Osama Bin Laden is dead!

Seth wrote:

holy crap Limbaugh said something positive about the President

Hm, another article puts that in quite a different slant...

Yonder wrote:
ilduce620 wrote:
Yonder wrote:

This is an especially poignant observation to make considering that this week (unless something else breaks) we will be launching the last shuttle mission, after which the United States will lose the ability to put a human into orbit.

The last trip for Endeavour, yes. Atlantis is supposed to be the last flight of a shuttle, scheduled for June 28th. Last I heard, at least.

Whoops, you're right, how embarrassing.

No problem. I wouldn't have known, either, 'cept they talked about it on NPR's Science Friday two weeks ago and I remembered them saying that Atlantis was supposed to go up one more time. Oh well!

Seth wrote:

holy crap Limbaugh said something positive about the President:

...

Yeah, he also said that he was contiuing Bush's policies, but it's something I never thought I would see.

Sadly, he was being sarcastic. I had some hope, but it was dashed. Still, I'd buy bumper stickers with these phrases on there to confuse the crazy people that listen to him.

Limbaugh expects his audience to pick up on sarcasm?

oh god dammit.

What are the chances that Bin Laden will become a zombie? I say zero because he was shot in the head.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

What are the chances that Bin Laden will become a zombie? I say zero because he was shot in the head.

Edit: Nvm.

HopeChest wrote:

edit: OG_slinger: what I meant was that in both cases, we went in and caused that suffering by loved ones while doing the "right" thing. In between your two posts, I think you forgot the original question you asked me.

No, every person we have killed is not a "secret terrorist" but that's not what you asked me about: you asked me about the reactions of loved ones to people killed as a consequence of us doing the "right" thing, which is what my comment was directed towards. That's the best sense I can make out of our exchange.

You were being uncivil by jumping to hyperbole so quickly, by asking me if I believe something is done by means of 'magic': clearly you had to know that I do not, and there's no reason to get snarky like that.

+++++

Okay, to get back to your latest post (we crossed in edits and postings) you still haven't shown me why the fact that the families grieve the same proves that intentions don't matter. They matter as far as the emotional reactions of loved ones, but, why is that evidence that what we are doing is necessarily wrong? Emotional reactions don't always makes sense: that's why they call them 'emotions' in the first place.

I didn't forget why I responded it to you. It was this post:

HopeChest wrote:

Aetius: if for you intent is not important (that's what I'm gathering from your postings--tell me if I'm wrong), and just the scale of human misery is the only metric, I think your difference of opinion with those you disagree with is not over the line between terrorism and (just) war, it's over a much more fundamental aspect of the concept of justice.

Coupled with your other statements lead me to feel that you think anything we do based on good intentions is ultimately excusable, no matter if what we actually did was many, many times worse than 9/11.

Do you honestly think that the surviving family members and friends of an Iraqi or Afghani civilian killed by American forces or caught in the crossfire are suddenly OK with it because we were doing the "right" thing? Of course not. Their loved ones are still dead and we were the ones that made that happen.

Hell, 92% Afghani men recently polled had no f*cking clue why we were in their country. To them we are simply infidel invaders who suddenly showed up and started killing people for no real reason.

We don't get a pass on the million people we killed or whose death we contributed to because we've convinced ourselves that we had the of best intentions. We tend to either forget or simply outright ignore that people can view the same event in widely different ways. To most Americans Iraq and Afghanistan was us wearing white and riding to the rescue. To a lot of Iraqis and Afghanis, however, we were an invading army wearing camo and body armor and spreading death, destruction, and chaos.

If what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan was an acceptable response for 9/11 just imagine what some people might think would be an acceptable response to our actions.

OG_slinger wrote:

Hell, 92% Afghani men recently polled had no f*cking clue why we were in their country. To them we are simply infidel invaders who suddenly showed up and started killing people for no real reason.

If another country's military was in my back yard killing religious extremists, and I had no idea why, would you not call me an ignorant moron. Pretty sure that's what most people's responses would be to someone so oblivious to their surroundings.
And it is 92% of 1,000 people polled; we all know how statistics can be bent in any manner needed to get the information desired. I'm calling BS.

Funkenpants wrote:

"Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can't do," Obama said of the news bound to lift his political standing and help define his presidency.

That's the kind of thing I'd say about a moon landing. It's always been pretty clear we know how to kill guys. That's pretty much what we're known for these days. I doubt anyone needed a reminder.

This is most thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.

In the past, the American president and people were inspired and rallied around the moon landing; an outstanding human and scientific accomplishment.

Now, the same rhetoric, but instead the country is brought together by the execution of your enemies.

