OSAMA BIN LADEN ANNOUNCED DEAD BY OBAMA (renamed thread)

[Canadian_watcher]

Wolf Blitzer just told me I would always remember where I was when I heard OBL was dead. Meh.

Wolf Blitzer ? does this guy ever go home? or do they keep him in a crate and just unbox him when they need a new performance?

remember when they introduced those hollographic reporters? Maybe Wolf was dead and they didn't want to replace him. He's so hypnotic, you know.. been around since Gulf War I ... I can't watch him. Gives me seizures.

[Fixx]

we must respect his faith by giving him a proper burial? Thats probably meant to flame the right wingers.

No, it's meant to have the body go bye-bye before we even see a photo, much less have a DNA test.

I remember they promised DNA tests if they ever "got" him in a drone strike. I remember one story of a tall, white-robed figure they blew to smithereens with a drone. They went in there (the story goes) and found the bits and pieces and did a DNA test. Wasn't him.

So where's the DNA test this time? Hell, even the CIA isn't saying they did one (I wouldn't believe the CIA anyway), but what's up with that?

No photo?

Please ......

Let's see, WMD was a lie, troops massing on the border of Saudi Arabia was a lie, Anthrax was a lie and in fact was a domestic attack, Colin Powell was a lie, Jessica Lynch was a lie, Pat Tillman was a lie, the "Spidey Hole" was a lie, yet I go on Facebook and everybody, with a very very few exceptions, are just taking Osama's word (oops I meant Obama's) that "they got him".

People are just fucking stupid. I'm thinking about getting into government or banking and ripping people off. Why not? They're stupid fucking sheep who deserve to be fleeced.

Not sure where this was taken from, it was posted on another forum.

http://www.uk420.com/boards/index.php?s ... &p=2680427

[Aphelion]

God that speech is disgusting, going on and on about all the imagery of 9/11. Nauseating, especially considering Osama bin Laden probably had almost zero to do with it.

I felt similar when I heard it.

I'll tell you what's just as disgusting: American citizens getting annoyed about the interrupted TV procession of the Royal Wedding by newscasters announcing the insane number of tornadoes this past week that have killed many people and left more homeless. I mean, who gives a s*** about Tuscaloosa? There was a RIDICULOUS ROYAL WEDDING HAT!!

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I just don't feel like celebrating.

[Canadian_watcher]

Frankly, I'm astonished that the RI community has come out in such numbers for what is a non-event, no matter what has happened.

and it's not even killling the Misogyny thread

Nothing can kill that thread. Its like the Fukishima melt-down of threads.

Who knew misogyny would trump Fukishima? The world is dying.....long live Misogyny!

*sigh*
Because it is at the root and the rest is just the fruit. if it weren't for misogyny's influence on our world we might not have had to endure Fukushima OR Osama Bin Laden. Just sayin'.
but don't worry, that's the last I'm going to say about it.

[Canadian_watcher]

Since 'bin Laden did 911' was a pretext for the war in Afghanistan, and if he has been dead for some years as many including myself believe, perhaps this is meant to bring closure and thus a reason for ending a stalemate war.

I wish.
This is bizarro-world though.

[8bitagent]

I joked that bin Laden is probably in some big Pakistani ISI furnished mansion, rather than dead or in a cave. I mean they are even saying in the news that
he lived right outside the main capital in a rich neighborhood of top officials and a couple miles from the main army academy. You'd think someone woulda thought, "hey, who is the guy
who lives in that ginormous Disney sized mansion complex?"

Of course it'll probably all come out that Pakistani ISI was protecting bin Laden, and relations between the US will sour and we'll see some new attack in India. all this news coming out lends credence to the idea the US has known for some time where bin Laden was, and was just waiting for the right time.

Why did they burn the mansion down? Wouldnt they want a "treasure trove of evidence"? Do they think people will not demand pictures and video of bin Laden's body?
So many questions will have to come out, and as JackRiddler posited; we'll probably get lots of revelations people won't notice.

