Whether Osama should've gotten a trail or not is now moot and a waste of time to debate.
The BBC had a great special about the history of Al Qaeda and then another one on the raid that killed bin Laden. According to them the SEAL time did have plans to capture bin Laden. He made a threatening gesture, they shot and killed him. They then took his body, took some DNA samples and brought him back to a U.S. ship where they gave him Muslim burial rights and then dumped his body in the sea because they didn't think any country wanted his body out of fear that it would become a shrine for militants to flock to.
I don't have a problem with anything that happened according to that account of the operation.
I can respect everyone's individual levels of comfort with how it went down. (and for the record I'm not THAT worked up about it; I'm more incredulous that so many people seem to completely not give a shit about (a) what kind of precedent is set by our actions/whether there's legal issues involved/whether it was a good move politically and (b) what his value could have been from an intel standpoint.)
motown67 said:
Whether Osama should've gotten a trail or not is now moot and a waste of time to debate.
that said, ^^^^^this?
serious head scratcher. "something went down the way it did and thats how it went down so it's a waste of time to even talk about it." I cram to understand this sentiment insofar as it relates to ANY event.
"Did the thousands of civilians his father killed get trials?"
first of all, i'm against religious extremists of any religion and obviously osama was an insane horrible bastard of epic proportions.but did the hundreds of thousands(possibly over a million) of muslims who've been killed get a trial? think of all those people who were killed as a result of "collateral damage"(our euphemism for innocent civilian deaths), the instability that resulted from our occupation, the lack of medical care as a result of our occupation, the cancer cases resulting from the depleted uranium which they(iraq and afghanistan) were blasted with(we're talking thousands of tons here), (look at the rates of leukimia in children in Iraq today as opposed to before the thousands of tons of depleted uranium were dropped) not to mention all the civilian deaths resulting from our use of drones. the deaths from depleted uranium will continue long after the war is over as the radiation will be there for years to come. did Iraq have anything to do with nine eleven or osama? did the hawks care that so many americans didn't understand that iraq had nothing to do with 9-11? was it convenient for the hawks to have this widely accepted misinformation floating around in the minds of most of the public when it was on the march to war?(i've seen anywhere from 45-70% of the US public thought iraq or saddam was involved). as it turns out most of the dudes on the planes were from saudi arabia, but did we hold them accountable? why weren't they attacked immediately if this was all about justice?(they hold somewhere around a 7% stake in our economy)
in afghanistan, we pay warlords(it's been widely reported that karzai's own brother is one of them) huge sums of money(millions a month) just to get our supply convoys through their territories. equally strange is the fact that poppy production has greatly increased since our occupation there.
all kinds of interesting information about the situation in afghanistan and how we helped them to become the biggest poppy exporter in the world:
here is an excerpt:
Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the CIA sponsored anti-Soviet Islamist extremists, and to finance its covert operations, it fostered the drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs.
As Alfred McCoy reports in "The Politics of Heroin," Afghan mujahedeen -- the guys President Ronald Reagan famously likened to "our founding fathers" -- ordered Afghan farmers to grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani army transported it to Karachi for shipment overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations.
am i mamby pamby to consider that a life is a life no matter what religion or nationality and one country's lives shouldn't be worth any more than anothers? or is that unamerican? god bless america and nobody else right? war is peace?
bottom line: do you think we're any safer after making retaliation and revenge a foreign policy? how many arab/muslim lives are worth the 3500 that we lost? who has more blood on their hands? how many more need to die for the score to be settled? we clearly aren't going to "win the hearts and minds" of the middle east. not with our current strategy anyway.
one last thing, the talk about respect to international law, is the use of drones ok with the geneva convention? how about depleted uranium? the lingering effects of d.u will kill thousands upon thousands more than osama could have dreamed of.
At the end of WWII America and her allies could have killed nazi war criminals by the hundreds.
Instead they were captured and tried at Nuremberg.
For decades the Nuremberg Trials were considered one of Americas greatest moments.
A time when justice, rule of law and The American Way reigned supreme.
Starting in the 80s the American public began to grow tired of TAW.
Revenge, Hollywood Western justice and Dirty Harry justice became what the public longed for.*
Only a small percentage** of people think putting war criminals on trail is a good idea these days.
To be clear, I do not cry for ObL I am glad he is dead.
I just think we could have made a stronger statement about the kind of society we are by trying him.
* This is my observation, not empirical fact.
** Actually I have no idea what the percentage is.
At the end of WWII America and her allies could have killed nazi war criminals by the hundreds.