Hopefully Obama was simply referring to the challenge of overcoming terrorism; but (at least according to various European commentators) Osama Bin Laden hasn't been influential in that field for a long while now.

Caddrel wrote:

This is most thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.

In the past, the American president and people were inspired and rallied around the moon landing; an outstanding human and scientific accomplishment.

Now, the same rhetoric, but instead the country is brought together by the execution of your enemies.

Not unprecedented. Look to V-E and V-J rhetoric.

ELewis17 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Hell, 92% Afghani men recently polled had no f*cking clue why we were in their country. To them we are simply infidel invaders who suddenly showed up and started killing people for no real reason.

If another country's military was in my back yard killing religious extremists, and I had no idea why, would you not call me an ignorant moron. Pretty sure that's what most people's responses would be to someone so oblivious to their surroundings.
And it is 92% of 1,000 people polled; we all know how statistics can be bent in any manner needed to get the information desired. I'm calling BS.

This is a very interesting reaction to what he was saying. Rather than seeking to understand how and why so many people in Helmand and Kandahar have answered in this way, and then perhaps to work out why to fix it, your reaction is:

1. To call them oblivious, ignorant morons.
2. To suggest the policy think-tank that compiled the report have bent the statistics and are talking "bullsh*t".

Also, do you think it's only religious extremists being killed in Afghanistan?

ELewis17 wrote:

If another country's military was in my back yard killing religious extremists, and I had no idea why, would you not call me an ignorant moron. Pretty sure that's what most people's responses would be to someone so oblivious to their surroundings.
And it is 92% of 1,000 people polled; we all know how statistics can be bent in any manner needed to get the information desired. I'm calling BS.

You do realize that less than 30% of Afghans are literate. It's not like they're getting their current events from the New York Times.

To make it an apt comparison it wouldn't be another country's military showing up in your back yard killing religious extremists. It would be another country's military suddenly showing up and killing local political leaders, members of the chamber of commerce, and other average church-going citizens.

And you might want to actually take a moment to read the report the statistic came from before dismissing it outright.

MannishBoy wrote:

Not unprecedented. Look to V-E and V-J rhetoric.

Except VE and VJ Days celebrated the end of killing, not another killing.

OG_slinger: I'm not sure how those lead you to feel that I had such an absolute position, but in any case, you are mistaken. I do not believe that mere good intentions are enough, at least good intentions so simple as "we were shooting at the bad guys."

Also, even if you're not forgetting your earlier responses to me, you're bouncing around between different cases (e.g. civilian killed in crossfire when we go after a legitimate target vs. when we kill only civilians because of negligence in picking a target) that bring up different issues, and it's making it difficult for me to give you accurate answers about how I feel about the matter.

As for the rest of what you said, I think we simply disagree on the importance of the feelings of those who have lost someone in the crossfire in determining whether the death and destruction we cause after trying to find some sort of just balance in our rules of engagement between effectiveness and minimizing the suffering of innocents is the moral equivalent of intentionally targeting innocents. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're arguing the absolute position that unless those rules of engagement are designed to reduce civilian casualties to nil, it's no better than trying to inflate civilian casualties. I do not agree with that position, and I don't want to argue against such an extreme position before ensuring it's not a strawman I'm constructing.

I also think you are assuming something else of me that is not true: that I blame those 92% for thinking we are infidel invaders who suddenly showed up and started killing people for no real reason. I do not. Nor would I fault them from a moral standpoint if they responded by invading us if they did not consider 9/11 a sufficient provocation for our invasion of Afghanistan--they have the right to defend their country just as we do.

Iraq...I think we're getting too far off-topic if we're going beyond 9/11, and I am one of those people who had no idea what those two things had in common at the time we invaded, so.

Coldstream wrote:

Make no mistake, the death of any civilian is a terrible thing, and the extreme measures taken by the military to avoid such casualties is why this crap has dragged on for so long. If we really were the cold-blooded, morally-equivalent killers that the apologists would have everyone believe, then there's no reason we couldn't have just carpet-bombed or nuked the major cities in Iraq/Afganistan and went on with our day. The reason our enemies hide in civilian populations is because they know that we're loathe to risk civilian lives in our operations. Were it otherwise, it would be pointless to hide in a civilian population if we would just killed everyone to make sure we got the bad guys.

But don't suggest that military action = terrorism. There's a fundamental difference based on intent that goes to the core of how almost every civilisation in history has differentiated between murder and other kinds of death. This is not an eye-of-the-beholder thing.

Here's an important question to consider, which I'd be interested in hearing your answer to; why do you think the US and UK military strive to avoid civilian casualties?

