tin foil hatted conspiracy theorists will have a field day. They SHOULD have brought the body back to the U.S. so that all the relatives who lost a loved on on 9/11 can take a ceremonious DUMP on the cadaver's face!:mad:

Yes, but UBL was THE poster boy of the entire Extremist Jihadist movement. Nobody was walking around with T-shirts of Al Zarahiri, but Bin Laden was a legitimate CELEBRITY amongst the Islamic backwaters.

We have finally caught Osama Bun Laden. Now he's finally in hell, sweating his ass off with his poker buddies, Saddam Hussein and Satan.

I'm justing posting my two cents. I am not going into any further discussion. But here I will personally tell Burt him why nobody likes him:

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh...nhhzo1_500.gif

This is meaningful for other reasons burt, the national enemy was just killed.

Seems bin laden and 3 others were gunned down, sorry GM45, your memorial sounds awesome but they buried him....why show that asshole respect throw himin the waste bin

This is roughly what the Soviets did with Hitler and the Fuhrerbunker because they knew it would work out the same way; if there's a grave, there's weirdos out there who will want to turn it into a shrine.

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/6600/kdssc.jpg

Also, is said that the choppers involved in the attack came from India. Another India vs Pakistan conflict?

Obama didnt do anything. It was the military going balls out and kicking ass.

No, it appeared we went in with the full cooperation of the Pakistanis. Getting India and Pakistan to agree on something? It's been a hell of a week for the president.

Exactly, thank you for bringing up this point. If Bin Laden has millions of admirers in the Muslim world (which we know he does), the last things we want to do is create ANY sort of shrine for him. (Regardless of what it's intended to be, that is how his followers will treat it.)

Also, I realize that almost everyone on here hates Obama and his team passionately, but give them credit where it's due: I'd say this counts as a major victory won by the administration.

As much as I want to believe one of our Team 6 boys ventilated OBL's skull, things aren't really adding up when I further contemplate it.

Firstly, only one photograph of his remains is circulating the web and it's believed to be a digitized hoax (Google "Osama Bin Laden Corpse" and decide for yourself, but while an admittedly gruesome image, it looks Photoshopped to me).

And secondly, we've seen in the past how US military/federal agents love to make a show of parading captured terrorists in front of TV cameras or releasing photos of dead ones' remains into the media. But with the most wanted terrorist in US history now allegedly dead and his remains in US custody, they ever so suddenly, and with very little fanfare, give him a quiet "burial" at sea? It makes no sense. Since when does our government decline an opportunity to toot its own horn? Never that I know of. And keep in mind that our failure to immediately capture OBL has constantly been used as a joke against us by the international community. Why would they decline an opportunity to rub this back in the faces of the likes of Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing? They wouldn't, they'd want to make us look as badass and tough as possible in our rivals' eyes.

I want to believe we got him just as much as you guys do, but the course of events aren't matching up to me. With the only known photographic evidence being suspect, no known publicly-available video footage of the raid, and our only "confirmation" that he's dead coming from the mouth of the president and "sources" of various news agencies that may or may not be credible, I'm finding this whole situation a little suspect and hard to swallow.

I hope something's released later, it does seem weird, im guessing the admistration is afraid of offending anyone. But id gladly show video. Hell id mount cameras on the rails of the seals rifles and have vids of where every shot lands and watch bin ladens head exploding. But yeah im not a political type.

The Islamic tradition is burial within 24 hours, so that's 24 hours to take photographs, video, run tests, etc, before dumping him in the ocean. (And they did do a DNA test.) I'm sure we'll get a tasteful photo within a day or two.

The pic REALLY looks chopped, we should wait a while for the real ones.

Okay, they said that DNA testing is underway. Man, what if they were wrong? You'd think the administration would want to be absolutely certain before going public with this.

And it looks like his safehouse was down the road from the Pakistani Military Academy. So Pakistan, anything you want to tell us here?

Say what you want about musharraf but he wasnt a pussy when it came to fighting terrorists like then new paki gov.

I think you are being a little too cynical.

As Evil Tim pointed out, it's a bad idea to publicly display Bin Laden's body if he has followers who will just see him as a martyr. This isn't a case of the Obama administration being "respectful" of Islamic tradition due to their liberal naivety; there are historic precedents where the same decision was made.

That being said, I'd expect the horn-tooting to commence sooner rather than later. Obama's address last night was full of swag and confidence that I've almost never heard in any speech he's given related to the War on Terror. I can already tell that he's going to milk this victory for all it's worth (because let's face it - he needed this, badly, to have a chance in 2012).

Yes, but his national security team was the one that had to verify the info that Bin Laden was at the site was credible, and for such a high-value target, Obama obviously had to sign the final authorization to attack. So in that regard, he did have to do something.