[wintler2]

the phenomenon of peaceful & democratic revolutionary movements across the Middle East & Arab world may be a key part of the context of them deciding to cash-in the OBL legend....jihadism looks so last decade at the moment

Yes especially if last seasons hated jihadists are this seasons popular revolutionaries. Like any once bankable sitcom character OBL now will be given a final milking on the way out, and it seems likely that much of the resulting warm wetness will be directed towards helping prettify the US's economic cadaver via 'renewed stability' and 'more sustainable business environment' blah blah.

Gotta wonder if this is a coincidence. Silver took a huge dump right before the announcement. A little insider trading?

Insider trading, or some arm of the Plunge Protection Team dedicated to keeping precious metal prices down.

[jam.fuse]

Chris Hedges... from truthdig.com hat tip to marisacat.wordpress.com

Chris Hedges made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chr ... 110502/?ln

Posted on May 1, 2011
AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.

But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.

And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida – that’s clear – he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren about Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … and I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe.

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawy, the head of al-Azhar – who died recently – who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know it’s intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to fight.

Thank you.

[Canadian_watcher]

from Chris Hedges, above:

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawy, the head of al-Azhar – who died recently – who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.

This, to me, was the greatest tragedy of 9/11. Not to take away from the pain of the individual people who were involved in one way or another with the atrocities - that is immeasurable, but I felt and saw the goodwill of the entire world directed at the US in the immediate aftermath and I remember feeling sick when Bush got up there with his hate and vitriol and decided not to turn the other cheek.

That was when I felt the most lost.

[8bitagent]

Is it me, or is Obama even more revolting in this speech tonight than Bush ever was? "Just shut up and celebrate" is the response Im seeing on both left and right forums/blogs/social networking.
Yeah, just seig heil away. Noone seems to remember how many innocents the US has blown to smithereens in the last decade. My disgust for this rotten government and the idiocy of the public
couldn't go up anymore...least I'd hate to think it couldn't. Everybody's bout damn lost their mind.

[semper occultus]

hey don't forget the script should have been OBL AND Gadaffi's heads on sticks simoultaneously...

[compared2what?]

Is it me, or is Obama even more revolting in this speech tonight than Bush ever was?

I doubt it's just you. But it's not everybody. Me, for example.

Also:

Our bilateral relations with Pakistan must be on their last fucking legs, whether this was real or staged, don't you all think?

I mean, we drop drones on their civilians constantly, they just threw the CIA out (or so it's said) for shooting their citizens (or so it's said), and now we've kill the Big Bad Guy who's been living in a mansion that was practically on, like, ten of their military bases or something since 2005 without involving or even so much as telling them? That's a lot of U.S. aggression on foreign soil in a country that's nominally an ally.

Although we probably can't afford to pay them their aid stipend anymore, anyway. And they might not need it, ftm. They're China's Israel, we were just their sugar-daddy on the side. India could already be in a position to make us an offer we couldn't refuse, even. We don't have all that many choices in the region. A few countries have the money that's left and a few others have the oil that's left, end game, etcetera.

Just thinking aloud.

ON EDIT: We could totally pin KSM's nuke blowback scenario on them, too, if it occurs, which I pray it won't. Dr. A.Q. Khan.

[bardobailey]

So, who's the new Number 2?

[semper occultus]

like the Hollywood-style disclaimer "...no Americans were harmed....." in the making of this contrived pseudo-spectacle....

[Saurian Tail]

Well, here we go. Full spectrum dominance. Sit back and watch. I got rid of the TV so I turned on the radio for a few minutes.

The liberal station was saying how Obama deserves full credit and were laughing at the idea of crazies demanding to see Osama's "long form death certificate". Full celebration mode.

The conservative station had some clown on talking about how this should make Obama reconsider the value of Gitmo and rendition. Full kill the infidels mode.

The sports station had a person call in and make a big deal about Osama using a woman as a human shield and went on to say how he didn't want to hear shit about collateral damage. Full "Hell Yeah!" mode.

Meanwhile, the body is already in the water. They've got all the bases covered. It's quite a show.

-ST