Bin Laden Dead?

that typo will always be funny

i took max's point to be, if they were intentionally lying to us, why admit the account was wrong? considering there was no pressure and no way their story could be authoritatively challenged.

these days i'm just having trouble telling the truth from the lies!!!!

what are we assuming was being watched in that now-famous room pic? like, helmet cams or something?

xp ha i guess yes, helmet cams it is!

Ubama Hussein

my eyes are rolled so far back in my head at this point i look like little orphan annie

jeez louise!!!! we need a straight shooter to tell it like it is!!!!

that's so you don't have to see their LIES man

xp

i think they could have just "went with it" w/r/t the first story because it was not necessarily unbelievable and to change the story to another "lie" seems to be a reach. i'm sure there are things they are not telling us but i'm sure there's also a lot of confusion with how everything went down so none of this should be surprising. of course, osama bin laden may also still be ALIVE for all we know!!!

I'm pretty sure that not every single soldier was wearing a helmet cam and that everythign was visible in the middle of the night.

On my drive home I heard "a caller from Jacksonville" on the local right wing talk show vow that should a helmet cam video get made and released it would sell "twenty million copies" in one week, "and I'd be the first in line to buy it!"

9/11 was an inside job, so there's that

xp: uh

maxgawkerpic+annie-eyes.jpg

I mean first off, it would get pirated and torrented

Secondly, if it exists it's already been made, this isn't like the "moon landing" ffs

I'm talking about a guy from Jacksonville calling in a right wing radio station.

dan should've called in to argue w/ him

Obama might wait a few months and be all "by the way, check out these pictures of his dead body"

This looks/sounds to me like Admin firgures scrambling all over themselves to get a good story, like SEALs who had no compunction whatsoever about shooting ppl in a middle-of-the-night raid in semi-hostile country but may have overelaborated how it all went down and like press eager to get all the details out as fast as they could.

From the very beginning and up to yesterday morning I wasn't sure:

If OBL's wife were dead or one of the courrier's wives;
Which of OBL sons had been killed;
Whether it was a single shot to the head or one to the chest and one to the head;
and
How many helicopters there were.

They were pretty quick to correct that he was shooting, just that he was 'participating in the firefight', whatever that means. I merely assumed that means he was getting in the way of bullets. And the human shield thing was quickly dispelled, too, though I can see why ppl would be more hellbent to use it than to check the facts.

I'm pretty sure that not every single soldier was wearing a helmet cam and that everythign was visible in the middle of the night.

― Concatenated without abruption (Michael White), Tuesday, May 3, 2011 9:18 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

producer in a van outside the compound--"3, pull in tight. tight. goin to 3 aaaaaaaaaand go to 3"

Exactly!

I was thinking you'd have to have one hell of a director to choose between 24+ feeds in real time and produce a narrative of any intelligibility.

Would it not be easier to say that Brennan/unnamed sources to f'rinstance AP had great big warboners over this, spoke while under the influence, and then move on?

Alternate theory is that the tabloids/right-wing organs got the ladyshield/badass gunfight version out there on purpose.

Pictured: The President and his national security team watch an experimental all-night-vision film in the Situation Room. xp

I was thinking you'd have to have one hell of a director to choose between 24+ feeds in real time and produce a narrative of any intelligibility.

― Concatenated without abruption (Michael White), Tuesday, May 3, 2011 9:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

as long as they work in the love interest subplot

Would it not be easier to say that Brennan/unnamed sources to f'rinstance AP had great big warboners over this, spoke while under the influence, and then move on?

Alternate theory is that the tabloids/right-wing organs got the ladyshield/badass gunfight version out there on purpose.

― a modest broposal (suzy), Tuesday, May 3, 2011 5:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

these arent mutually exclusive either.

see when i heard about the burial at sea thing i just figured that they shot him so many times that there was no way they could take a picture so they all just went ewwwwwww, get that thing out of here.

I'm glad he's dead. I'm more curious as to what this means to Pakistan/Afghanistan in the coming future than spending my times burning couches in the street and repeatedly yelling, "USA!"

I suspect that photos will emerge sooner than later. Arresting and trying might have dispelled the 'Americans are hypocrites' story I'm hearing but I think we ARE hypocrites and mostly because the Repubs are a bunch of whiney cowards who have a vested interest in sticking to an essentially indefensible story lest they look worse than they already do. If that sounds partisan, allow me to say what I think about many of actions in WWII or Vietnam when the Democrats were in power. Ppl are swine, generally.

