Bin Laden Dead?

do you really?

a foreign policy dude i check for (but don't agree with about very much) gives his take

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bin-laden-killed-5674519

nothing earth shattering really!

like i know i'm a midwestern rube who lives in an unimportant city, but (honest q) are ppl really expecting swift, successful retribution for this? i've never really bought the idea that obl was, like, a folk hero. dude facilitated terrorism, but i can't imagine he ~inspired~ it.

maybe i'm wrong, but i never got a "revolutionary" vibe

I think it's ok to feel elated, OBL killed 3K of my neighbords. How often do people like him never have to pay the piper? I'm thinking of Pol Pot and Pinochet living to be old men when they, too, deserved bullets to the brain.

Uh, neighbors.

that is: i doubt there are fencesitters out there who, upon hearing of osama's demise, suddenly felt compelled to do a terrorism

so i'm being interviewed by BBC World in like 45 minutes live -- idk, if anyone wants to watch...

four guys with camo and rifles at the 34th street stop looking particularly icy

Haven't these guys been around bigger stations since 9/11 tho? Maybe not the subway but I used to see them all the time in Penn. Wait - isn't that where the 34th st stop is?

Interpol is warning to be extra alert for retaliatory attacks

p sure that osama ranks pretty low on the scale of history's greatest monsters, certainly several rungs below pol pot

I'm really just nitpicking, but alternatively referring to OBL as a "mastermind" of 9/11 and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed the same way doesn't really strike me as great terminology.

Interpol is warning to be extra alert for retaliatory attacks

all I gave them was one lousy bad review.

wait waht, Mordy?

haha yeah that was a little throwaway

I called into NPR this morning to share my experience re 9/11 + bin laden and they called me to do a live interview at 3:15EST over Skype

mordy is that a 'man on the street' thing, or are you a seal or something

xp lol well done sir!

My Dinner With Osama

man on the street thing -- i don't even get BBC World tho, does this kind of thing get published online so i can link my parents to it and make them proud?

don't forget to tell them about lorax

Mordy:

http://www.headshift.com/blog/seal-of-approval.jpg

I think I'm going to be on for like a minute, lol

major love tho if any of you are able to tape/record whatever it...

can you work in a mention to the Hot Rod song?

If you throw in a "Suck my cheesesteak, Morbius" I will paypal you one trillion dollars.

Honestly, I never gave much weight to threats of terrorist retaliation and doomsday scenarios or whatever. Like, if the stated goal of Al Qaeda is the destruction/defeat of the US, why would they sit on the means to achieve that? Like, "Oh, shit, you killed Bin Laden?! Now it's on! Now it's serious! Doomsday scenario: go!!!"

http://feministing.com/2011/05/02/bin-laden-obama-and-the-democrats-shameless-together/

feministing posts something by a philosophy prof at hampshire.

little bit different take than what you'll see in most places today...

Bin Laden hid behind women in firefight: White House

"I believe, Mr. Radio Personality, that he was actually killed by my friend Erica's dog Benson, not Navy Seals."

one trillion dollars is a lot of money!

good luck, Mordy. Now we need you at The Corner.

stated goal of Al Qaeda is the destruction/defeat of the US, why would they sit on the means to achieve that? Like, "Oh, shit, you killed Bin Laden?! Now it's on! Now it's serious! Doomsday scenario: go!!!"

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, May 2, 2011 1:44 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark

p much how i feel, too. like maybe the dude had a "if/when i'm dead" killswitch plot or something but if Al Qaeda were actually able to commit atrocities on American soil, they'd be doing it.

I honestly do not know how legitimate the danger of retaliation from Al-Qaeda is, but the impression I got so far is that Fox News is selling it p hard to the American people to, I assume, build up a case against withdrawing troops from the Middle East and ending the War on Terror--my guess is that they are afraid that will be Obama's next move.

I also think that if this whole 'deather' thing happens, it will probably hit full-force if & when Obama starts pulling out troops...

Frum:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/02/frum.binladen.obama/index.html?hpt=T2

Who were the others killed, btw?

woman shield, his son, two bodyguards iirc

0.637 miles, 1.026 km from the Pakistan military academy.

http://i54.tinypic.com/35cl6oj.jpg

http://i54.tinypic.com/35cl6oj.jpg

There was speculation that OBL's youngest wife was in the house, and supposedly he was using a woman as a human shield and she died in a crossfire, so it sounds likely it was her.

daniel larison with the cold water

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2011/05/02/fighting-the-hydra/

Obviously, losing prominent individual leaders hurts insurgencies and terrorist groups, but in the way we talk about these figures we tend to exaggerate greatly how important they are as part of the larger conflict. We have seen the latest version of this in the recent “accidental” assassination attempts on Gaddafi, as if Gaddafi’s death would force his sons to surrender rather than fight on. Indeed, the more that Americans come to believe that killing individual leaders is a ready-made solution to policy problems, the easier it will be to sell supposedly low-risk, promiscuous interventionism facilitated by missile strikes or special forces. It also helps to keep people from thinking very much about any of the other things that stoke jihadism and insurgency, and it encourages the false comfort that we just need to kill enough of the right people to prevail.

belatedly: this is awesome, & kinda like the michele bachmann thing whereby the argument rests not on one's compliance with law or receipt of information, but on the grace of the other side - bachman deigning to 'take him at his word', & ol' man frogbs equanimity in overlooking dumb laws and those who flaunt them

tbh I never really know what he's on about, he also believes that 9/11 was an inside job and all that. he was in the air force for a good 15 years and claims to have worked on the iraq war...to his credit he's been able to predict most of the major developements in the war and the mortgage crisis way ahead of time; i don't really take much of what he says too seriously but I don't really think he's racist either. if he is then he's getting some form of poetic justice because all three of his sons have either married or are engaged to women from different countries including pakistan

xp to Mordy - well done, and if my impressions of BBC World are anything to go by, you'll be on hourly in businessman's hotels worldwide for the next year or so

wait, Mordy's doing pr0n?

Exciting! I'll be a minor businessman hotel celebrity.

Also, how long before the first "kill Osama Scarface-style" mods/mission packs are released for Socom/MW2/etc? I remember the original batch of Counterstrike mods being out within 48 hours

be sure to wave a "recognizably human" flag

COUNTER TERRORISTS WIN

Next map: cs_Libya

i'm two-thirds white btw

― dell (del), Monday, 2 May 2011 15:33 (3 hours ago)

what, do you have two dads and a mom?

re: Obama's speech. Perfect for the non-elitist core he's trying to win votes from

or one parent full white & one 1/6 white

George F. Will, vindicating John Kerry:

Barack Obama, in his pitch-perfect address informing the nation that bin Laden is as dead as communism — never mind the cadaverous Cuban and North Korean regimes — rightly stressed that this is “the most significant achievement to date” against al-Qaeda, but that it “does not mark the end of” our effort to defeat that amorphous entity. Perhaps, however, America can use this occasion to draw a deep breath and some pertinent conclusions.

Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — some lair: not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.

Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled. Still, the enormous military footprint in Afghanistan, next door to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.