For those of you who missed it last night, here are a few good links, starting with Obama’s speech.
Where we found bin Laden:
The courier and his brother were tracked to a massive, palatial compound built in 2005 at the end of a dirt road in an isolated and “affluent” suburb of Abbottabad favored by retired Pakistani military officers, said the second senior administration official, who added that it was believed that the residence was constructed specifically for bin Laden.
Some great photos from the New York celebration, and from around the nation.
That’s all I have. If you want to play a non-drinking game, watch Fox and Friends this morning and have a drink every time they say “President Obama”. You’ll stay fairly sober.
WereBear
Partner woke me at midnight to tell me the news. As is his wont, he flipped to Faux News to get their reaction: big scrolling ALERTs all over the screen and solemn intonations about how this has made us more of a target…
Because they can’t ignore it entirely, I suppose.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
PRIMARY OBAMA!
Killing bin Laden was an Impeachable offense!
Hold Obama accountable – he’s a monster!
Donate to the draft Dennis Kuchinich/Alan Grayson 2012 PAC!
WereBear
I did love the part where he reminded the nation that as Americans, we are supposed to be able to do incredible stuff.
stuckinred
MSNBC just showed a clip of the Times Square celebration with Cpt Choi in his dress blues cheering!
LGRooney
Ding dong, the witch is dead!
Oh, but that was the wicked witch of the West. There’s still the wicked witch of the East and she’s worse than the last one.
Who’s next?
Not that I want to piss on the parade, but we’re not talking about a swarm of bees lost without its queen. We’re talking about people with lots of ideas and multiple divergent ideologies based on the “West is evil” theme who wouldn’t mind either repeating this guy’s “accomplishments” or surpassing them.
Killing one man isn’t going to change much as long as we still are running on naive platitudes in the international relations arena that only pacify our public and inflame those who would do us harm. Watch out for what happens in Pakistan now.
zmulls
They knew he was in the compound since mid-February, and waited until the beginning of May to pull the trigger. Can you imagine some other Presidents I won’t name who could have forced themselves to wait that long?
Oh, and the burial at sea? Brilliant. I’ve always wondered how you stop OBL’s gravesite from becoming a shrine, or international arguments over who gets the body. Body? What body? Bottom of the ocean, sport. Go fish.
(Seriously — give the burial the basic level of respect but take the whole issue out of play. That’s some good chess playing right there.)
Linda Featheringill
Pretty amazing!
I’m going to ignore Fox News and that ilk. Phooey on them.
BTW, has anyone seen estimates of how many people were gathered outside of the White House last night?
tkogrumpy
I can’t wait for the complaints that the president couldn’t bring him back alive.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
I tuned into the Fixxed News coverage and they’re all in a complete state of deep depression.
IT’S FUCKIN HILARIOUS!
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
THIS SHOULD BE REPEATED ALL DAY
Remember how bush shut down the CIA bin laden unit back on july 4th 2006.
of all days to surrender – the 4th of July.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/washington/04intel.html
President Obama had to start from scratch.
PeakVT
The guesswork on the intertubes right now is pointing to this house the one where OBL/UBL (but not ABL) was hiding. There’s also talk about another house but it seems too central.
PurpleGirl
@tkogrumpy: But what about the whining that he was too dangerous to keep in a jail cell (even a military one in the Midwest someplace) and be tried here? Wouldn’t they start screaming about that?
AkaDad
I’m surprised it took a Kenyan to get him.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
New photo from Times Square
http://cdn.crooksandliars.com/files/uploads/2009/05/Times%20Square%20at%20night%20VE%20Day_fcf6a.jpg
VERBERNE
Just how many Trillions of dollars disappeared down the rabbit hole that was Iraq and is now Afghanistan. The republicans are using the ‘deficit’ that they helped create to attempt to destroy the social safety net; yet we merrily keep dumping billions every year in Afghanistan and Pakistan without a cognizant blimp on the nations consciousness. So we killed one man; was it worth the cost?
tkogrumpy
@LGRooney: @PurpleGirl: Are you suggesting that the complaints should be consistent or rational?
JGabriel
@WereBear:
It’s just so hard to find us in the middle of that North American continent. We could have gone centuries without Al Qaeda ever noticing us, if only we hadn’t called attention to ourselves.
.
Calouste
@zmulls:
Someone actually asked the question: when we catch him, what are we going to do? (Can you imagine that kind of question being asked in the Bush “the Iraqis will greet us with flowers” administration?)
And there were probably three plans, one for when he was caught dead, one for when he was caught alive, and one for when he was caught but dying.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@VERBERNE: I knew the professional left would take this hard as it smashes their primary obama dreams.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
OBAMA!
zmulls
@Calouste: Exactly — I’m sure they had the foresight to ask the question, and to think through all the ramifications. I’m glad we have a President who thinks that carefully. But I doubt he’ll get credit he deserves on that call — I expect more people will be whining that they didn’t get to use the body as a pinata.
