52
   

Osama Bin Laden is dead

 
 
OmSigDAVID
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:46 pm

I heard that Laden was shot 2ice in the left eye.
Has the armament of the CIA or the Seals who shot Laden been identified ?

Does anyone know with WHAT Laden was shot ?





David
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  0  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:49 pm
@sozobe,
Did you read the other link, Soz? Try this one. Read it at its source which has hotlinks to other sources. Interesting stuff on Iraq too.

Quote:
Little-Known Facts About Afghanistan and Bin Laden

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/did-us-fail-to-provide-evidence-of-bin.html

The government apparently planned the Afghanistan war before 9/11 (see this and this).
And the government apparently could have killed Bin Laden in 2001 and AGAIN in 2007, but failed to do so.

In fact, starting right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon and other countries. As American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst Gareth Porter writes in the Asia Times:
Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.
Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states...

***
General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon].

***
When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."

***

The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy" their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Indeed, the goal seems to have more to do with being a superpower (i.e. an empire) than stopping terrorism.

As Porter writes:

After the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1988] by al-Qaeda operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a 2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at Tufts University.

A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".

And recall that former U.S. National Security Adviser (and top foreign policy advisor) Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative".

Cynics argue that America is just the latest in a long string of empires trying to control the "crossroads" between East and West.

And people such as the former UK ambassador to Afghanistan argue that there are even uglier reasons for America's involvement in Afghanistan.

This essay does not address such questions. All I'm asking is whether the U.S. refusal to accept the Taliban's offer to hand over Bin Laden should be viewed as similar to its refusal to accept Saddam's offer to go into exile for $1 billion dollars. In other words, we should ask whether the U.S. was hell-bent on going to war against Afghanistan and Saddam, without - contrary to official statements - really caring about the bad guys.


Ionus
 
  0  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:51 pm
@JTT,
You spend all your time finding rat bags who agree with you rather than looking at both sides.....why do you expect any credibility ? Just because you rant ad nauseaum about being anti-USA in a lefty forum doesnt mean you are right .
JTT
 
  0  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:55 pm
@Ionus,
Unsurprisingly, you are more vacuous than H2oman.
failures art
 
  5  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:56 pm
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr


Upon getting back to DC today and getting first hand accounts of Penn Ave last night, I withdraw my previous statement about wishing I was back in town. Apparently the crowd at first were some people just meeting up and waving and whistling. People talking about where they were when... etc. It later spoiled in to nothing more than an obnoxious frat party of emotionalism. Namely hate-emotionalism. Jingoistic fervor.

We are celebrating but we should not. I don't blame people for celebrating though. It's become our only custom upon significant events. It is now instinctual. We lack a custom for moments like this. We may feel much, and our feelings may grant us much familiarity, but we can bond without clenched fists and blood-stained ivories.

I'm glad Osama's body has been handled with proper cultural rites. He lived life poorly, so let him die well and die with finality. The only way we ever killed the boogie man was to grow up and stop looking under the bed.

We should not want Hell for a man like this, but oblivion.

"USA USA USA" simply misses the mark. Americans looking to bond, need a greater perspective on how this effect the world. But there are no cheers for the earth or for mankind as a whole.

A
R
T
Ionus
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:57 pm
@JTT,
When we need your opinion we can always ask a North Korean anchor woman from their local TV channel .
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:59 pm
@failures art,
Hear hear!
0 Replies
 
Ionus
 
  -3  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 06:59 pm
@failures art,
Do you feel not celebrating Rubbish bin Laden's death will make yours more distant or make you more righteous amongst your peers ?
failures art
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:13 pm
@Ionus,
I think the response to the news reveals how much healing has yet to happen. There is a psychological wound here, and it's one that will take time to heal. I think many of my peers bear psychological scars. It has been them, those young few, thirsty in the dessert, being ripped limb from limb. They've come back broken, poor, and bitter. I think you don't know my generation, my peers. We're tired of old men fighting over dust and oil.

I think about Carl Sagan a lot these days, and perhaps I've been over-quoting his pale blue dot. A few words of his stand out.

Carl Sagan wrote:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.


We are a long ways from mending such a wound, and I for one find solace and my own medicine thinking about the passage above.

