Makes perfect sense. Its absolutely critical that the soldiers involved are never identified publicly, for the sake of their families’ safety.
Exactly. Just ask any conspiracy theorist, “what would convince you?”, and see if they can answer.
I am not a CT, but I’ll play devil’s advocate.
The incongruity between the treatment of UBL’s corpse and those of Uday and Qusay Hussein is what’s driving a lot of the crazy (IMHO) speculation that UBL wasn’t killed in yesterday’s raid. There strikes me as little reason why you couldn’t have had an impromptu news conference on the USN ship where the burial occurred. Fly in a good dozen or more journalists from a bunch of different organizations—Al Jaz, CNN, BBC, Pravda, whoever—let them video the corpse, take fingerprints whatever, watch UBL be sewn into a shroud and then heaved over the side: all of that would have gone a long way to squashing even the most resilient of conspiracy theorists. In short, do what was done for Uday and Qusay, who sat above ground for around a week postmortem, IIRC.
If he wasn’t killed during the raid, then what? It seems that he then either died earlier, and this is some silly way of closing out the hoax, or UBL is alive, but being tortured for everything he knows (and well, just because) in one of the U.S.'s black sites, God knows where. At the end of which, he’ll be liquidated, maybe literally.
What a weird situation. UBL was sitting in a the rough equivalent of an expensive home on the Maryland Western Shore, within eyesight of the Naval Academy, and no one can find him in all of this time. Then, the U.S. military fights a 30-40 minute gun battle, complete with exploding helicopter, and the Pakistani military doesn’t interfere. Despite the site being practically next door to the capital—and next door to the homes of a lot of senior Pakistani military officers—and even closer to India…
Glad he’s gone, one way or the other. Now bring the troops home.
Al Qaeda didn’t give a shit about Uday and Qusay…or Saddam, for that matter. Those bodies had nothing to do with this enemy. Displaying OBL’s body has ramifications that those other bodies did not.
Of course, it’s not like photographs are going to satisfy the deathers anyway.They’ll just say they’re faked.
I would point out that any conspiracy would require the Navy SEALs to be in on, though. If this operation never happened, there would be all kinds of Navy personnel screaming their heads off about it.
Right- in that case there was a concern that the Iraqis wouldn’t believe they were really dead and gone unless they could see it with their own eyes. Remember that bizarre video of Saddam getting a physical, having his teeth checked and such? The notion was that Iraq couldn’t move on unless it was perfectly clear the Husseins were never going to be in charge again, and that did make some sense. In both cases people wanted proof but the reasoning was somewhat different. And I did see some commentary that the government feels Saddam’s burial place in Tikrit became a shrine to him.
coming soon to a grocery near you. Check the canned crab section. If you have a sudden impulse to kill Jews just remember that it will pass soon.
It’s not that weird a situation. I think the fact that I can get on a plane in Richmond and be anywhere in the world in no more than a long day of flying has lead some people to believe the earth is as small as the community they live in.
The truth of the matter is that Pakistan is a big enough country that it should be no surprise that the United States was totally unaware that Osama bin Laden was living in a compound in a city right near the heart of the “settled” region of Pakistan. Firstly, everything the public has seen for at least ten years has strongly suggested ObL was living in some mountainous region vaguely around the border of Pakistan/Afghanistan, a huge rugged wilderness full of various tribes and highly difficult to fully scout and find every little hiding place.
Based on what President Obama has said in the past few days, it looks like even the United States didn’t suspect he was living in a normal Pakistani town essentially in plain sight until maybe 2010 at the absolute earliest. The courier that lead us to bin Laden is someone we apparently became aware of about four years ago but it wasn’t until maybe the last 12-18 months it really started to pick up and then earlier this year of course it got red hot as they became aware of this compound and intelligence started analyzing it.
There are lots of big houses in otherwise normal communities all over the world, and probably all over other cities in Pakistan. There was just honestly no reasonable way we could have known he was there.
Now, Pakistan is a whole other matter. One would suspect that this strange house that residents called “Waziristan Mansion” (in reference to the fact strange individuals from Waziristan–the tribal region Osama was *suspected *of hiding in, had apparently built and occupied the building) would have come up on the radar of Pakistani intelligence at some point. Not necessarily at first as a big deal, but it’d show up as a blip sort of like “hmm, weird compound pops up, residents say the people inside are from the tribal regions to the north, very strange security measures, no links to the internet and they burn their own trash…” Not an immediate slam dunk, but how that could never have ended up being noticed by any of the local authorities and then looked at with scrutiny (and such scrutiny would have certainly made it readily look much more interesting) is hard to understand. Which is why I strongly suspect at the very least someone in power at the local level there in that part of Pakistan was involved. That’s being generous to Pakistan, based on other evidence I would not be surprised if the highest levels of Pakistani government were in fact complicit in this.
The Pakistani military being unaware until the thing was almost over is well, not surprising at all. How far into the Columbine shooting was the American military aware? That had essentially the same foot print. The helicopters apparently took off from a base not far from there, which American forces have been allowed to use for some time. Those helicopters going up would not immediately trigger any alarms because most likely helicopters leave there all the time. Them landing in the middle of town in Abbottabad would send up red flags, but probably not instantly. It should be worth noting low flying helicopters leaving a military base that commonly sees American helicopters coming and going isn’t like some sort of “red alert siren mode engaged” for Pakistani radar. In fact low flying helicopter would probably not be seen by the Pakistani military, most likely the only reason they were even aware of the situation as early as they were was that this literally went down in the very middle of a residential neighborhood and most likely local police were called by concerned residents who noticed explosions and continuous gun fire in the middle of the night.