WereBear
@JGabriel: And I spared a thought for Rush… this will get those ol’ synapses working overtime.
Not that I’m underestimating the amount of cognitive dissonance a winger can hold in their head; but we do get into quantum physics at this point.
Southern Beale
I posted some videos of the celebrations over at my place.
They’re all crappy, but heartfelt. I didn’t want to post a network news video that started with the obligatory advertisement for some product … hearing the message of our corporate overlords right now just feels wrong. This is the people’s moment, not the corporations’.
Davis X. Machina
Pakistan’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Imagine how it would look to the Russians if Shamil Basayev was living on a nice estate in McLean, Virigina.
Well, that’s what it looks like from here to me.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
Who’s gonna play the President in the movie? I say Denzel.
lonesomerobot
this has probably been said here already, but cue the “deathers” in 3, 2, 1…
This is bound to become one giant conspiracy nut feeding frenzy.
Joey Maloney
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
I don’t see any reason to think that. What were GHWB’s popularity numbers in the immediate wake of the first Gulf war? How much did that help him a year and a half later when the economy was still in the shitter?
WereBear
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): I’ve always thought Denzel. However, given that they are close to the same age, we have the classic Hollywood tactic of looking for a younger Denzel.
Mike Furlan
On Fox this morning:
“Obama pulls ‘stunt’ to distract nation from demand to release his college transcripts.”
Real Americans will continue to focus on what is important:
I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”
– G.W. Bush, 3/13/02
Fox will mention Obama today, but only in connection to his failure to produce his college records.
AkaDad
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
Louis Gossett Jr.
JGabriel
@LGRooney:
al-Zawahiri.
… And who previously accomplished next to zilch without Bin Laden’s & al-Zawahiri’s example, leadership, and money/funding. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the organization is dead unless we get Zawahiri before they have time to re-group.
But if we do get Zawahiri in short order, then Al Qaeda melts into individual cells, some still effective but most not, who will be no more organized than the random anarchist terror cells that proliferated in Europe and the US during the late 60’s through the 70’s — i.e., there may still be some successful random attacks from the remaining cells, but nothing anywhere near as deadly and damaging as the organized attacks under Al Qaeda.
I could be wrong, of course, but that seems the most likely outcome.
.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
This cements Barack Obama place in history as a great president.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@Joey Maloney: keep fucking that chicken.
Hawes
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Louis Gossett, Sr?
Will Smith. I mean c’mon. He took out the aliens, he took out George Foreman, now he’s taking down bin Laden.
Hal
Conservatives are in a state of shock. First Obama owns Chump at the Correspondents dinner, then Bin Laden.
Rhoda
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Will Smith, he’s got the ears.
This is such a fucking awesome day.
Hawes
Black Jimmy Carter my ass!
This is his Desert One and he aced it.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
45,000 people during the Mets-Phillies game in Philadelphia began shouting “USA! USA! USA!”
LGRooney
@JGabriel: If we can just get to a point where we understand that it is a dangerous world, there are people out to get us, we are going to suffer from terrorism – even if smallish episodes from disorganized cells, and we need to get on with life regardless, I’ll learn to be more satisfied.
My biggest hope from all this is that we learn even more about the network and its supporters and expose them publicly.
Now, on to democracy movements in the Middle East..!
djesno
from Juan Cole
An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives. His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was in part about the need of the US to refocus on the threat from al-Qaeda. He said that the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball by running off to Iraq to pursue an illegal war and neglecting the eastern front, from which the US had been attacked, and where riposting was legitimate in international law. Obama began threatening to act unilaterally against al-Qaeda in Pakistan in August 2007, during the early period of the Democratic primary.
Ironically, Obama had to admit that Pakistani intelligence helped the US develop the lead that allowed the US to close in on Bin Laden. So the operation was not unilateral, and young candidate Obama was too over-confident. The US story that the Pakistanis were not given prior notice of the operation is contradicted by the Pakistani news channel Geo, which says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbotabad. CNN is pointing out that US helicopters could not have flown so far into Pakistan from Afghanistan without tripping Pakistani radar. My guess is that the US agreed to shield the government of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari from al-Qaeda reprisals by putting out the story that the operation against Bin Laden was solely a US one. And it may be that suspect elements of the Pakistani elite, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence, were kept out the the loop because it was feared they might have ties to Bin Laden and might tip him off.
Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive. The notorious terrorist turned to techniques of fear-mongering and mass murder to attain his goals in the belief that these methods were the only means by which the Secret Police States of the greater Middle East could be overturned.