And regarding the question of intent; if you make the decision to go to war, you accept from the start there are going to be civilian casualties. Given that, surely it's reasonable to say that by going to war, you accept that your military is going to kill civilians? You can't say you didn't know it was going to happen, the defense that's commonly used is, "What we were going to war for is more important than X civilian deaths."

Yonder wrote:

This is an especially poignant observation to make considering that this week (unless something else breaks) we will be launching the last shuttle mission, after which the United States will lose the ability to put a human into orbit.

True, but we'll still have the satellites and space robots.

OG_slinger wrote:

Except reports have it that he was killed by a double tap the left side of his head...

I hadn't seen any reports regarding that. I had heard something about him being shielded behind some woman. I'm sure more information will be forthcoming, but I don't know if we'll ever really "know" what happened.

Shooting someone in the head is a technique the military uses to make sure the person is dead. If they were to shoot at Osama then they were trying to kill him. And they would make sure at least one round went into his head.

KrazyTacoFO wrote:

Shooting someone in the head is a technique the military uses to make sure the person is dead. If they were to shoot at Osama then they were trying to kill him. And they would make sure at least one round went into his head.

"He knows too much".

Sincerely,

Truthers

I'm not going to jump in on the comments about whether the US govt is on the same moral footing as the terrorists. I just wanted to find out where the million civilian casualties number came from. Without a verfiable source I can't believe that the American military is directly responsible for half, or even a quarter of that many deaths.

jdzappa wrote:

I'm not going to jump in on the comments about whether the US govt is on the same moral footing as the terrorists. I just wanted to find out where the million civilian casualties number came from. Without a verfiable source I can't believe that the American military is directly responsible for half, or even a quarter of that many deaths.

Even if that number were correct it wouldn't be the US being directly responsible. Early on in the war Lancet estimated a quarter million. In 2006 they bumped that number up to near a million. Looking it up...

Here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties

Anyway, aside from the numbers likely being wrong they're liberally lumping in people that likely would have died of natural causes or violence anyway. Putting an exact number on collateral damage not bombed or shot by coalition forces would be really hard to do.

OG_slinger wrote:
ELewis17 wrote:

If another country's military was in my back yard killing religious extremists, and I had no idea why, would you not call me an ignorant moron. Pretty sure that's what most people's responses would be to someone so oblivious to their surroundings.
And it is 92% of 1,000 people polled; we all know how statistics can be bent in any manner needed to get the information desired. I'm calling BS.

You do realize that less than 30% of Afghans are literate. It's not like they're getting their current events from the New York Times.

To make it an apt comparison it wouldn't be another country's military showing up in your back yard killing religious extremists. It would be another country's military suddenly showing up and killing local political leaders, members of the chamber of commerce, and other average church-going citizens.

And you might want to actually take a moment to read the report the statistic came from before dismissing it outright.

I have read a decent portion of the report, though not all of it. I was able to find the portion of the article that states that "90% of people of southern Afghanistan do not know about the 9/11 attacks". That is quite different from your original quote:

OG_slinger wrote:

Hell, 92% Afghani men recently polled had no f*cking clue why we were in their country. To them we are simply infidel invaders who suddenly showed up and started killing people for no real reason.

Actually the article really makes your quote almost entirely false.

We have had troops on the ground in Afghanistan for nine years and change. I really doubt that there is a single able-minded person in the country not aware of the US troops combating the Taliban.
Now there are really only two reasons I can come up with for the people to have no knowledge of the original purpose for our "occupation" of the country (Our country's civilians were attacked by AQ, and now the Taliban is hiding AQ's leader from us):
1) They accepted whatever propaganda/lies/conjured story they were fed by whomever as fact.
2) The situation has not affected them directly enough for them to care.

I don't really have a point to make here, but while they may not have known about the 9/11 attacks on our country, they do know that we are there to fight the Taliban.
The interviewees were read:
"On September 11 2001, Al Qaeda attackers hijacked planes in the United States which were full of
ordinary passengers, including women and children. They flew these planes, full of people, into two
tall buildings in the city of New York. They destroyed both buildings, which were full of ordinary
people.
The attacks killed 3000 innocent citizens, including Muslims. They were organised and directed by
Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, who was then living in Afghanistan protected by the Taliban
government.
The American government asked the Taliban to hand over Osama Bin Laden. They refused, so the
Americans and their allies NATO attacked the Taliban, and came into Afghanistan to look for
Osama Bin Laden and overthrew the Taliban."

Response to above text wrote:

When asked whether this description justifies the international mission in Afghanistan, the
results are divided. Almost half of the respondents (48%) believe that it does, and nearly
half (46%) do not believe the events of 9/11 provide justification for the intervention.

