There is no factual answer readily at hand, thereby opening it to debate, rather than GQ. Please correct me if this is a poor assumption.
The code name was not an example of an oddly coincidental name generated randomly. The name seems too consciously chosen, given the superficial parallels between the two.
So I guess I’m asking for a debate between these particular possibilities:
As has been hinted at in the linked Pit thread, was “Geronimo” chosen as a sort of institutionalized insult to the Chiricahua Apaches in particular, and Native Americans in general? I can see where the anti-Geronimo propaganda of yesteryear, which relentlessly demonized him as being an utter, utter monster, might have filtered into the nation’s consciousness to the point where the use of his name was seen as another way to demonize OBL.
Now, it’s true that Geronimo has been almost as aggressively beatified in recent years as he was demonized during his life, but I think there’s still a seed of the old attitude in the US.
Was it chosen simply because there are rather striking parallels between the two cases? At the time, Geronimo was the spiritual and military leader of a militant band of Apache. He was extremely elusive. The US government searched relentlessly for him, and he hid out in a remote and confusing wilderness area, where he was protected by sympathetic locals and by the geography. He was most definitely Public Enemy #1, and of course, he was brown (:p).
Also, as difficult to accept as some who think he was a hero might find it, Geronimo also committed atrocities. Really brutal, horrific stuff. Not on the sheer scale as OBL, but as I pointed out in the Pit, there doesn’t seem to be any real dispute that Geronimo, for example, raided the Peck ranch in Agua Fria Canyon in 1886, killing two hired hands.
The lurid horror story at the time was that he then had Mrs. Peck repeatedly raped, cut off her breasts, and then slammed her two-year-old’s head against the wall and dashed his brains out. That probably did not happen, but what seems to be undisputed is that he murdered Mrs. Peck and the baby (the 13-year-old daughter Trini recalled that they were shot as they walked outside the ranch house.)
Geronimo himself apparently said, later, that he “woke up groaning when he thought of the helpless little children.”
As was already mentioned in that Pit thread, it seems like an odd choice, since one might reasonably guess that it was a code name for ObL. Why not pick something totally unrelated? I’m assuming this name had been in use for sometime. If it was just used for the mission, then maybe its shelf life was so short it didn’t matter.
I would be really surprised if it was a consciously targeted insult at the Apaches.
Does that matter, though? We know the SEALS used that name for bin Laden during the raid, but if someone figured out it was bin Laden while they were already shooting up his house, I can’t imagine that would have made a big difference. If the CIA used that name while they were spying on the home, that would be another story.
I don’t think many people are still holding a grudge against Geronimo. And I seriously doubt anyone in the U.S. government picked the name with the intentional purpose of insulting the Apache. I think the name was chosen because both men were famous and elusive fugitives. Americans have always had an complicated viewpoint of the Indians they dispossessed. Even hundreds of years ago there were European accounts praising Amerindians for their bravery or their wilderness and martial skills. There is a double faceted reasoning for this. First is that some Amerindians were genuinely cool, and people like hearing stories about cool people. The second is that if you portray your enemy as badass, it makes you seem super badass for having defeated him. Of course at the same time you have to justify having an active bounty for any of your enemies’ scalps, so you also have to play up your enemies negative traits, whether these traits are real, fabricated or exaggerated. If it makes Amerindians feel any better about their culture being appropriated by their conquerors, recent genetic testing seems to imply that a lot more nominally white Americans have some Indian ancestry then was previously suspected. So I guess some of those white people who always talk about their half-Cherokee great great grandmother might not have been full of shit.
Hell, my family settled in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia and intermarried with Cherokee, so I know I’m not full of shit when I say it. There are still lots and lots of my relatives in the area. In fact, most of the geographical features (ridges, mountains, valleys, etc.) bear names of branches of my family.
I assumed it had something to do with the fact he was going to be taken out by an airstrike. Perhaps at some point it involved parachuting. Besides, StopTubman seemed inappropriate.
Why does this persist? “Geronimo” was NOT a code name for UBL. It was a codeword for “We have captured/killed UBL.” It’s not a person’s name, it’s a sentence. Originally, the codeword was supposed to be Jackpot but the SEALs changed it on the fly because Jackpot has some other, standard meaning.
The use of Geronimo was made up specifically for this mission…it’s not like they were calling him that for years and years. And consider that by the time the first person utters the word on the radio, UBL’s already dead. Everyone’s caught up on this one, single codeword but they’re forgetting that there are dozens and dozens of codewords. This one was probably the tenth one used just in that mission alone. Do people similarly have a problem with “Irene” being used to start a mission?
Finally, Geronimo has been a military term since WWII. In fact, check out the nickname of the 509th Infantry Regiment. For the military, Geronimo has drifted from its original meaning to invoking images of paratroopers. Paratroopers = badass soldiers = SEALs…get it?
Today’s paper said the code name for ObL (or for ObL being visually identified in the compound) was “Jackpot”. The article I read says what Chessic Sense says.
It looks like you’re right. But it persists because a variety of things have been reported about that issue since Sunday night. Not all the reporting has been totally clear and not everybody has read everything out there. For example, here’s CNN today:
I don’t agree that there is a “seed” of the old culture within the US military or the US Federal Government that still desires to demonize Native Americans.
This seems to me to be the most likely reason for a non-random assigning of the name “Geronimo” to ObL.
I read (and I don’t recall where) that codenames and codewords are frequently chosen at random (that is, computer generated) in order to help ensure that someone who intercepts the transmission can’t guess who the codename refers to. The selection of “Geronimo” was accidental. Possibly someone should have known better and changed it, but it wasn’t a deliberate slight.
With the OP’s permission, I’ve revised the thread title to reflect the fact that “Geronimo” was used in the mission but was not a code name for bin Laden himself. The title was originally Why was OBL’s code name “Geronimo”?
I for one had been getting tired of “Operation Pretentious Euphemism”, so it’s nice to get back to the classics like “Operation Sledgehammer” or “Operation Hercules”, but this seems a little tone-deaf.
These days, I might have expected it to be something like “Operation Sauron” or “Operation Voldemort” or “Operation Jabba-the-Hutt”.