Dr Wahid Abd-al-Majid, an adviser at the Al-Ahram Center for Political Studies, spoke to al-Arabiya on April 15 about al-Qaeda no. 2 leader (and now no. 1) Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dismissive statement that all the Egyptian uprising had produced was an untrustworthy military junta. Since Egypt is moving toward parliamentary elections, al-Zawahiri’s description is a caricature. Abd al-Majid, said, “Al-Zawahiri wanted to declare a stance on what is happening in Egypt, especially when he saw the end of the road for Al-Qa’ida and religious violence, or violence that hides behind religion, in Egypt, because what the Egyptians accomplished peacefully negates any need or justification for violence in Egypt. Al-Zawahiri dreamt of being the one who topples President Husni Mubarak, only for the president to be toppled by the youth in a peaceful and democratic revolution that has absolutely no connection to Al-Qa’ida’s long-held claims.” (USG Open Source Center translation).
The son of a Yemeni immigrant to Saudi Arabia who went from rags to riches by doing construction and engineering work for the Saudi royal family, Usama Bin Laden grew up one of dozens of sons of a billionaire, in an absolute monarchy which maintains that the holy Qur’an itself is its only constitution. It wasn’t a system that dealt well with rebelliousness or dissent.
Unlike most of the Bin Ladens, who are worldly business-people (a niece, Wafa, posed provocatively for GQ) Usama was known as a serious and religious young man. At university in Jeddah he probably came under the influence of Abdullah Azzam, a radical Muslim fundamentalist of Palestinian heritage.
The Palestine issue helped radicalize Bin Laden. He and his circle in Afghanistan were obsessed with the Israeli occupation of Islam’s third holiest site, Jerusalem, and gave one another sermons about what they saw as a modern crusade against Muslims in that city. The perfidy of successive British governments in conquering Palestine, agreeing to its becoming a Class A League of Nations Mandate (i.e. a nation-state in training), but at the same time giving Palestine away to the international Zionist movement, had resulted in the end in the ethnic cleansing of most Palestinians and their reduction to the status of stateless refugees. But the religious Usama seemed to care most of all about the 1967 Israeli military occupation of all of Jerusalem, including the Muslim holy site of the Dome of the Rock. Although Israel may have been a democracy for Israelis, it was a foreign military occupying power in the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and ruled there with an iron fist.
In 1978, young officers made a Communist coup in Afghanistan. By fall of 1979 the enterprise had turned unstable because of faction-fighting among the officers. In December of 1979 Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev, perhaps baited by the Carter administration, sent in Soviet troops and began a brutal 8-year occupation of among the least developed and most poverty-stricken countries in the world.
The Reagan administration and the Democratic Congress took the small Carter administration program that supported a Muslim insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan and vastly expanded it, ultimately to the tune of billions of dollars. Reagan also twisted the arm of Saudi King Fahd to match US expenditures. Seven major Afghan guerrilla groups were fostered and given CIA training in camps. The Soviets fought back viciously. In that decade, perhaps a million Afghans were killed, 3 million were displaced to Pakistan, 2 million were displaced to Iran, and 2 million were displaced inside Afghanistan. In a country of, at that time, perhaps 15 million persons. It was Apocalypse Now, Kabul version. The two opponents were not attractive. The Communist regime was a cruel dictatorship. The Mujahidin were a mix of tribal and religious forces, but some groups were radical fundamentalists, as with the Hizb-i Islami or Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the most bloodthirsty of the Mujahidin. He got a lion’s share of the CIA money (he is today a die-hard opponent of the US whose men have killed many US troops in Afghanistan).
When Reagan convinced King Fahd to help get up a covert paramilitary to fight the Soviets (Reagan really liked private, unaccountable militias; he also backed them in Central America), Fahd had his ministers look around for a fundraiser who could get money from private sources in Saudi Arabia for the Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden was chosen, being a well-known socialite who also had a serious and religious side. Bin Laden jetted back and forth between the mosques of Saudi Arabia and the the Pakistani city of Peshawar, his headquarters in the struggle against the Soviets. The “Arab Afghans” who gathered around him may not have gotten direct CIA training for the most part, though some likely did, but they learned everything they needed to know about setting up cells and carrying out covert operations from the Afghans who had been through the CIA schools.
The Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan in late 1988 through early 1989. Soon thereafter, the Soviet bloc began collapsing.
Bin Laden was left without a task there in Afghanistan, and he returned to Jedda in Saudi Arabia. He gave a guest sermon at his mosque on the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising, and already had begun turning on his former ally, the United States, whom he blamed for enabling Israeli repression of the Palestinians. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden suggested to King Fahd that he be allowed to gather together his old gang of Arab Afghans to push Saddam back out. King Fahd wisely rejected the idea of having a bunch of scruffy Mujahidin crawling all over his country. The crisis had been provoked by a Baathist president-for-life, Saddam Hussein, another dictator acting arbitrarily. That Fahd instead brought in non-Muslim Westerners to do the job stuck in Bin Laden’s craw. A couple of years later he went to the Sudan and began his career as a terrorist. Then the US pressured Sudan to expel him, and he went to Afghanistan. He initially hooked up with his old Mujahidin buddies, but he was introduced to Mulla Omar, leader of the Taliban, and ultimately became very close to him.
