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Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

geezer said:
so the "body" was "washed, wrapped in a white sheet and eased into the sea in accordance with blah blah blah"... they're not saying what they did with his head. After all, they needed some DNA for testing right?
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Ha. I'm sure they got a couple vials of blood for testing. Some skin samples, and maybe hair for forensics. Also probably fingerprinted the body.

Then rammed it full of pork products before putting it into the weighted bag for burial at sea. ;)
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

aparch said:
Ha. I'm sure they got a couple vials of blood for testing. Some skin samples, and maybe hair for forensics. Also probably fingerprinted the body.

Then rammed it full of pork products before putting it into the weighted bag for burial at sea. ;)
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Well, if they treated it with full Islamic tradition, wouldn't they have severed the head live on Al-Jezeera?

Reason I've heard for tossing him overboard is so that whatever "grave site" he would have had on land wouldn't become a pilgrimage site for his supporters...makes sense. Now they'll just have a bunch of nitwits trying to pick him up from the bottom of the ocean. Now we just need to send a newspaper with his turban and a fish inside to Zawahiri.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

Kepler said:
The internet has an answer for everything, with the caveat that the answer is not always accurate.
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Okay, fine. Evidently we gave more than lip service to those requirements. Under the circumstances, we did about the best we could. And I'm not bothered at all. It couldn't hurt and might help. 'Course MY idea of burial at sea would have been to dunk him in the shark tank at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, but I wasn't consulted.

So far, the most rewarding phrase I've heard regarding this operaton is: "DOUBLE TAP TO THE HEAD." Take that, you fooking piece of sh*t. While this event is less significant than it would have been years ago, it's still significant. As I've said before, anytime you can rid us of one of these dudes, the world is a marginally better place. Plus we promised the world we were going to get him and we have fulfilled that promise. The message is simple: "We reached out and touched Bin Laden and we can do the same to you." Paraphrasing what Joe Louis said about Billy Conn: "You can run, but you can't hide (forever)."

The president deserves all the credit in the world here. If this had turned out like Jimmy Carter's "Operation Blue Light" in Iran, I'd be right there reaming him. He did what only POTUS can do, gave this dangerous operation the green light (instead of a much less risky air strike). As we learn more details, I think we'll be amazed even more than we are now that we got out of there with no casualties. There will be a blizzard of Navy Crosses after this operation, all richly deserved.

Only the United States could have pull this off. We'll learn that the alphabet soup of intelligence, CIA, DIA, NSA and others took that initial bit of info about a courier (from the Bush years) and worked it 'till we were confident of who was being protected in that "compound," drew up a plan for killing him, practiced it, then mounted it from our bases in Afghanistan and carried it out perfectly. Think about it, we've got guys willing to helocast, at night, on the roof of a heavily guarded building in hostile territory to find the most wanted man in the world. This was an execution mission and it accomplished its goal. I'm curious if we had "humint" in Pakistan and if so, is anybody gonna get the 25 million dollar bounty?

As they say in the Navy: Well done.
 
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Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

WeWantMore said:
I'm pretty curious to hear how we obtained the name of the courier from the detainee. I do hope he wasn't made to listen to loud music or other horrifying things.
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I just flashed on the scene in "One, Two, Three," (Jimmy Cagney's final starring role) where Horst Buckholtz is made to confess by listening to a warped copy of "Itsy, Bitsy, Teeny, Weenie, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." Sorry for the diversion. You may resume your relevant discussions now.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

Old Pio said:
I just flashed on the scene in "One, Two, Three," (Jimmy Cagney's final starring role) where Horst Buckholtz is made to confess by listening to a warped copy of "Itsy, Bitsy, Teeny, Weenie, Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." Sorry for the diversion. You may resume your relevant discussions now.
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I hope they played Friday by Rebecca Black until he spilled the info. By the second verse I would have been talking.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

IrishWildcat said:
Well, if they treated it with full Islamic tradition, wouldn't they have severed the head live on Al-Jezeera?
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Wow. When every Muslin dies they show it live on Al-Jazeera? How do they have time to show anything but dead people?
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

It surprises me that a town in that part of the world still carries the name of a British Major, even if he did found it.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

state of hockey said:
It surprises me that a town in that part of the world still carries the name of a British Major, even if he did found it.
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Pakistan didnt become the Republic we know it as today until 1957. From 1947-1957 it was the British-India Commonwealth for Muslims in South Asia. West Pakistan become the Republic of Pakistan, while East Pakistan became Bangladesh. It is also part of the Commonwealth of Nations, 52 of 54 of which were formally British Property.
 
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Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

NMU8405 said:
Pakistan didnt become the Republic we know it as today until 1957. From 1947-1957 it was the British-India Commonwealth for Muslims in South Asia. West Pakistan become the Republic of Pakistan, while East Pakistan became Bangladesh. It is also part of the Commonwealth of Nations, 52 of 54 of which were formally British Property.
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Yeah, I know that. But I still figured they would change the name, I guess.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

Washington Monthly

.... It's probably going to be a while before we a complete picture of what transpired in Abbottabad -- and the White House Situation Room -- yesterday, and some of the details will probably remain classified indefinitely.

But what we do know sounds pretty extraordinary. MSNBC noted some "heartstopping" moments earlier.

The first was when the operation's helicopters first arrived at the scene. The plan was for the choppers to hover and lower 12 Seals to the ground rather than land. But one of the choppers stopped working due to a lack of air within the high compound walls.

It made a soft landing (not a crash) on the ground and the raid went forward. At that point a third "emergency" chopper on standby came to the scene.

As the team returned with bin Laden's body, they blew up the broken chopper, which resulted in a "massive explosion." The team exited in two helicopters.

The other tense moment came when the choppers were leaving the country but remained within Pakistani airspace. The Pakistanis, seeing the choppers and not knowing if they were friendly or not, scrambled their fighter jets, causing white knuckles before the helicopters were able to leave.

Half a world away, in the Situation Room (the real one, not that one), President Obama and his national security team were actually able to watch the Navy SEALs conduct the raid in real time on secure video screens and in radio bursts.

John Brennan, assistant to the President for Counter-Terrorism, told reporters today, "It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here."

Brennan also noted that there had been some disagreement around the table about whether to greenlight the operation before the president gave the order, a move Brennan called "one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory."

Marc Ambinder, meanwhile, has a fascinating piece on the "specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group," part of "the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units."
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From the National Journal

From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 70 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were counted, and five were killed. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound. Trial runs were held in early April.
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Much more at link.
 
Re: Osama bin Laden Declared Dead

If you aren't already watching, turn on Versus
 
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