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Merged Osama bin Laden dead,

Tricky said:
Giving credit to Obama or Bush is pretty iffy. The CIA got the intel. The Seals pulled the trigger. Now you can argue that the CIA is more efficient since Obama became Prez because of his appointments et. al., but such a claim would be extremely difficult to give definite proof for.

Personally, I have no problem letting Bush share the credit for this. I agreed with him when he sent troops into Afghanistan after 9/11 and I agreed with Obama when he continued the operation. If I fault Bush for anything, it is for drawing down the involvement in Afghanistan to fuel the ill-conceived, ill-executed invasion of Iraq. But at the time, Bush did the smart, but fairly obvious thing, of going after the people who caused the 9/11 attacks. It was an easy decision, and one that was almost universally supported. It was a little harder for Obama to justify continuing the action, what with the memory of 9/11 being more than seven years old, but he did the right thing too.

Right now, I'm really happy. Don't harsh my buzz with all this partisan crap.
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I think you have to give them both credit. I've been hearing that they found OBL by tracking the movements of a known courier for OBL. And from what radio reports were saying today the name of the courier was revealed by a Gitmo detainee questioned while Bush was in power. It took a long time (maybe a year or more) after finding out the name to finding the actual person, who was under surveillance for years before they were able to figure out OBL might be in that compound. Then it took months to train the SEAL team, who trained in a special-built replica of the compound.

Did the Gitmo detainee reveal the name of the courier because of "enhanced interrogation" techniques under Bush? Maybe.

Would Bush have had the cojones to send a SEAL team into Pakistan without telling the Pakistani government, as Obama did? Maybe not.

eta: I wonder if that Gitmo detainee had the initials "KSM"...
 
dtugg said:
I am sure it is not always reliable but do you honestly believe that nobody has ever given up any useful information under torture?
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Sure they have.... but since it's unreliable, it's useless and amounts to false information or no information.
 
For anyone who thinks that the Pakistani government … or at least it's military leadership … didn't know the inhabitants of Osama's compound, notice the structure labeled "PMA Kakul" next door to Osama's compound in this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53039952@N05/5680415946/lightbox/

It's just 100 yards away. That is the Pakistan Military Academy. It provides training to the officers of the Pakistan Army. Don't for one minute think Pakistan's military and likely it's top leadership didn't know where Osama was staying the last 5 years. Someone knew, and now we should find exactly who and deal with them in an expeditious manner.
 
dtugg said:
I don't think that the consitution should apply to foreign nationals captured outside of the country.
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Who are then housed on sovereign American land and mistreated by Americans.

We can either be a nation of laws and lofty ideals or we can be bullies that pick and choose when to do terrible things for the sake of expediency.


Let me ask you 2 related question:

We prosecuted and executed Japanese officers who tortured allied soldiers during the war.

1) Were we wrong to do that?
2) If not, then are our own troops guilty of similar crimes?
 
Dorian Gray said:
Sure they have.... but since it's unreliable, it's useless and amounts to false information or no information.
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Unless it results in useful information. I won't pretend that I know this was the case here. But you don't either.
 
Ziggurat said:
Why would that have anything to do with it? That notion just doesn't mesh with the information that has been made public so far:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs...as-culmination-years-work-sr-admin-official-s

"Sunday afternoon’s raid by U.S. forces that killed Osama bin Laden was the “culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work,” senior administration officials said in a conference call"

The description of the chain of events just doesn't match a binary "Bush screwed up, Obama got it right" narrative. Obama got it right, but it took a long time to get right, starting from well before Obama took office.
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Since Obama has been president, there has not been a single terrorist attack on US soil, plus he killed Osama bin Laden.

Mission Accomplished! :D
 
Hitchens on Pakistan.

the uniformed and anonymous patrons of that sheltered Abbottabad compound are still very much with us, and Obama's speech will be entirely worthless if he expects us to go on arming and financing the very people who made this trackdown into such a needlessly long, arduous and costly one.
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http://www.slate.com/id/2292687/
 
BeAChooser said:
That looks like it might be more that a "rumor". What I quoted was from the Associated Press, citing US officials.
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Surprise surprise, the source of this claim is none other than torture advocate and Daddy apologizer, Lynn Cheney. According to Lawrence O'Donnell just now, "officials" have a different story.

