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monolith
climber
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Yea Hawkeye, I decided not to get involved. Not worth the distraction. Let the truthers have fun in their little playpen.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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i am fine with no photograph and the burial at seza thing is brilliant. why? because if preventing some zealots from getting inspiration either from pictures or visiting an OBL shrine saves one life its worth it.
It was also brilliant because the destruction prevents anyone from figuring out the details of what happened. For example, was he shot in the back, therefore disproving the administration's claims that OBL would have been taken alive if possible?
This thought was explored by Alan Dershowitz in WSJ today--basically recounted that in his extensive experience in murder trial defense, forensics on the body is often the key to understanding what happened. AD also noted that we don't bury a Muslim homicide victim within 24 hours. The whole thing allows Obama to kind of have his cake and eat it to--there's a nudge/wink to those who think the assassination was just fine while also at least plausibly complying with some notions of international law.
This is pretty much beaten to death, but if the position is going to be that Obama was killed while resisting a lawful attempt to arrest him rather than in an assassination, wouldn't it be incumbent on the administration to do an investigation into the circumstances of the killing?
Obama is generally a smooth operator--everyone should give him that.
Oh changing gears:
Was Osama the mastermind of 9/11?
My memory as being an adult who generally follows current events and has since before 9/11--I don't think anyone (who knows what they're talking about) ever really contended that Osama was the mastermind of 9/11. It was an AQ operation and Osama was in charge of AQ, but it was planned lower on the hierarchy (by KSM), and merely approved by Osama.
At least that's the way I remember. I'm talking about generally accepted reports, not conspiracy stuff.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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you propose actually trusting the Obama administration to investigate itself on the
circumstances of the killing itself?
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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you propose actually trusting the Obama administration to investigate itself on the
circumstances of the killing itself?
Well, that's basically how any investigation of possible government wrongdoing is done, yes. Obviously there is a potential conflict of interest, but an investigation is more credible than an all-too-convenient destruction of evidence.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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So much for having destroyed the downed chopper - nice present for the Chinese.
The remote operator obviously nicked a compound wall either setting it down, which seems inept at best, or wasn't adequately situationally aware in attempting to do [very] close surveillance (which seems ill-advised with a drone that size). If he was setting it down, then it begs the question of why bother landing the drone at all.
In either case, it points certainly out some of the current limitations of remote piloting in close-in surveillance ops. It would seem some all-sides proximity sensors tied to command overrides would be in order.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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...therefore disproving the administration's claims that OBL would have been taken alive if possible...
You can bet your ass NO ONE wanted him alive - it would have caused way, way too many problems downstream. Not the least of which, given the multitude of nationalities who died in the WTC attack, would have been a clamoring demand he be tried in the Hague and not in a US civilian or military court.
Very messy all in all. This was definitely a case of the deader the better from the get go no matter who makes claims to the contrary.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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was he shot in the back
actually, that could also be used to indicate he was a coward running away while he had no issue with sending others to their deaths for his cause. frankly, i dont give a sh#t where they shot him.
Gene, why?
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN that weapons were near bin Laden, who died on an upper floor of the compound toward the end of the nearly 40-minute raid. "He was right there and going to get those arms. You really can't take a chance."
this is a great case where in my opinion the facts are not all in (but does not make me disbelieve everything i hear). imagine you are osama and you damn sure heard the choppers come in. you probably heard footsteps (assume that the SEALs used silenced firearms ). so why the hell would it take him 40 minutes to try and get to the firearms, and why the hell would the SEALs give him 40 minutes. i call BS on that. knowing the penchant for bombs if you were planning this raid would you not go in so fast and furious as to have any fighting over in a matter of 5 minutes tops? i mean 25 guys only dispatched what 4 killed?
taking 40 minutes to off 4 guys makes no sense for me and the above statement if true would suggest that OBL must have been so drugged or out of it as to not hear anyone until they were at this frickin door.
this does not make me disbelieve everything i hear, nor does it make me think that there was a great big conspiracy and OBL was dead in 2001 and ripened for the right time....just sayin.