I think the choppers actually came from Afghanistan, and judging by reports that they flew under Pakistani radar and the SEALs blew up a damaged helicopter on-site before leaving, they probably only solicited Pakistani cooperation after the fact.

Yeah, but who´s going to take the credit for it?

Exactly. By k9870's definition, no President in history can ever claim credit for successful military operations unless they are the ones who personally gather the intelligence and lead the troops on the ground themselves. Kennedy can't be given any credit for resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis (actually, some historians would argue that it's partially his fault the crisis occurred), and Carter can't be blamed for the debacle of the Iran hostage crisis.

Sorry, k9870, but I think you are trying a little too hard to discredit a President you don't like. Don't. One doesn't have to like Obama to admit that he did something right (or, indeed, very well) on this one occasion. Or are you just being sarcastic again? (Yes, I considered that possibility, but you aren't very good at conveying sarcasm in your posts, as I'm sure you've seen repeatedly by responses to them.)

I'm not going to take anything away from Barry. He made the call, it happened on his watch, and he deserves to reap as much political capital out of this as he can. But, as a partisan, I would like to point out that he didn't do anything that GWB wouldn't have done. In the end, he didn't negotiate bin Laden's surrender, he didn't coax bin Laden's friends to turn on him, they took him out with brute force, shooting first and asking questions later, just like GWB would have.

Let's rephrase that a bit. While I (and many other commentators) have long since noticed that Obama's foreign policy is pretty much indistinguishable from Dubya's at this point, it would be more accurate to say that Obama now is more like Bush in the last two years of his presidency. If we talk "classical" neo-con Bush doctrine (invade countries, impose regime change, seek to spread democracy), Obama is still at least an improvement in that regard. But again, Bush himself was an improvement over Bush by the end.

Also, while Obama has been using drone attacks and targeted killings with a frequency that even Bush never approached, it is human intelligence and cooperation with foreign assets that makes all of this possible. There is a lot of debate right now amongst counterterrorism scholars about targeted killings and Obama's use of them (some scholars claim that it's undermining our "soft power" capabilities in the Muslim world). Personally, I am a huge fan of strikes like the one that killed Bin Laden - whether it's drones or SF who conduct them. Al-Qaeda's entire program is based on the assumption that they can get us to keep invading Muslim countries and then bleeding us of our power with guerrilla warfare (the way that the Afghan mujahideen did to the USSR). Bush was stupid enough to fall for it, while still failing to kill Bin laden.

As far as I am concerned, Obama's administration has perfected an effective counter to the Islamists' style of warfare; they may still be able to parade around their "martyrs" in the Arab media who are killed by the drone attacks, but it's much harder to sell young jihadis on the idea of dying gloriously while fighting the Crusaders. Because there's nothing romantic about getting taken out by a Hellfire missile or killed in bed by Delta operators. Plus, targeted killings are cheap enough that we can do them indefinitely - whereas occupying an entire country is both expensive and futile, and almost always guarantees that the insurgents will win as long as their cause survives (no matter how many die). The fact that Obama recognized the efficacy of this method of warfare and has continued to employ it is something for which he deserves credit. I can forgive any and all of his retarded leftist peacenik rhetoric as long as he keeps the targeted killings going.

BTW, I notice there have been a lot of people pointing out that Bin Laden was killed in a residential area of Abbottobad, in an expensive villa. Everyone seems to be focused on what this says about Pakistani cooperation. I just find it interesting that he died this way, instead of in some cave within jihadi territory where he would have had to deal with the hardships of nature as well as combat. It's going to be just a little bit harder for Al-Qaeda to sell him as a "holy warrior" when he died in a fairly luxurious setting, with protection from rogue elements of a government that is already despised in most of the Muslim world for being an American ally (albeit a reluctant and difficult one). It makes him look more like a gangster than a rebel leader. If I were in the administration, my next move right now would be to flood the 'Net with snapshots of Bin Laden's compound.

Apaprently hes been in that setting a very long time too. Our first lead was august i think? And the compunds been standing like 5 years. I really dont understand pakistan though. They see this big compound and never check it out? Have a military installation near by? They could have just blown the gate open and taken osama out, theyd look good to the americans too. Hell their economy sucks bad enough the reward money wouldve come in handy too.

Remember that when you talk about the "Pakistani government", you basically aren't talking about a single cohesive entity. If Bin Laden was receiving Pakistani government protection, we're probably talking about rogue elements of the military (particularly the ISI), not the entire government. It's not even obvious that those dudes would have been motivated solely by ideology, either (Bin Laden might have simply been paying them off).

But we'll find out more, I am sure. Bin Laden's death is probably going to cast more light upon the ISI-Taliban-Al-Qaeda relationship than ever before.