Exeunt Birthers, Enter Deathers.
I agree with “the proof is that it would be political suicide that would make Obama the most hated president in history” if revealed, and it would be. That said, I expect the conspiracy theories to be:
-He was already dead/died years ago and this was a way of giving Obama a bump
or
-It was one of his lookalikes
Or for Fox to start the “now that he’s dead we’re really in trouble” cries.
Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed during the administration of the previous president. The Bush Administration made one calculation about the value of displaying the dead bodies of one set of enemies vs. the possibility of inflaming local public sentiment against us; the Obama Administration made a different calculation. Although Obama and his advisors certainly haven’t been the 180° polar opposite of the Bush Administration that some hoped (or feared) they would be, Obama and his people are clearly not the same bunch as Bush and his people and don’t necessarily think the same way or come to the same conclusions.
And of course as for the body, it’s highly obvious the handling of the body has been done to insure we do not get accused of desecrating or mistreating his corpse. ObL has actually lost a lot of credibility with much of the Muslim world in the past 7-8 years, even with extremists and other terrorists. Outside of Al-Qaeda cells itself ObL was not nearly the force that he once was, where at one point even totally non-affiliated groups sort of viewed him as a hero/icon. There is no reason to make him respected in circles he wasn’t already respected in by mistreating his corpse and enraging persons who were not otherwise too concerned about ObL dying.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the world is going to accept, without any problem, the validity of Osama’s death. You do not generally want to have your actions governed by what you think will convince conspiracy theorists that there is no conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists are essentially hysterical types and I consider that a partial form of mental incompetence, that’s not the group of people for whom you should cater your actions.
I’m sure the government, if pressed, could produce OBL’s Casio digital wristwatch.
Once in a while you would hear someone say that he was in a safe house in Pakistan. It’s not true that nobody ever suggested it- not that they had proof. But the public image was definitely that he was somewhere in the wilds along the border in relatively primitive surroundings even if he wasn’t literally in a cave.
As others have said, claiming his death while he’s still alive would be political suicide.
Others have suggested the possibility that he died years ago and they are now faking his death.
Here’s the problem with that, as I see it. First it assumes that it’s known for certain that he died years ago. That implies that there are people who saw convincing proof years ago, and it’s unlikely that all (or even any) of them are in the Obama administration. In fact the likelihood is that they were in the Bush administration. Would Obama want to now claim responsibility for a death that political opponents know actually occurred years ago? As in the other case, it would be political suicide.
Indeed that was the popular image, and as the Family Guy clip showed, maybe Osama got tired of getting beaten by Stewie so that is why he moved to the city. 
It’s a bit odd how he didn’t seem to have any guards. I always thought he’d be surrounded by a heavily armed loyal bodyguard but there’s been no mention of a shootout. The SEALs went in, found a couple of wives in a room on the first floor, proceeded to the second floor where they found bin Laden with his wife. No mention of any armed guards apart from the couple of couriers.
And why did the helicopter crash? Do they have a habit of stalling? I would have thought a helicopter stalling would be quite a rare thing. The chances of it stalling at just that moment in the middle of a crucial anti-terrorist op seems like a big coincidence.
I’ve read mentions of a shootout.
Maybe, but you’d have thought that would have been emphasised more in the news if it had happened to any great degree.
You would think, bin Laden, a guy like that would have lookouts posted around the compound and also an escape route in case there’s a drama. I’m surprised he didn’t have a tunnel leading out of the compound or at least some means of exit. That’s the first rule of special forces - always make sure you’ve got an exit.
Sitting in a compound with no lookouts, no guards and no escape route seems a bit negligent to me, as far as evil masterminds go.
He was keeping a low profile. The more security and things you have, the higher your profile is. He was living with the two couriers and one of his sons (evidently Hamza, but nobody has confirmed it) plus wives and families. There were few people he could trust. So in that sense he was not that well guarded.
I’m not sure what news stories you’ve been reading, mutantmoose; the stories I’ve seen have all talked about a 40-minute firefight before bin Laden was killed.
That said, it appears he only had maybe three or four guards, which isn’t a huge number. On the other hand, this compound of his already sounds insanely conspicuous as it is–the Pakistani goverment is already facing enough questions without it having turned out that bin Laden was holed up in a giant high-tech base in the caldera of a semi-dormant volcano staffed by a couple of battalions of Ninja Assassin Bodyguards located in the middle of Islamabad Central Municipal Park.
As to guards: the more guards you have, the more people have to know where you are. Not to mention the increased amounts of food you have to bring in, the larger number of comings and goings that might attract interest… Given that if ObL’s cover was blown, the Americans would bring in enough troops to outnumber the guards, no matter how many guards he had, it makes sense to minimize the number of people in the compound.
The news reports say it was a “mechanical failure”. Frankly, I think that either the pilot landed badly (understandable, given the total darkness) or the helicopter came under fire or both, and it was damaged enough that the SEALs decided to call in their backup helicopter rather than fly it out.