They were all dictatorships– the Soviet Union, the Communist government of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan, and the Taliban. Usama learned to take the law into his own hands because he had no other way to effect change. He wanted to see the region’s dictatorship overthrown in favor of his renewed Islamic Caliphate. It was a crackpot, fringe, pipe dream, but he brought to the aspiration all the experiences and training he and his men had learned during the Reagan Jihad against the Soviets. Then he and his number two man, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to the conclusion that the reason they could not overthrow the governments of Egypt (Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship) and Saudi Arabia and so forth was that these were backed by the United States. They decided it had been a mistake to hit the “near enemy” first. They decided to hit the “far enemy” on American soil. Bin Laden thought that if only he could entice the US into the Middle East, he could do to it what he thought he had done to the Soviet Union.
Hence the horrific attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.
It was those attacks that created Informed Comment. I started it in spring of 2002 initially to cover al-Qaeda and to present analysis about how to defeat it. Like all Americans, I was personally devastated by September 11. I was depressed for a year. I felt it in distinctive ways because I had lived nearly 10 years in the Greater Middle East. Most of that time I was a student or, later on, academic researcher. But although I studied history, I was living in the present. I had been in Egypt in the late 1970s when Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad began becoming notorious. I lived in Pakistan off and on in the early 1980s and went up to Peshawar and talked with Mujahidin.
I supported the first phase of the Afghanistan War, which involved a light Western footprint in that country. There were 40 al-Qaeda training camps, which produced thousands of potential terrorists, and if they had not been destroyed they would have gone on manufacturing threats to the US. I discovered that there was a lot of good information on the Arabic internet about al-Qaeda, and I paraphrased the reports I thought significant. I began being invited to private security conferences in Washington, sponsored by think tanks at the request of government agencies, where the audience was typically inter-agency. There, I presented my analyses of al-Qaeda along with other academics and security experts. I hoped that the insights might be useful to State Department, Pentagon, CIA, DIA and other officials on the front lines of dismantling al-Qaeda. I had opposed the Vietnam War, something that had been painful for my father, who was a 20-year man in the army. But if the US government could benefit from my studies of al-Qaeda and other radical fringe movements trying to hurt Americans, I was just delighted.
(Just a note: I often challenged Washington orthodoxies, the honoraria were small, and I was only invited a few times a year, so the suggestion of some of my detractors that I sold out by doing these presentations is frankly silly. I just want my government to be as informed as it can be, and I’ll tell them the same things I tell the peace groups who also invite me to speak. If I had wanted to sell out, I could have formed a consultancy and purveyed the party line and made big bucks).
I was deeply dismayed when it became apparent that the Bush administration intended to use September 11 as a pretext to launch an illegal invasion of Iraq. I thought it was most unwise, and would be seen as an act of neo-imperialism and resisted. I told friends that if the UN Security Council voted against it, and Bush proceeded, I’d be out in the streets protesting. But then the UNSC never really was given a chance to vote, and Bush ran off to war. I prefer peace to war, but am not a pacifist. I don’t believe the use of military force is always wrong or counter-productive. I am from an army family after all. But I do believe that wars should be like abortion: rare and legal. The UN was established after the horrors of the Axis in WW II in an attempt to deploy collective security to stop the practice of aggressive wars of conquest and annexation. President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the UN Charter when he made Britain, France and Israel withdraw from Egypt in 1956-1957. By waging a war that was neither in self-defense nor authorized by the UNSC, in contravention of the UN Charter (a treaty to which the US is signatory), W. and Dick Cheney were throwing away the achievement of the founders of the UN, and returning us to the international jungle, where the strong fall upon the weak with no framework of law.
I was also dismayed by the propagandistic way the White House promoted its war on and then occupation of Iraq. They only had two speeds, progress and slow progress. A big bombing that killed hundreds was “slow progress.” Fantastic historical analogies were trotted out. The reality was obscured. Since I know Arabic, I read the multiplying Iraqi newspapers on the web, watched Arabic satellite t.v., developed correspondents in Iraq, and tried to describe the situation more realistically at this blog. Interestingly, I still got invited to Washington to speak to audiences of security and intelligence personnel. Then-senator Joe Biden asked me to testify on Iraq before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I even got invited to share my (pessimistic) views with the British foreign ministry, the French foreign ministry, the Japanese Institute of Middle East Economies, etc., etc. Not to mention a lot of correspondence with people in similar institutions in other countries.
What pained me most of all, aside from the sheer scale of destruction in Iraq set off by Bush’s illegal and ill-considered adventurism, was that the Iraq War clearly gave al-Qaeda an opening to grow and expand and recruit. I think if Bush had gone after Bin Laden as single-mindedly as Obama has, he would have gotten him, and could have rolled up al-Qaeda in 2002 or 2003. Instead, Bush’s occupation of a major Arab Muslim country kept a hornet’s nest buzzing against the US, Britain and other allies.
