obama confirms osama bin laden is dead

pittrek wrote:

I will NEVER understand how can somebody celebrate ANYBODY's death

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Well, you see ... you have this thing called common sense... something which most Americans lack.  And they are ironically Christians ... you know, those people who tell everyone else to love their neighbour ... except for those who believe in different things they do.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth ... one is required to have this mentality to be pleased at what has happened.  I, as a rational bystander with little stake in the outcome, do not get what the big deal is.  The leader is gone, but there are 20 people waiting in line to take over.

The people in charge who say bin Laden orchestrated 9/11 are the same people who say Oswald killed Kennedy.  I take just about everything they say with a pinch of salt.  Last year Fidel Castro said Osama bin Laden was in the CIA payroll and used whenever Bush needed to scare people.  It's on Wikileaks... and there is not a single lie in there.

The only positive I can think of is this just may have secured Obama his second term.  All those people who think he is a  Muslim and that he's indifferent to war will have no rebuttal now.  It's a shame that health care reform wasn't enough for them, but hey, welcome to the US.  The American dream ... you have to be asleep to believe it.

Now maybe the US can withdraw their troops, and stop meddling in affairs that have nothing to do with them.  Maybe then they won't have to scratch their heads wondering why people from the middle east are pissed off and fly airplanes into their buildings.

"you have this thing called common sense... something which most Americans lack"

Oh dear ...

Here is a brilliant article - required reading.  It's probably the single best column you'll ever read on the first decade of the 21st century.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/05/02/neil-macdonald-osama-bin-laden.html

It's not the end of terror, but it's doubtlessly the end of an era.  And it's certainly historic. I got my 16 year old out of bed to watch Obama's speech live so he could witness a small slice of history and so that he might talk about it with some degree of thoughfulness at school today.  It's a hugely symbolic victory for the United States because every year he remained at large against such a powerful enemy served to further build his mystique and the apparent righteousness of the mission in the eyes of followers and recruits.  Now he's just another guy who eventually went down in a hail of patient, determined and eminently skilled American bullets.  He'll be celebrated as a martyr of course but there appears to be nobody in the ranks who can step into his shoes with anything like the quiet charisma or battlefield credentials of bin Laden. This event will change something, though we'll probably need years to determine just what and just how.

I disagree.  Bin Laden went down smiling, as he knew he had achieved his goal - to create an American society of fear.  Terrorism on the US will end as soon as the US minds their own business in the middle east (particularly Israel).  They are not the superpower they think they are, and 9/11 proved it.  It created a fearful and divisive population - exactly with the bin Laden recipe called for.

And it's exactly what the Bush administration called for too...

In 2000, a right-wing think tank called Project for the New American Century stated in section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence:

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

They all wanted it, and they got it.

Sir GH wrote: Bin Laden went down smiling.
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It appears he "went down" using a female as a human shield to protect him from 30 US Navy Seals lining up to make him a martyr. So much for the image of the big brave Holy Warrior.

Yes, but he could have been smiling .. :-)

Holly2003 wrote: Sir GH wrote: Bin Laden went down smiling.
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It appears he "went down" using a female as a human shield to protect him from 30 US Navy Seals lining up to make him a martyr. So much for the image of the big brave Holy Warrior.
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It was one of his bodyguards who supposedly used a female as a human shield, providing this is not a b*llshit story to explain away collateral damage in the first place, which is a realistic scenario. Take into account that this was a 40-minute chaotic firefight in the middle of the night in a location the design of which was only partly known.

"this thing called common sense... something which most Americans lack"

Oy vey ist mir.  It's exactly this kind of hyperbole that makes me wonder - truly - if there's hope for any of us.

What have you achieved with killing Osama ? Or was it Obama ? :-)
http://failblog.org/2011/05/02/epic-fail-photos-news-caption-fails/

For his followers he will be a "hero", a "martyr" who "died a heroic death" and all other bullshit that brainwashed fanatics use to say. In other words, the soldiers who shot him probably created for the world a MUCH bigger danger.

1) The photo of the body is a fake - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-photo-fake?CMP=twt_fd

2) The "Al Qaeda compound" was within WALKING DISTANCE of Pakistani military HQ, and the CIA couldn't find Osama for 10 years?
3) The body was buried at sea?  Why not put his head on a flagpole beside the White House where all the bloody-hungry Americans can see it?

Don't piss in my ear and tell me it's raining.

As George Carlin once said - it's all bullshit folks, and it's bad for ya.

Sir GH wrote: Yes, but he could have been smiling .. :-)
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There was a bin Laden quote I've been keenly but unsuccessfully trying to find.  It appeared at the end of the HBO doc 'My Trip to al Qaeda' (which is on YouTube and well worth the watch, but since I saw it the last section has been removed on copyright, so it might be a bit frustrating to get all that way and not see the conclusion).  Anyway, I can't even paraphrase it properly but it was something like bin Laden not having to rip apart American values and freedoms because after 9/11 they would just turn on each other and do it themselves.  Powerful and prophetic and in part the basis of the opinion piece you posted.  It's the primary reason I was so apoplectic about the response to the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. America was playing right into his hands.  Again.  But in so much as they've done it to themselves they can undo it to themselves given time, space and a rebalancing of their vision.  That power remains with the American people, not with the corpse of  bin Laden.

It's almost better that he's lived this long.  Over the last months he's had to witness the march of democracy in the middle East by peaceful means, particularly in Egypt.  What must he have thought of that given that the Egyptian prisons of decades ago were the birthplace and breeding ground for the radicalization that fed his early ranks.  His entire movement depended on a belief  that violent resistance to governments sympathetic to the West was the only way.  And he lived to see the edges of that fray and start to unravel.  I think being a human being he most likely died disoriented and in terror with his heart threatening to pound straight out of his chest.  Those aren't usually circumstances that lend themselves to smiling.

"In other words, the soldiers who shot him probably created for the world a MUCH bigger danger"

Not that I'm placing bets or anything, but I'm actually of the opinion that it isn't going to change it much either way.  I don't feel the US is any safer, nor any more dangerous a place to be.   The kind of people that might engage in terrorism on the back of bin Laden's death are the kind of people that probably would've done it already anyway.  

To be totally honest, my first reaction to the news was total ambivalence.  The time to shoot him and prove a point was 10 years ago when they messed up and missed out.

Still half asleep, I spent the first twenty minutes of this morning wondering why the Americans had killed Henry Cooper.

fatty.

I think the timing is very serendipitous.  No doubt bin Laden will be asking Mr. Cooper to punch him in the face for all eternity once he realizes there isn't even one virgin waiting for him, never mind 72.