I Will continue to wait for the facts.
 
Jekyll's Guest said:
It is my opinion that someone who truly supported the constitution and what it stands for would have to say no.

Shooting a washed up old terrorist in bed is not worth abandoning your country's essential principals, no matter how cathartic it may be.
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Agreed.

Now, I, personally, wouldn't have had any issues with torturing those bastards myself. (And I DO have some experience with the techniques.) But, yes, the government had no business doing it no matter what the reasons.

ETA: I wouldn't expect to get any real, actionable, information, I would just be torturing them for sport...
 
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BenBurch said:
Agreed.

Now, I, personally, wouldn't have had any issues with torturing those bastards myself. (And I DO have some experience with the techniques.) But, yes, the government had no business doing it no matter what the reasons.
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No matter the reason? Even if say, it was known that a nuclear weapon was going to detonate in Manhattan and a person who can stop it is in custody and isn't talking? Yes, I know this is a highly improbable 24 type scenario. But it is designed to see if you are actually against torturing somebody "no matter what the reasons."
 
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C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden, July 2006
The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.
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Coincidentally, 2005 was the year the Pakistani compound was built.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."...

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken....

...In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military's counterterrorism units, like the Army's Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.
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The rest of the article points out that BEFORE 9-11, a group within the CIA was obsessed with getting Bin Laden and were seen as alarmists.
"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."

Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.
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Another news account: Was Ending CIA Osama Unit A Mistake? - First Head Of Unit Tells CBS News Closing Was 'Questionable'
the CIA has closed the unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the CIA Counterterrorist Center, the paper reported officials said.
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So here is a unit formed in 1996 under Clinton's watch that had Bin Laden as it's top or sole priority. That corroborates Richard Clarke's claims that Clinton passed the Bin Laden ball to Bush who promptly dropped it. This was before 9-11-01.

Bush then failed to make Bin Laden a priority after 9-11. While Bush used 9-11 as an excuse to take out Saddam, Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora where he might have been caught.


And then in 2009 Obama redirected our priorities back to Obama: Gen McChrystal: Bin Laden is key to al-Qaeda defeat
President Barack Obama's deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan meant success was possible.
But [Gen McChrystal] said the mission was "undeniably difficult" and the next 18 months would be crucial. "I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaeda until he's captured or killed," said Gen McChrystal of Bin Laden.
"I believe he is an iconic figure at this point, whose survival emboldens al-Qaeda as a franchising organisation across the world."
The general said that killing or capturing Bin Laden would not spell the end of al-Qaeda, but that the movement could not be eradicated while Bin Laden remained at large....

...US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said last week that officials have had no reliable information on Bin Laden's whereabouts for "years".
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"No reliable information for years" suggests that the claims by the CIA that changing focus from Bin Laden in 2006 did not mean they had stopped looking was disingenuous at best and a lie at worst. Yesterday's mission was unlikely to have occurred under Bush. This explains why it took 10 years to find Bin Laden. Bush wasn't looking for him seriously and after 2005, not much at all. Obama changed that and successfully found Bin Laden.
 
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The Daily KOS has done some detective work on the torture claim:

Waterboarding did not reveal Osama bin Laden trail

Here's the NYTs article Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden
Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.
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This corroborates the Daily KOS report:
From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.
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I continue to await more facts.
 
dtugg said:
No matter the reason? Even if say, it was known that a nuclear weapon was going to detonate in Manhattan and a person who can stop it is in custody and isn't talking? Yes, I know this is a highly improbable 24 type scenario. But it is designed to see if you are actually against torturing somebody "no matter what the reasons."
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This BS scenario is the usual fare when claiming torture is justified. Trouble is this particular hypothetical HAS NEVER BEEN AN ACTUAL BASIS ANYONE WAS TORTURED.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
This BS scenario is the usual fare when claiming torture is justified. Trouble is this particular hypothetical HAS NEVER BEEN AN ACTUAL BASIS ANYONE WAS TORTURED.
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Please. I acknowledged it was a highly improbable scenario. Ben said he was against government torture not matter what. I was asking him if was really true.

And how about you. Would you do it? I understand if you decide to ignore the question. Either your principals are flexible, or you think that a million lives are less important than the rights of some terrorist scumbag. Probably a question best left unanswered from your point of view.
 
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