Now that Obama has eliminated the monster Usama Bin Laden and vindicated the capability of the United States to visit retribution on its dire enemies, he can do one other great good for this country abroad. He can get us out of Iraq altogether. The US military presence there is the fruit of a poisonous tree. It will always provoke Iraqi Muslim activists, whether Sunni or Shiite or secular nationalist. And it angers the whole Arab world.
The Arab Spring has demonstrated that the Arab masses yearn for liberty, not thuggish repression, for life, not death and destruction, for parliamentary democracy, not theocratic dictatorship. Bin Laden was already a dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War and the age of
An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives. His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was in part about the need of the US to refocus on the threat from al-Qaeda. He said that the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball by running off to Iraq to pursue an illegal war and neglecting the eastern front, from which the US had been attacked, and where riposting was legitimate in international law. Obama began threatening to act unilaterally against al-Qaeda in Pakistan in August 2007, during the early period of the Democratic primary.
Ironically, Obama had to admit that Pakistani intelligence helped the US develop the lead that allowed the US to close in on Bin Laden. So the operation was not unilateral, and young candidate Obama was too over-confident. The US story that the Pakistanis were not given prior notice of the operation is contradicted by the Pakistani news channel Geo, which says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbotabad. CNN is pointing out that US helicopters could not have flown so far into Pakistan from Afghanistan without tripping Pakistani radar. My guess is that the US agreed to shield the government of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari from al-Qaeda reprisals by putting out the story that the operation against Bin Laden was solely a US one. And it may be that suspect elements of the Pakistani elite, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence, were kept out the the loop because it was feared they might have ties to Bin Laden and might tip him off.
dictators in which a dissident such as he had no place in society and was shunted off to distant, frontier killing fields. The new generation of young Arabs in Egypt and Tunisia has a shot at a decent life. Obama has put the US on the right side of history in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya (where I see crowds for the first time in my life waving American flags). People might want a little help from a distance, but they don’t want to see Western troops deployed in fighting units on their soil.
If Obama can get us out of Iraq, and if he can use his good offices to keep the pressure on the Egyptian military to lighten up, and if he can support the likely UN declaration of a Palestinian state in September, the US will be in the most favorable position in the Arab world it has had since 1956. And he would go down in history as one of the great presidents. If he tries to stay in Iraq and he takes a stand against Palestine, he risks provoking further anti-American violence. He can be not just the president who killed Bin Laden, but the president who killed the pretexts for radical violence against the US. He can promote the waving of the American flag in major Arab cities. And that would be a defeat and humiliation for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda more profound than any they could have dreamed.
read the whole article, Juan Cole DOES know what is what in the Arab world. http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/obama-and-the-end-of-al-qaeda.html
LGRooney
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): The Caps still lost, however. Poo!
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@Hawes: This is “Raid on Entebbe” X 1,000,000
This will go down as the greatest military raid in history.
ALL HAIL THE COMMANDER AND CHIEF
djesno
Sorry, I’m not used to the auto-html tags with these damned buttons! The entire text of the above comment from me is from Juan Cole. Just wanted to clear that up.
gnomedad
I’m thinking Herr Doktor Krauthammer might like to change the timing of his latest column.
liberal
Funny thing is is that even if the Bush Admin had been on the right track to pull this off, they probably would have blown it due to leaks made to puff various actors up.
MTiffany
Patiently waiting for Fox and friends to start implying that bin Laden’s death is a hoax, seeing as how the ‘photoshopped long-form birth certificate’ meme isn’t really gaining traction outside the 27-percenter demo.
Steve Douchey: “Where’s the birth-certificate?”
Brian Killmeade: “Where’s the body?”
Gretchen Whasserface: “In the ocean?”
Douchey: “In the ocean?”
Killmeade” “In the ocean? Which one?”
Grethcen Whasserface: “Hmmmmm…. The ocean. How convenient…”
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
Lincoln, FDR, Obama
liberal
@VERBERNE:
Well, at least we can use this as an excuse to GTFO. Though I doubt we will.
gnomedad
OT, a new word for y’all: guanopsychotic.
agrippa
@djesno:
Intelligent remarks; I agree with most of it.
This should bring about a serious reappraisal of the US involvment in Afghanistan.
roshan
@djesno: Bro, lighten up with the link text, man. One paragraph would have been enough for us to head over there and read it.
WereBear
Mr WereBear (old DC hand that he is) declared that we would now be leaving Afghanistan.
A Humble Lurker
Hm. I remember last year when this blog was talking about how 911 was wing nut X-mas and how it was REALLY going to be nuts this year because it was the 10 year anniversary.