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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monolith
climber
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Hawkey, I bet we'll find he wasn't killed after 40 minutes. The whole operation took that long, including the collection of intelligence.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Proof the killings were illegal, this is the worst fake planting of a gun to justify a shooting I've ever seen.
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Gene
climber
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the Fet,
Don't you know that that is a White House authorized Photoshop image that had to be manipulated in order to not inflame al-Qaeda sensibilities? Al-Qaeda guys don't pack real heat.
Sheesh.
g
PS: Never bring a squirt gun to a SEALs event.
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shut up and pull
climber
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A LOOK AT OBAMA’S post-Osama-shooting polls. Some weird results: He got a bounce, but “according to Quinnipiac, his re-elect among independents actually went down.”
Why? Cuz everyone knows Barry Hussein wants to make nice-nice with the terrorists, not kill them.
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shut up and pull
climber
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Obama oil subsidy plans a boon for big oil. “The Obama plan would give Big Oil a huge win by making their smaller competitors less competitive.”
Its called corporatism folks. And Obama is the master of the corporations.
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shut up and pull
climber
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OBAMA AND OSAMA: The Vindication Of President Bush? “In one event, on May Day, the entire case against President Bush was demolished by one of his greatest critics: President Obama. . . . President Obama, one of the Bush administration’s most strident and vocal opponents, used the very tools, techniques, and tactics that he attacked previously and very publicly to accomplish it all, vindicating former President Bush and six years of the War on Terror before Obama took office.”
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shut up and pull
climber
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uh oh.
San Francisco vs. USA: Rift Emerges in Responses to Bin Laden's Death
Source: The Bay Citizen
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shut up and pull
climber
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UH OH.
May 3, 2011
Top Green Admits: “We Are Lost!”
Walter Russell Mead
George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed.
Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one of the smartest people in it. This is what I’ve been getting at for more than a year here: regardless of what is happening to Planet Earth, the green movement does not have coherent and workable solutions.
Greens like to have it both ways. They warn darkly about “peak oil” and global resource shortages that will destroy our industrial economy in its tracks — but also warn that runaway economic growth will destroy the planet through the uncontrolled effects of mass industrial productions. Both doomsday scenarios cannot be true; one cannot simultaneously die of both starvation and gluttony.
Monbiot gets it, and furthermore concedes one of the main arguments of the anti-green case. The ‘problem’ is not a shortage of carbon rich non-renewable futures. The problem is the abundance of these fuels. We are not running out of hydrocarbons; shale natural gas, tar sands and coal offer enormous reserves that can cover our needs for the foreseeable future. We have an abundance of fossil fuel. Moreover, it seems likely that for a very long time to come, fossil fuels will be substantially cheaper and more abundant that expensive renewables. (One should also note that these new fuel sources are found in places like Canada and the United States rather than Saudi Arabia and Iran.)
More, Monbiot also acknowledges the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the green solutions. He acknowledges that there is no prospect for democratic politics to impose the draconian limits on consumption and economic activity that green dogma requires. Every ‘solution’ the greens have come up with has a fatal flaw of some kind; none of it works, none of it makes any sense. As Monbiot concludes,
“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”
This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse.
Monbiot has worked his way through to a cogent description of the dead end the global green movement has reached, but he has not yet diagnosed the cause. In particular, he remains a staunch Malthusian. In his view, humanity is good at creating new ways to destroy itself, but not at finding solutions to the problems we create. Our ingenuity is magically good at finding new fossil fuels, but we have no skill whatsoever at managing the consequences of our discoveries. The unknown technologies of the future will create horrible new disasters, but they will offer no new ways to contain or manage the disruption they cause.
Economic growth is a cancer, in this view. Its bad effects are permanent and cumulative, its blessings are evanescent and ultimately trivial.
Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.
It is happening on a massive and humiliating scale to the world’s greens today. Monbiot’s sober assessment of the consequences is dead on; when the greens digest his analysis and go a bit further to ask how they got into this mess, they will be ready to join something that the world truly and urgently needs: a serious and grownup conversation about how to conserve the beauty and viability of our glorious home as the human race continues to develop the extraordinary intelligence Mother Nature has seen fit to give us.
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