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The Trump Presidency: Part 17

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Norman Alexander said:
Did you read my next post?

Nobody is cheering for ISIS here. But I would be just as pleased the scum is dead if he had fallen down a well or something.

But there's a right way to go about assassination and many wrong ways. The Trump team chose one of the wrong ways, potentially an illegal way, and are crowing about it. They are playing "the end justifies the (illegal) means" card.

Incidentally, this is exactly the same thinking behind many domestic shootings and rampages in the USA. The perpetrator's thinking goes that never mind that a murder-rampage is illegal, some guys he believes are bastards or "criminals" got ended. So it all worked out well in the end. :rolleyes:
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I don't know that this was an assassination at all. He reportedly killed himself.

Was bin Laden illegally assassinated? Far as I know, both raids were attempts to capture. That they were likely to end in death instead doesn't make them assassinations.
 
phiwum said:
I don't know that this was an assassination at all. He reportedly killed himself.

Was bin Laden illegally assassinated? Far as I know, both raids were attempts to capture. That they were likely to end in death instead doesn't make them assassinations.
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Enemy leaders are legitimate targets in a war situation, and both Bin Ladin and Baghdadi were self confessed enemies of the United States.

I find Norman's whole thesis this was some kind of rogue operation to be silly.
 
dudalb said:
Enemy leaders are legitimate targets in a war situation, and both Bin Ladin and Baghdadi were self confessed enemies of the United States.

I find Norman's whole thesis this was some kind of rogue operation to be silly.
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Rogue operation?

When a complaint is that Trump gratuitously and completely unnecessarily violated the law in the course of what was likely otherwise valid operation, where does rogue operation come into the picture? When a complaint is that Trump was fairly certainly brazenly lying about what his role in it actually was and where he actually was when it happened to try to take any and all credit, what part of that is claiming that it was a rogue operation?
 
Ziggurat said:
This is rather naive.

The target audience for a description of Baghdadi's death isn't swing voters in the US. It's the Islamic radicals and potential radicals. This is propaganda, but we need to use propaganda in an ideological war. Is it a lie? Maybe, but frankly I don't care. Humiliating him even in death is a good thing. Reasoned discourse about how much of a meanie he was don't matter, the people who can be swayed by that aren't the problem. As Osama said, people follow the strong horse. So take every opportunity to portray the leaders of ISIS and other terrorist groups as weak.
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If that is the case, then surely it will lead to more, not fewer, radicalized Muslims joining ISIS to fight the US.
 
Stacyhs said:
Are you claiming that I said or inferred that "Trump did it for domestic consumption"? If so, try again as I did no such thing.

This was all about Trump being Trump: lying his ass off about something that there is no evidence of ever happening. You provide evidence otherwise and I'll admit I'm wrong. Until then...
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Ziggurat said:
You missed my point completely. I don't care if he's lying about the circumstances of Baghdadi's death. I'd be fine with Trump saying he was caught in flagrante with a pig, so long as Baghdadi is actually dead.

But getting upset that Trump may have lied about the specifics of his death comes across as sympathy for Baghdadi, and I'm telling you, that's not a good look.
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Good lord. You're doing it again. No one who isn't trying his damnedest to justify Trump's LYING would misconstrue what I said as being sympathetic to Baghdadi. He was a piece of garbage as far as I'm concerned. But there was no need for Trump to LIE about Baghdadi 'whimpering and crying' except Trump just can't help himself. He's a liar.

ETA: When Trump was asked how he knew what al-Baghdadi's behavior was in that tunnel, he failed to answer.

David Gomez, a former senior FBI agent who ran counterterrorism for the FBI’s office in Washington State until retiring in 2012, wondered if Trump was exaggerating for effect about what he knew of al-Baghdadi’s last moments. “I think the statement about his crying was Trump playing to his own ego,” Gomez says. “As someone who has been in a lot of those fast-moving situations, it’s highly unlikely anyone would have seen that if it had occurred,” he says.

When Trump was asked by a reporter if he heard al-Baghdadi whimpering through a live video stream, he said, “I don’t want to talk about it, but he was screaming, crying, and whimpering. And he was scared out of his mind.”
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https://time.com/5711845/al-baghdadi-trump-details-isis/

Of course he didn't want to talk about it because he was making it all up. He had no problem giving other details of the raid.
 