I have a feeling this year the anniversary is going to be different than people would have thought last year. Perhaps that is only me.
Also, I feel overwhelmed by this day. I honestly thought it was never going to happen. The 2012 election is going to be a lot more fun than the 2010 election was, I think.
liberal
@LGRooney:
The only way I could see it really helping is if it leads to increased factionalism and infighting.
The actual solution to the problem is to realize that they’re “over here” because we’re over there.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
Richard Engel is calling the news “breathtaking”.
Was anyone watching broadcast tee vee when they interrupted coverage? If so can you describe what happened.
JGabriel
Juan Cole via djesno:
This analysis may be right — I’m loathe to contradict someone with as much expertise as Cole, particularly given my total lack of it. But it kind of contradicts itself.
I can see how it’s maybe possible to alert Pakistan’s highest officials and keep the ISI out of the loop. Seems unlikely, yet possible. But I don’t see how you do that and get military or local police assistance to cordon off the area without the ISI getting a whiff of it.
P.S. djesno, that’s far too much text to be quoting from a single article — it really goes beyond fair use, unless you have, and post, permission for it.
.
Cheryl from Maryland
The age of most of the celebrants (20’s) is very distinctive. While some of that may be the youthful ability to get outside and celebrate, I can’t but think some of it is related to approx. 1/2 of their lives having passed since September 11th.
liberal
@A Humble Lurker:
Main determinant in 2012 will be the economy. My impression is that the poli sci literature says it would be better for the Dems if the economy went nowhere until 6-9 mo before the election and then got measurably better, as opposed to the opposite.
4tehlulz
You know, I used to joke that finding bin Laden was as hard as looking in the Islamabad phone book.
Since I wasn’t that far off, maybe I should look into a career in intelligence. I already have a better track record than Curveball.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am sure this has been mentioned before, but how pointed the remarks of Saturday night seem when POTUS was mocking Trump and said “these are the kind of decisions that keep me up at night” Considering the decision he had just made (the previous day) and the raid was actually supposed to occur on Saturday (put off until Sunday due to weather), I wonder if it was placed in the speech to draw a stark contrast between POTUS and every other candidate out there.
Just wondering.
PurpleGirl
@gnomedad: guanopsychotic
I like it.
djesno
@roshan: yeah, going back over it I quoted, like, 30% of his article…I appologize!
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
On Thursday, April 24, 1980 I was a freshman in high school. In the pre-cable television days, I was watching a program on NBC, when at 10:30 PM PDT, they broke into coverage to announce a hostage rescue in Iran had been attempted but failed with the loss of life.
What a fucking difference last night. I LOVE THIS GUY!
gene108
I wonder, if this will send a shiver up Chris Matthew’s leg, like Bush, Jr.’s appearance in a flight suit for his Mission Accomplished speech did?
JGabriel
@liberal:
Six months till November and we get Obama decimating Trump, then capturing Bin Laden within the space of two days.
Could someone please remind Obama that the next presidential election is in November 2012, not 2011?
.
bemused
@gene108:
Oh, groan, no. If he talks about his leg shivers again, I will hurl.
MTiffany
@bemused: No talk of leg shivers. Just a close-up shot of the wet spot on the front of his trousers.
Southern Beale
@LGRooney:
Yeah there’s a good bit of that going on, someone over at my place commented that “assuming the official story here is true,” we still have high unemployment, massive cuts in social programs etc. etc.
And just, you know, STFU. For one fucking moment. Jesus.I mean, I’m sick of it. This country needs to come together. Over the weekend we saw the Brits united for the wedding of their royals, tens of thousands of people in the streets of London waving their flags, huge smiles on their faces, celebrating.
Fuck it. America deserves to celebrate. We need to celebrate something. And if some faux Lefties are going to claim that we aren’t entitled to one moment of celebration because the country still faces problems then I really have no use for you.
jwb
@Hal: For domestic politics, I fear this just means things are going to get worse in the short term rather than better. It won’t take long for the conservatives to be back, doubling down on the crazy.
celticdragonchick
@Hawes:
This.
Meanwhile, village idiot Glen Reynolds posts this bit of bullshit this morning:
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@Southern Beale: firebaggers will always dislike Obama. He could have announced that he personally found the cure for cancer, and they would still be sticking pins in their obama dolls.
celticdragonchick
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
Yep. I was in the 8th grade at that time. I remember.
