DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... Bin Laden killed (Part 2)

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The Bin Laden thread has been killed ... news at 11.

I was thinking they say it was a mission to capture or kill OBL.
I bet it wasnt I bet the mission was just to kill him.

Makes ya wonder...what would they have done with him had they just captured him?

Heard they found 5 signed jerseys, 3 gold pants charms and 2 sweater vests in that mansion.

work buddy said his friend's facebook status had the best insight...

"That's what OBL gets for putting his real information on the Playstation Network."

I'm guessing the image that I can't see at work is blocked because it links to a video game site?

I fail.

j/c

I am pleased that this POS was brought to justice...although I won't celebrate his death.

I give credit to Obama for having the guts, sense, brains, cajones, insight, forsight, etc to go ahead with the mission. It's ironic that had GITMO never existed, he may never have gotten the chance to approve the mission.

I am starting to get more and more pissed at Pakistan for that POS being able to live in luxury and happiness for the past six years. Undetected. I've got to believe we had other "opportunities" to get him yet "he just barely got away". Which to me means we told Pakistan of a pending mission and they "helped" him barely get away.

We need to put a great deal of pressure on them to provide an acceptable explanation.

I hope we do not show pictures of his dead body OR the burial. Too bad too sad for the extremists who want something to mourn or martyr. Let them think OBL is still alive.

Nothing good can come from the release of his body or burial.

Now...on to Ayman Zawhiri (sp?) and let's get out of Afganistan.

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It's ironic that had GITMO never existed, he may never have gotten the chance to approve the mission.

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Not only that, but had waterboarding not been used, he may never have gotten the chance to approve the mission.

j/c

Read on www.CNN.com that the reports now are that Bin Laden was unarmed.

The movie "Unforgiven" pops into my mind.

You shot an unarmed man!
Shoulda armed himself...if he's going to attack my country.

I'm sure most killed on 9/11 were also unarmed. Just sayin'.

Unarmed?

I'd say "Who cares?".

We sent SEAL's, not Federal Marshall's.... we weren't there to bring him back for a trial.

j/c

Couple of thoughts: First, I stand in wonder at our military's ability to fly into a foreign country, unbeknownst to them, spend 40 some minutes on the ground, and fly out. All less than a mile from a military base. Radar jamming. Painting our helicopters - what ever. It's amazing.

Second - I find it extremely difficult to believe our troops were told to "capture or kill" bin laden. That might be what we are saying now - but I highly doubt the troops involved were told capturing bin laden was a viable option. Had he been captured - then what?

Put him on trial where? In the u.s.? Then you have all the problems/questions of "did he get a fair trial". Try him in an Arab country? Same questions. No, I def. believe the troops were told "if he's there, kill him." Remember, the first reports were he was armed and shooting. Now we're finding out he wasn't armed - he wasn't shooting.

Third. I still question whether Pakistan knew what we were doing or not. I know in my first point I sad Kudo's to the military for flying in undetected. But I have a feeling pakistan knew and just didn't react - they had been informed, and told not to do anything. Why do I feel that way? Because it makes it easier for our troops, but more so, it makes it easier for Pakistan to tell the world "we didn't know". It saves them much heartache from the arab nations.

Just some thoughts of mine.

That was my guess also.

SEAL: You surrender?
OBL: N[bang]

This calls for a drink. I’ll have the Bin Laden.. two shots and a splash of water. Mmm mmm good!

In his first interview since commanding the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, CIA chief Leon Panetta tells TIME that U.S. officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets. Long before Panetta ordered Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of the Joint Special Forces Command, to undertake the mission at 1:22 p.m. on Friday, the CIA had been gaming out how to structure the raid. Months prior, the U.S. had considered expanding the assault to include coordination with other countries, notably Pakistan. But the CIA ruled out participating with its nominal South Asian ally early on because “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets,” Panetta says.

The U.S. also considered running a high-altitude bombing raid from B-2 bombers or launching a “direct shot” with cruise missiles but ruled out those options because of the possibility of “too much collateral,” Panetta says. The direct-shot option was still on the table as late as last Thursday as the CIA and then the White House grappled with how much risk to take on the mission. Waiting for more intelligence also remained a possibility.

On Tuesday, Panetta assembled a group of 15 aides to assess the credibility of the intelligence they had collected on the compound in Abbottabad where they believed bin Laden was hiding. They had significant “circumstantial evidence” that bin Laden was living there, Panetta says — the residents burned their trash and had extraordinary security measures — but American satellites had not been able to photograph bin Laden or any members of his family. The Tuesday meeting included team leaders from the CIA’s counterterrorism center, the special-activities division (which runs covert operations for the agency) and officials from the office of South Asian analysis.

Panetta wanted to get those aides’ opinions on the potential bin Laden mission, and he quickly found a lack of unanimity among his team. Some of the aides had been involved in the Carter Administration’s effort to go after the hostages held by the Iranians 30 years ago; others had been involved in the ill-fated “Black Hawk Down” raid against Somali warlords in 1993. “What if you go down and you’re in a firefight and the Pakistanis show up and start firing?” Panetta says some worried. “How do you fight your way out?”