George Bush was relentlessly mocked for waiting seven minutes (actually waiting for his security detail to ready the exit and for his vehicle to be readied) before leaving the school he was visiting. He calmly finished reading My Pet Goat for the kids before going to his now-ready helicopter.

On the other hand, after Obama was told (most likely for the fifteenth time) that the CIA was really, really, really quite confident that Osama bin Ladin was at that compound in Abbottabad, he decided he needed to sleep on it.

Sixteen hours later (hours during which Osama might have fled-- bear in mind, his courier's name had just been outed by WikiLeaks), he made up his mind.

How does the media report this? Well, relying upon those in Obama's inner circle (that is to say, his political flunkies and spinners), we're told this:

"But the next morning after 16 hours, Obama summoned four top aides to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could speak, the president put his fist on the table and declared 'It's a go'."
Why does it matter that he did this "before they could speak"? They had spoken already yesterday when they strongly, strongly urged the president to give the order, and he had decided to sleep on it.

They were only waiting on him, after all.

So, after 16 hours of vacillation, during which the operation might have been rendered a failure by intervening invents, he fist-bumps a piece of furniture and finally makes up his mind.

This is something to brag about? This is, in Howard Fineman's words, "almost Biblical"?

Seems like a very cautious, feckless, indecisive individual delaying and delaying on critical decisions and then attempting to sound heroic when he finally does what he's being paid to do.

spending my times burning couches in the street and repeatedly yelling, "USA!"

i can just imagine you doing this, anyway

"Ppl are swine, generally."

otm

Bush waiting seven minutes for any intelligence when events were currently happening versus Obama waiting 16 hours after hearing very probable intelligence, with nothing currently happening.

his courier's name had just been outed by WikiLeaks

apparently it's not likely to be the same guy - the wikileaks info dates back to 2003. but obviously that's the least of that guy's problems.

yep

"we were just attacked" + 7 minutes vs. "he's probably in there."

Bush is still waiting for intelligence to visit him, fnarr.

I instantly thought burial at sea was a shrine avoidance move, but cordially invite the overly jingoistic to go and dance on OBL's grave after they're done beerbonging at Ground Zero.

Am I incorrect in recalling that quite a few people involved with this on the 'right' phoned up their go-to press guys on Sunday night to 'spoil' the news?

I am not so high-falutin' that I don't get the warboners/public spectacle aspect of this and I'm not so censorious as to kick the administration in the nuts over it but when the dust settles on this, it's not all that significant; he was essentially under house arrest anyway and the real issues are what to do in the long run about Afghanistan, its corruption, tribal politics, poppy production and the threat from the Taliban, the ingerence of the ISI, etc...

i'm pretty sure 150 years from now when a future earth grad student is writing their lame dissertation about whatever trendy theory bullshit of the 2160s and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden they'll include in a footnote the apocryphal story of him using a wife as a human shield that some ppl believe but doesn't seem to be historically validated and that'll be that.

best url ever

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8490567/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Pervez-Musharraf-jogged-in-area-during-military-training.html

So, after 16 hours of vacillation

Forcing the narrative. Your vacillation is my weighing the pros and cons from a broad perspective in light of intel that shows he's not going anywhere and making sure that we do it right. Maybe not feckless at all. Maybe just not a shoot from the hip and take of your foot rush to be a stupid, rash braggart asshole.

are we going to start clowning year 2235 hipster chicks for their gravity uggs?

bush would have found a way to fuck it up. big time.

Western paranoid narcissism about retaliatory attacks DO NOT NEED.

one of the scary things about obama is that he's reinforced the security-state apparatus that bush put into place but he actually seems competent enough to make it work

^^^ I had that complaint in 2008.

are we going to start clowning year 2235 hipster chicks for their gravity uggs?

Please tell me you mean anti gravity uggs 'cause I can't imagine uggs being any more plodding than they already are.

I forgot who wrote recently that Obama did with expanded executive authority what Eisenhower did with the New Deal.

I can't believe Obama took time to think before taking a major decision.

plus i always figured that cheney or someone would have told bush NOT to kill osama if he had the chance just cuz alive he was good for business or something. but i'm cynical like that.

i'm of course accounting for the year 2134 asteroid completely fucking up newton's law, mw

Ah, okay, omar. Just checking.

btw, resistance = "He didn't hold up his hands and surrender."