Meanwhile, the wingers are trying to figure out how to make this into a hit piece on Obama. Pathological.
djesno
I am really (really) trying to get the hang of this quoting with buttons instead of HTML thing, but an earlier commenter said,
I’d have to disagree. First off, with the American Idol-style competition to become one of the New Three Stooges that the 2012 Republican primary has become and what the Republicans are planning, collectively, to do with our economy is making it as likely that any of their prospective nominees would have as much chance against Obama as Marion Barry would have getting out of a crackhouse without dilated pupils and/or an indictment. It IS “the economy, stupid”, but this is a game changer. Dubya spent seven years going after fictional WMD and (while not saying it directly, allowing it to be believed through the RNC’s media arm – FOX) that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. Emperor Codpiece blew his chance and spent all of the money we saved during the Clinton/Gore administration and the “Kenyan Socialist” came in and saved the American manufacturing base (GM and Chrysler) AND killed the bogie-man Bush couldn’t get. AND he did it all while EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN stood in the way of his every move. I may be overly optimistic, and right now is NOT the time to be thinking politics, but I see a Democratic landslide in 2012, if only because of this.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Much as it’s a fucking good thing that he’s dead, I’m not terribly sure I’m in the mood to celebrate.
Sure, OBL was the personification of the terrorist threat we’ve been seized by since 9/11, but considering all we know now, and all that’s happened, I’m just not sure his death makes much of a difference any more, logistically, symbolically, or realistically. It’s about damn time, sure, and the end of a criminal like him should always be celebrated in some respect. But it feels like too little, too late in some respect too.
bin Laden should’ve been captured and neutralized ages ago, and a lot of that hangs over Bush’s head. Since then, we’ve started…what…three wars now? Ok, 2 since I’m still not sure how invested we are materially in Libya. The point is, I’m not sure bin Laden, as a symbol of terrorism or as an actual leader within Al Qaida, is as important enough in making a real impact as it would’ve been, say…5 years ago.
And secondly, I look back and reflect on the whole ill-fated War on Terror bullshit and see a country that’s been conditioned to be pants-shittingly scared of its own shadow. We have actual serious, mainstream discussion over whether Muslims actually deserve to practice freely or even be considered Americans. Fact is…OBL is dead…but he pretty much fucking won as is. We are not the America we were pre-9/11, and that’s not a good thing. We’ve had a political discourse mistaking said same pants-shitting fear and marketed is as bravery, overextended ourselves worldwide, while being convinced that the only way to save our freedoms from ‘terrists’ is to strip them down by our own hands.
Kudos to Obama for doing what Shrub failed at and ignored. About damn time, and at least it shows Obama is more serious at this shit than Shrub was. But I’m just not sure how significant this is anymore.
chopper
@Southern Beale:
this.
i understand the world still sucks, but FFS, half of the GOS this morning is full of dicksacks bitching about how sad this whole thing is. of course it is, you bastards haven’t cracked a fuckin smile in 15 years.
jwb
@celticdragonchick: Don’t worry, they’ll figure out a way to turn this into a hit piece on Obama, even if they have to lie through their teeth to do so. There’s just no way wingers are going to let a Dem get the credit for it. I’m just waiting to see what stupid angle they come up with on it. I never cease to be amazed at the stupidity of the angles they manage to successfully play.
WereBear
@chopper: Why I don’t go there any more.
Because if you look at it that way, there’s no reason to be alive at all. And thus, any chance you might have to brighten some other being day somehow… gone, too.
Nihilism. Not even an ethos.
BDR
@chopper:
Agreed. America deserves to celebrate this asshole’s death and, moreover, Democrats just scored an epic win with this move. The Eeyores on our side need to help themselves to piping hot cup of Shut the Fuck Up.
Hal
@Southern Beale
Exactly. Some of my coworkers seem to think OBL’s body should have been flown back to the USA and put on display, and how do they really know it’s him, and where’s the DNA, and dental records???? A conspriracy around every corner with some.
chopper
@Hal:
i’m still waiting for the long-form death certificate.
Jay C
@celticdragonchick:
And this after Obama made a special mention at the end of his address last night:
Like I said in one of the threads yesterday: why would anyone ever bother with anything Glenn Reynolds has to say – ever? What a fucking crank.
OzoneR
@Southern Beale:
and world hunger needs to end, but neither is realistically going to happen
djesno
Is there a single reason at all that we need a military presence in Afghanistan anymore? The WOT moved to the Pak/Afghan border years ago, and now that we’ve gotten Darth Vader do we need to continue throwing money down that hole? It would be nice to create a western-style democracy there (or anywhere where theocratic oppression exists) but is this financially realistic now that OBL is dead? just a thought.
Kirbster
My attitude is more grim satisfaction than elation. I expect some blowback from the millions of little Osamas US foreign poicy has created over the years, which makes me glad that I don’t live in a major American city (especially NYC) and that I’m not flying or travelling abroad in the near future.
djesno
Of course, Donald Trump is still waiting for the long-form death certificate. (sorry, my wife made me say that)
WereBear
What I try to remember is that they lead lives that are far more miserable than I would have the heart to inflict on them.
djesno
also, this: NEVER EAT SPINACH WITH A STRANGER!