A
R
T
OmSigDAVID
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:15 pm
@Ionus,
Ionus wrote:
Do you feel not celebrating Rubbish bin Laden's death
will make yours more distant or make you more righteous amongst your peers ?
Have u heard WHAT Laden was shot with ??
HOW did thay kill him ?
Ionus
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:18 pm
@failures art,
I am happy you can find solace . But I doubt your motives in saying we shouldnt celebrate the death of the personification of terror . Whilst you are not heavily critical of such people who were celebrating, I think they are entitled to be joyous . Who can say they are wrong ? They have their lives to lead .

Quote:
I think you don't know my generation, my peers.
I led your generation, your peers . It was my job to know them .
Eorl
 
  2  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:18 pm
@failures art,
Wow. Dr Martin Luther King said it so much more eloquently than I. Who'd a thunk?
0 Replies
 
OmSigDAVID
 
  -1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:29 pm

It might have been fun
to shoot Laden with a FLAMEthrower,
(I bet THAT 'd get his attention)
but it is not e z to use those in ranger operations;
awkward to move them around.

Then u need to wait until the flames r out
b4 u can load it into a helicopter.





David
0 Replies
 
Ionus
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:31 pm
@OmSigDAVID,
Quote:
Have u heard WHAT Laden was shot with ??
HOW did thay kill him ?
Special forces have a wide range of weapons to choose from.....given there were no hostages which could demand the use of low power small calibre weapons, than I think any high powered weapon could have been used.....personally I would have taken my trusty SLR with me, despite its length....greater hitting power and it will penetrate most vests .

Given the length of the firefight, I dont think it was reasonable to take him prisoner unless he played dead . If he was vertical he should have been shot dead rather than risk one more life in the event he was strapped with explosives .

He has been dead for years anyway . The problem was when to officially kill him . He was already past the average life expectancy for a man in that area . He had bad health but exactly what is not known, though heart and kidney disease are possible .
failures art
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:32 pm
@Ionus,
To those who felt the effect of his actions directly, I still feel compassion for. Certainly, I can imagine such news to cathartic, but sadly I feel that justice is illusory and the feeling will be fast and fleeting. Those people will never stop hurting fully, and such a thing is truly awful.

Words like "justice" are for us, so we may make such an event digestible and so it fits into a sort of narrative. I cannot project to the victims and survivors that they must feel better; justified; or healed.

I'll let them feel whatever they wish. They are entitled to feel how they feel, and they have no national obligation to feel better on my behalf to fulfill said narrative. I do hope that in some small way this provide them some sort of solace. It is a horrible burden.

A
R
T
0 Replies
 
realjohnboy
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:32 pm
@failures art,
Thanks for the essay, Art.
I remember 911, of course, which was the beginning of this chapter. Little Tony raced into my store and we, employees and customers, gathered as the news got worse and worse.
A customer, who was a child in WW2 Norway, quietly said "The world will never be the same." And I think we all agreed with that.
I don't know what the "proper" response should have been. Probably not what you missed in front of the White House hours later in what you refer to as a frat party.
In my mind it was, of all places, in a baseball stadium in Philadelphia in the bottom of the 9th in a game with the NY Mets. There is video. This was not any kind of orchestrated "spontaneous" response. Rather it was thousands upon thousands of people who had gathered for a baseball game seeing the news flash across a scoreboard.
In my mind, although there probably was some "USA! USA!" rhetoric, it was more of "Osama is dead. A chapter is over."
0 Replies
 
failures art
 
  0  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:33 pm
@Ionus,
Ionus wrote:
Quote:
I think you don't know my generation, my peers.
I led your generation, your peers . It was my job to know them.

In that case, I understand why they are let down.

A
R
T
BillRM
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:34 pm
@Ionus,
One bullet in the eye does not sound like there was a firefight.
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:34 pm
Quoting myself on page 8,
"I'm glad their (the troops) mood would be elevated, but I would hope that this brings into more question re why are we staying in Afghanistan and so to accelerate bringing them home. [...]

I guess my perplexity is that we have de facto made the taliban the enemy - or have we. Not that I'm for the taliban but I don't take it that they are why we have been there, exactly.

Further, are we going to hang around in both Iraq and Afghanistan basically as a presence behind the covert ops to get splinter al qaida groups? to mediate civil wars? to protect our investments? Are we in Afghanistan mainly because Pakistan has nukes?"


David Weigel took this up on Slate today -
http://www.slate.com/id/2292816/

He discussed the approaching push/pull re our staying the course in Afghanistan, the wherefores and whys or why nots.

0 Replies
 
Ionus
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2011 07:35 pm
@BillRM,
Who says he was shot in the eye ?
 

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