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Norman Alexander said:
The log shows he didn't get to the White House until after 16:30. That was 90 minutes after the raid officially launched. I'm willing to bet such surgical insurgencies would done and dusted in only minutes. Hanging around to take happy snaps and party only gets you shot at, which is unhealthy.
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Actually the special forces team stayed on the ground for two hours. We know this because President Trump publicly announced it. Some military analysts believe that giving away information like that makes future raids more dangerous. President Lunkhead does it again.
 
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Well, this is totally unsurprising.

“The incredible thing is that this operation succeeded despite all the ways in which the Trump Administration made it more difficult,” said Dana Stroul, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

<snip>

“Trump rejected [intelligence community] assessments and spilled classified intelligence, cut off our military operations at its knees with unplanned decisions like Syria, repeatedly treated Iraq with indifference, and appeared ready to throw out the relationship with the SDF only a few weeks ago,” said Stroul.
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Uh huh. And Trump wants to claim all the glory, as always. Well, some of it.

Trump did mention the Kurds when he was thanking people, other than himself, during his “big announcement”. Yet he did it in the most snarky way possible. Trump chided them for not participating directly in the raid militarily—failing to mention that they are in the fight of their lives thanks to Trump. However, even he had to acknowledge that the information they provided “turned out to be helpful”. Because he’s that much of an ass.

In fact, as Pentagon officials admit, without the Kurds, this victory would not have happened:

The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.
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The president did profusely thank Russia in his announcement, however. Even though they too did not participate militarily, Trump sickeningly gushed and fawned all over them. What’s worse, he heaped praise on Putin’s army even before once mentioning the US troops who conducted the operation.

This was surprising, since Russia said they had nothing to do with the raid.
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Seriously... this would be a total WTF moment if Trump hadn't already overwhelming and constantly demonstrated himself to be a Russian asset.


In other random news...

Why the **** would any police think that this utter BS was even remotely acceptable?

Seriously, an unarmed black male on a subway cooperated fully with a huge group of policemen that were pretty well terrorizing the people there and had wildly unwarranted and unnecessary force used on him. His crime? According to the police, it looks like it was basically that he jumped the turnstile.
 
As is much coming out of Trump's mouth, generally unbeffiting a head of state. Ungifted bravado in terms of political posture, which seems to become an increasingly popular ailment with politicians. That being said, I did find it in part funny (his remark about Abu Bakr whimpering).
 
Ziggurat said:
You missed my point completely. I don't care if he's lying about the circumstances of Baghdadi's death. I'd be fine with Trump saying he was caught in flagrante with a pig, so long as Baghdadi is actually dead.

But getting upset that Trump may have lied about the specifics of his death comes across as sympathy for Baghdadi, and I'm telling you, that's not a good look.
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Jumpin' Jehosephat. You just don't get it. The freakin' leader of the supposed greatest nation on Earth lying in this way makes both him and the US look small-minded and juvenile. There's no *dignity* in it, even if the just-dispatched bastard deserves it. Let other lesser lights do the trash talking. The President should project a certain gravitas.

You should read Churchill's "moral of the work" that prefaces his monumental memoir and history of WWII. One line of the four reads, "In victory, magnanimity." While not so strictly applicable here, given the evil and murderous enemy involved, the victor should nonetheless not exult nor disparage to such a revolting degree that it call attention to his own meanness and thereby cheapen the win.
 
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Trump's speech on the killing of Baghdadi will be played again and again - on ISIS recruitment sites and in terrorist training camps.
 
thaiboxerken said:
I'll give this victory to Trump. It erases all of the criminal activities Trump did and is currently doing.............
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That'e effectively the way it was reported on BBC radio this morning, though it was the headlines news bulletin on BBC Radio 6 which is a music channel so comprehensive reporting wasn't necessarily a priority.

IIRC they said that "The Baghdadi killing has restored the Trump Presidency after a difficult week" and then played a clip of Mike Pence congratulating the military and praising President Trump's decisiveness.
 
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