Poopyman
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
Being a Sunday night, nobody in the MSM was prepared, and they started pulling their on–air staffs in off the street. It looked like Andrea Mitchell was broadcasting from home, especially when Allan Greenspan shuffled into the background, dressed in his bathrobe and drinking milk straight out of the carton[1]. Over on CNN, it looked like they’d pried John King out of some bar and plied him with coffee to get him on–camera[2].
.
.
[1]Not intended to be a factual statement.
[2]Sadly[3], he really did look this way.
[3]No, not really “sadly”. It was HI–larious.
djesno
This is where we’ve come as a nation…first off, HI-larious is a fucking awesome word. second off, we just shot a mass-murdering terrorist psycho gangster and somehow we’re talking about how hungover the anchorman appears? also, too: never eat spinach with a stranger! (+9, i think)
djesno
thank FSM i’ve got the next two days off.
Southern Beale
@Hal:
From what the news has reported the White House is actually going to release some kind of evidence, proof of death or whatever it is they call it. They know that needs to be done.
Not sure what it will be yet.
Woodrowfan
the tinfoil-heads on “Crooks and Liars” are whining about it. I love C&L but damn, they have a lot of nutjobs on the comments page.
Poopyman
@Southern Beale: They already have.
bemused
@MTiffany:
Eeeew. Did you have to plant that in my head? Have pity.
Nutella
@Kirbster:
Thanks for saying that. Treating this like a sporting event is just wrong. I can’t blame the people who were directly injured by his attacks, but for the general public this reaction is awful.
Here’s an opinion from outside the country to think about:
Earl Butz
My dad was flying a US Air 767 out of Logan that morning. I cannot describe for you the pants-shitting terror I felt for a good portion of that day until he was finally allowed to call us.
So to all of you Eeyores and firebaggers on this thread: with sincerity, go fuck yourselves with a rusty chainsaw.
We earned some celebration, and by God, it is 7AM and I am drinking some badass tequila and taking work off today. I hope they shot him right in the fucking face, I hope he knew it was coming, and I hope it hurt like hell. Small enough payback for what that fucker did.
liberal
@JGabriel:
Heh.
I figure, in addition to my point above about leaks, that Bush would have botched the raid because he would have wanted it timed to hit the US at the best hour for PR (I’d assume early prime time) and that would have somehow screwed things up.
djesno
@Nutella: Do you have a link for that reference?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I hope the sailors in the ship that buried Bin Laden took the opportunity to relieve themselves over the side of the ship as the body fell.
Bin Laden has a caliphate of the fishes.
Masterful move though, no shrine, nothing. We have adults in charge in this administration.
maya
But..but..but.. we got Saddam’s pistol right over here. Look!
cckids
@WereBear:
Late to the party, but WIN!
negative 1
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: We’ve always been afraid of our shadow. You think that the cold war was about rational calculation of risk? It wasn’t that long ago.
Also, the other thing I’ve been hearing a lot of is “he’s just a figurehead, it’s just symbolic to kill him”. If this is sourced to someone’s research, great – I’m no foreign policy expert. I haven’t heard this evidence though. It wouldn’t really be too rare for a fundy group to splinter when the figurehead dies – a bunch of little chiefs trying to be the big chief after the old one dies is a pretty common phenomenon. Also, don’t underestimate the power of the cult of personality. Keeping extremists united isn’t really that easy. It’s not necessarily true that the next leader will be nearly as effective. Look at how many variations on al-qaeda there are, after all. Or, alternatively, look how many people want to be the “keynote speaker” at CPAC.
Brachiator
@djesno:
I don’t know…. A piece of punditry filled that leads off with idiotic deterministic speculation about Obama’s motives leaves me cold:
This is as stupid as the claims that Obama must be a stealth anti-colonialist because his father was Kenyan. And then Juan Cole keeps the mealy mouth “seems to me” stuff going with “My guess is that …” and “it may be that…,” which is journalistic shorthand for “I don’t know but I got a deadline.”
And as much as I am hopeful about the Arab Spring, the idea that everyone in these nations is yearning for parliamentary democracy is a stretch. You have sad examples of Copts being persecuted by the Muslim majority in Egypt, with no guarantee that the Coptic Christians will be able to be a part of any new government.
This morning I listened to a couple of talk radio hosts lap up everything a guest commentator was saying about the mission to take down bin Laden just because he was a former Army captain, even though everything he was saying was mere speculation based on his past knowledge and training, but without any real information concerning what actually happened in Pakistan.
With such a momentous event as the takedown of bin Laden, I guess I’m in the mood for some actual reporting, instead of pundits and commentators coasting on their background experience.
But, as always, your mileage may vary.
Ecks
I dunno, the pictures of it that are coming out don’t make it look exactly like a “palatial compound”… even the video of the inside. Looks like a mildly crappy apartment block, not sure I’d want to live in (even if the whole thing was mine).
negative 1
@Ecks: Yeah it looks like having the dorm room that has the extra closet space. I mean, I guess it could be worse, but…