Interesting report.

jdzappa wrote:

I'm not going to jump in on the comments about whether the US govt is on the same moral footing as the terrorists. I just wanted to find out where the million civilian casualties number came from. Without a verfiable source I can't believe that the American military is directly responsible for half, or even a quarter of that many deaths.

Not sure where the million figure is from, but the Lancet did two studies which are pretty solid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_...

Who the responsibility lies with is another matter, but a lot of people have died in Iraq following the US invasion (or liberation, or whatever term people prefer).

To quote the short summary of the second report:

The second survey published on 11 October 2006, estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006. The new study applied similar methods and involved surveys between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths.

601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval) were due to violence.

31% (186,318) of those were attributed to the Coalition, 24% (144,246) to others, and 46% (276,472) unknown.

I would have preferred he ended his days in spirit crushing solitary at ADX Florence, but two 5.56mm cerebral hemmorages work for me.

Paleocon wrote:

I would have preferred he ended his days in spirit crushing solitary at ADX Florence, but two 5.56mm cerebral hemmorages work for me.

The weirdest thing to me is how the administration had the intelligence to take him down, but didn't capture him. I understand some of the arguments against that, but isn't the chance of him letting out valuable intelligence worth catching him?

EDIT: Unless, of course, that intelligence would also have included his knowledge of life as a CIA asset. Oops.

DSGamer wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

I would have preferred he ended his days in spirit crushing solitary at ADX Florence, but two 5.56mm cerebral hemmorages work for me.

The weirdest thing to me is how the administration had the intelligence to take him down, but didn't capture him. I understand some of the arguments against that, but isn't the chance of him letting out valuable intelligence worth catching him?

Our soldiers are trained more to kill than to capture in combat unless somebody's overtly surrendering. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback when your not in combat with a bunch of extremist Muslims in Pakistan. Right in the middle of a lot of Pakistani military types in what probably could have been considered hostile territory.

It probably would have been better if a capture had worked out like happened with Saddam. Unfortunately it didn't happen for whatever reason. Sounds like Osama didn't want to surrender and preferred the martyrs death. Our soldiers helped him toward that end.

Reading some of the latest posts, something else to remember about bin Laden that's easy to forget--I know I do--with him having spent the last decade fading into almost-legend: back when Afghanistan was invaded, it wasn't because bin Laden's attack on the Twin Towers was a one-night-only piece of grotesque performance art. We didn't just go into Afghanistan because of what bin Laden *did*; we went in because of what we thought what a safe base of operations would allow him to do in the future.

This latest raid may turn out to be mostly about retribution (depends on how active bin Laden was in developing new attacks), but back in '01, it was also about interrupting his ability to stage another 9/11. Osama may have become a figurehead as the years went on, but back when we actually invaded he was much more than just that.

MannishBoy wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

I would have preferred he ended his days in spirit crushing solitary at ADX Florence, but two 5.56mm cerebral hemmorages work for me.

The weirdest thing to me is how the administration had the intelligence to take him down, but didn't capture him. I understand some of the arguments against that, but isn't the chance of him letting out valuable intelligence worth catching him?

Our soldiers are trained more to kill than to capture in combat unless somebody's overtly surrendering. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback when your not in combat with a bunch of extremist Muslims in Pakistan. Right in the middle of a lot of Pakistani military types in what probably could have been considered hostile territory.

It probably would have been better if a capture had worked out like happened with Saddam. Unfortunately it didn't happen for whatever reason. Sounds like Osama didn't want to surrender and preferred the martyrs death. Our soldiers helped him toward that end.

Pretty much this.

That and I wouldn't trade a single American life to capture Osama bin Laden alive. If there was even the slightest chance that one of our operatives would get harmed, I say make the bastard do the Spandau ballet.

DSGamer wrote:

The weirdest thing to me is how the administration had the intelligence to take him down, but didn't capture him. I understand some of the arguments against that, but isn't the chance of him letting out valuable intelligence worth catching him?

EDIT: Unless, of course, that intelligence would also have included his knowledge of life as a CIA asset. Oops.

I just hope we can rely on the Pakistani forces securing that compound. That place could be a treasure trove of intel. Hell they might be able to find every freaking cell in the world if they were stupid enough to keep laptops there.

Bear wrote:

I just hope we can rely on the Pakistani forces securing that compound. That place could be a treasure trove of intel. Hell they might be able to find every freaking cell in the world if they were stupid enough to keep laptops there.

According to the reports I've seen, the SEAL's secured the intel when they conducted the raid. For some reason I don't think they wanted to let the Pakistani forces handle much of anything.

I thought I read somewhere that he was shot while resisting detainment. Has new information come to light? I haven't had much time to go into all the headlines I've seen, but a few of them read something along the lines that Obama had ordered the team to capture bin Laden alive.