– bolding mine.
Might be smart, but it isn’t necessarily true:
– bolding mine.
Smart it remains.
You know what your problem is Apple?
I’ll tell you what your problem is.
You confuse people with the facts, that’s what your problem is.
The whole op lasted 40 minutes - from wheels down to wheels up - not the shootout. The only reference to a shootout appears to be at the end when bin Laden himself pulled a gun. Forty minutes isn’t much time to have a proper shootout. Remember that that 40 minutes also has to include them searching the place afterwards and carrying bin Laden’s body out to the helicopter
I think you should re-read my post, because that’s exactly the point I’m making.
In this case there were two additional practical concerns: there was the memorial thing, and the fact that if he’d been buried on land, he would have been in someone’s country. What country would have wanted bin Laden’s body? So it seems to me that they did the best they could with those stipulations. It would have been terrible if this turned into a sort of Abu Ghraib redux.
Four other people were shot to death. This is pretty clear in most of the reporting.
IIRC one was actually his son, and another was a woman (one of his wives? His son’s wives?) killed when someone used her as a human shield. The others were security guards, again IIRC.
-XT
They’ve been described as couriers, so they were apparently more than just bodyguards. It’s not clear who used the woman as a human shield. The Washington Post says flat-out that it was bin Laden, since the dead woman was one of his wives.
Again, I don’t know what news stories you’re reading here.
Certainly there are a lot of details in these accounts that seem confused or even outright contradictory, which is pretty much to be expected at this stage. You may say the media stories don’t hold together, but everything I’m reading is certainly saying there was a shoot-out.
About the only thing in this that I’m sort of sceptical about is the statement I heard today, in quite a few newscasts, that the primary intent of the mission was to capture him alive. That I don’t believe for a moment, even though for purposes of Political Correctness I can understand why they would say this.
Can you visualize what a clusterfuck it would have been if Osama had been captured relatively unhurt? He would have immediately lawyered up with a dozen or so top defense lawyers, the trial would have taken at least three or four years to start, it would have cost the United States many hundreds of millions to prosecute, and it would have been a crap shoot whether or not he would have been convicted. And if convicted, some compassionate judge would likely have given him something like 120 days home detention, and 30 hours community service.
Nossir - bring Osama out alive would have been an absolute disaster.
Looking at the Google Earth pics of his compound and the computer models it was reasonably well defended from land attack but probably not indistinguishable from other very wealthy homes. Pakistan has incredible poverty so I would guess high walls around rich residences aren’t that uncommon and wouldn’t draw much attention, but a private militia, even a small one (20 guards or so) is going to need a barracks and you can’t reasonably expect to keep 20 men or more inside all the time and walking around the place with Uzis at all hours would seem a bit conspicuous, and regardless of how much support he has in Pakistan he also had a $50 million (or whatever) bounty on his head and any backers he had in the government were going to run screaming if he was spotted and their protection would be gone. He still had to keep a low profile, and a three story house with lots of privacy walls on each floor (7 feet walls around the balconies- tall enough to cover him and his headdress) would seem secure without being too secure to arouse suspicion.
To those people who are arguing that OBL must be dead because the government couldn’t possibly make something of this grand scale up, I’d like to (kind of) invoke Godwin’s Law and note that Hitler once stated, the great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie, than to a small one. That’s not to say that he isn’t dead, but rather that simply believing he’s dead because the government said so to be a bit… naive.
It’s not that the story is too big to be a lie. It’s that the lie would be too easily disproved, and that if it were disproved, it would be incredibly damaging politically.
On the burial at sea thing - I don’t think it was very wide, it seems quite clear that this is against muslem rites. However, having said that, I don’t think it will offend the “moderates”, and as to the “hardliners” - no matter how he was buried they would be inflamed. So I don’t think the public opinion really matters.
And it is certainly better than having his grave found and memoralised (although if the gravesite couldn’t be kept secret something is wrong)
On the compoound. You may well want to check out a joker callled Mas Selamat Kestari.
This is another terrorist that escaped from custody in Singapore. He was eventually found to be hiding out in a village in a normal house just across the Malaysian border. He was there for a long time (more than a year is springing to mind, but I would need to google to verify) before he was caught.
So basically your argument boils down to “if we hadn’t killed him now it’s possible he could have not been killed later if the judicial system ruled against it !” ? :dubious:
I guess policemen should also just shoot suspects on sight. It’s always a crapshoot whether or not they get convicted, and sometimes they don’t even get the chair when they are.
Let’s see. The CIA confirmed his death, so did the Pakistani ISI, so did al Quaeda.
As far as being killed years ago, by whom exactly?? And why wouldn’t the wasteful Dubya administration take credit for that? Are we saying that Dubya and the boys said, “No, Americans aren’t ready for that. Until they are, let’s spend billions on a war with mythical weapons of mass destruction and fuck a large part of the economy!”
Believing conspiracy on Osama’s death is like saying that it wasn’t Pavarotti in the casket, it was a fattened up Placido Domingo, and HE really died from the Carter administration years ago for not liking bluegrass. 
If you’re a conspiratist, keep digging till you’re dead or dead tired on this one. 
A time traveller, presumably, considering Bin Laden released his latest Best Off Jihad mix tape in January of this year.
The best course of action would have been to, respectfully, rocket his corpse to the moon. The same loons who won’t believe he’s dead also wouldn’t believe we could’ve gotten him to the moon either.
CNN has a photo gallery of the President, VP, top military folks, national security folks, etc, in the situation room during the raid. I know if it were a conspiracy, that lots of people would need to be involved, but it seems unlikely that all of these people, plus the CIA, plus the SEAL team guys, plus AQ, plus the Pakistanis, etc, all were involved in an elaborate coverup.
http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/02/tense-moments/?hpt=T1
I assume he was depending on obscurity. Armed lookouts attract attention but are worthless against smart bombs.
Your username answers your question.