But Panetta concluded that the evidence was strong enough to risk the raid, despite the fact that his aides were only 60%-80% confident that bin Laden was there, and decided to make his case to the President. At the key Thursday meeting in which President Obama heard the arguments from his top aides on whether or not to go into Pakistan to kill or capture bin Laden, Panetta admitted that the evidence of bin Laden’s presence at the compound was circumstantial. But “when you put it all together,” Panetta says he told the room, “we have the best evidence since [the 2001 battle of] Tora Bora [where bin Laden was last seen], and that then makes it clear that we have an obligation to act.”

Obama decided that Panetta’s arguments trumped two other options: striking the compound remotely or waiting until more evidence was available to prove bin Laden was there. “If I thought delaying this could in fact produce better intelligence, that would be one thing,” Panetta says he argued, “but because of the nature of the security at the compound, we’re probably at a point where we’ve got the best intelligence we can get.”

For weeks, Panetta had been pushing the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to try to get photographic confirmation of the presence of the bin Laden family. “NGA was terrific at doing analysis on imagery of that compound,” he says, but “I kept struggling to say, ‘Can’t you at least try to get one of the people that looks like [bin Laden]?’ ” NGA produced photographs of the two couriers and their families that McRaven’s Navy Seal team used to identify players in the compound as they made their way toward bin Laden.

Panetta only learned that the President had been convinced by his arguments on Friday, when Obama said he was authorizing the helicopter mission and made his order official in a signed letter. After he received the order, Panetta told McRaven of the President’s decision and instructed him to launch. He told him the mission was “to go in there [and] get bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t there, get the hell out!”

CIA officials turned a windowless seventh-floor conference room at Langley into a command center for the mission, and Panetta watched the operation unfold from there. As he and his team waited for McRaven to report on whether bin Laden was indeed at the compound, Panetta says the room was tense. “I kept asking Bill McRaven, ‘O.K., what the hell’s this mean?,’ ” and when McRaven finally said they had ID’d “Geronimo,” the mission code name for bin Laden, “All the air we were holding came out,” Panetta says. When the helicopters left the compound 15 minutes later, the room broke into applause.

The aftermath of the mission has been productive. The U.S. collected an “impressive amount” of material from bin Laden’s compound, including computers and other electronics, Panetta says. Panetta has set up a task force to act on the fresh intelligence. Intelligence reporting suggests that one of bin Laden’s wives who survived the attack has said the family had been living at the compound since 2005, a source tells TIME.

That will raise questions about the Pakistani government’s possible awareness of bin Laden’s location in recent years. But one of Panetta’s predecessors says this can work to U.S. advantage. “It opens up some opportunities for us with Pakistan,” says John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA chief. “They now should feel under some great pressure to be cooperative with us on the remaining issues,” like going after the Taliban elsewhere in the country. “It’s called leverage.”

link

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/first-strands-on-bin-932436.html


And it all started there, with "harsh tactics". It doesn't specifically mention waterboarding, but it also doesn't rule it out.

I'm not one to be overly concerned with morality in war when dealing with combatants or intelligence assets.
War's very nature is immoral. It is ugly, brutal business. The goal in any and every war (aside from not getting into it) should be to win and end it as fast as possible by any and all means available. Only once you're out of the war can you really - honestly - pretend to care about morality.

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we're the world's leader in killing innocent civilians

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We just get the most opportunities. Put someone else in our position and the numbers would be significantly higher.
Kinda like how Travis Hafner has a higher number of hits in a major league game than I do.... I just haven't gotten the chance ;-)

Not sure if W's official statement had been posted...

May 1, 2011



Earlier this evening, President Obama called to inform me that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda network that attacked America on September 11, 2001. I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude. This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.

That list isnot very good.
Left off acoupla guys that should rank highly.
FDR,the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo killed thousands of civilians each.
And of coarse Truman,nuking the japs should get him rated.
Now that's mass kiling efficiently.

The list explains the nuking of japan at the bottom.. even if you counted every death in Japan from the initial blast to deaths afterwards.. we don't compare to the deaths caused by those at the top of that list.

Just throwing this out there, but I guess when I think of "genocide", I look at more recent times. I mean, we could look at how we treated the Native Americans in the late 1800s as well as the Filipinos in the late 1800s early 1900s, but that was a different time (though it doesn't make it right in the least).

I guess what I'm saying is that it seems we really do try our best to make sure we're not killing non combatants, and, if you think about it, that makes our job harder.

It would be a lot easier to do like the Soviets did in Afghanistan and just wipe out villages, but we don't. It would have been easy for us in the OBL raid to kill everyone there, but we didn't.

Do non combatant fatalities occur? Yes, they do, and it's extremely terrible and unfortunate. But, I think we at least TRY to keep them at a minimum.

I guess I take a little more pragmatic view (though not always on here since I like to play devil's advocate), but the most important thing is (1) advancing American interests and (equally) (2) protecting American lives. If there is some "collateral damage", it's sad, but it's the way it is.

JMHO