Instead they were captured and tried at Nuremberg.
For decades the Nuremberg Trials were considered one of Americas greatest moments.
A time when justice, rule of law and The American Way reigned supreme.
One difference I would point out is that, unlike OBL or Al Quaeda, the Nazis had surrendered.
I think the greatest harm of putting ObL on trial would have been to humanize him.
Currently he is viewed as a seasoned guerrilla fighter and a mastermind, a charismatic holy man who inspired a generation, a stealthy genius who out witted the worlds intelligence agencies for decades and who crushed the Soviet Union and mired the USA in 2 wars.
If bought to trial, I think, he would have appeared small, beaten and a rich egomaniac who because he had great wealth was able to take credit for others fighting, masterminding, devotedness and intelligence.
I don't think the US government could stand the embarrassment of having been played so ordinary a person.
Thus in death his myth survived. He will be remembered along side the other evil geniuses.
This was a military operation. According to the BBC the SEAL team was told to capture bin Laden. However he made a threatening gesture so they ended up shooting and killing him.
The basics of any military training is to protect yourself and the other members of your unit. If your goal is to capture bin Laden alive no matter what so that you can put him on trial you would have to change this unit's rules of engagement. That means if he was going for a gun when he made that threatening gesture you would have to hope that you could subdue him some how before he shot at you so that you could capture him alive. In fact, you might even have to let him shoot at the unit and get some sailors wounded and killed because your goal is not to protect the sailors' lives first, but rather capture bin Laden. In effect, you're saying that the lives of the SEAL team were less important than bin Laden's. Would you be willing to give that order?
That's why I think the issue is moot. They went in to capture him, he threatened them, they acted in self-defense. I am not willing to sacrifice more people for that motherfucker just so I could put him in a court room.
After the celebrations die down, americas mistakes will again fuel terrorism rather than thwart it. Once again the US administration makes the mistake of trying to solve terrorism by treating its symptoms, not its true cause, which is a failed US foreign policy in the middle east. if the us administration was to stop invading and occupying muslim nations and not hinder UN efforts to deal with issues, the threat of terrorism might be neutralised.
a learned german friend wrote that. just throwing it out.
After the celebrations die down, americas mistakes will again fuel terrorism rather than thwart it. Once again the US administration makes the mistake of trying to solve terrorism by treating its symptoms, not its true cause, which is a failed US foreign policy in the middle east. if the us administration was to stop invading and occupying muslim nations and not hinder UN efforts to deal with issues, the threat of terrorism might be neutralised.
a learned german friend wrote that. just throwing it out.
Yes, America must learn to not respond when they are attacked on their own soil and thousands of their citizens are murdered.
That's a valuable lesson.
And the UN has such an amazing record of dealing with these things...
attacked on their own soil and thousands of their citizens are murdered.
rich.
im gonna step out now.
Right - 'cos that never happened.
Bye.
So in your opinion
innocents dying as a result of American policies < innocent Americans killed ?
Please be serious.
In your opinion, should the response to 9/11 have been straight out of Animal House - "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
The invasion of Iraq was stupid. Using torture was evil and stupid. Invading Afghanistan and trying to break the Taliban and (eventually) killing bin Laden seem well justified.
How do you think the US should have responded to 9/11?
innocents dying as a result of American policies < innocent Americans killed ?
Please be serious.
In your opinion, should the response to 9/11 have been straight out of Animal House - "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
No. I'm just very tired of Americans (some on this site) treating 9/11 as some out-of-the-blue event and not a response to wide-spread imperialism with casualties all around the globe.
In terms of innocent people dead Osama doesn't hold a candle to the US government. That doesn't make Osama any less evil, but it should quell some of this self-righteous noise.
Singers: [all] Ame-eri-ica! Ame-eri-ica!
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
[lead singer] Terrorists, your game is through
'Cause now you have to answer to
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] So lick my butt and suck on my balls!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[all] ...Ame-eri-ica!
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
It's the dream that we all share
It's the hope for tomorroo-o-o-ow
[lead singer] Fuck yeah!
Singers: [all] Ame-eri-ica! Ame-eri-ica!
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
[lead singer] Terrorists, your game is through
'Cause now you have to answer to
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] So lick my butt and suck on my balls!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[all] ...Ame-eri-ica!
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
It's the dream that we all share
It's the hope for tomorroo-o-o-ow
[lead singer] Fuck yeah!
This was a big hit by Tommy Facenda.......I understand he recorded a version for every ally country fighting a war in the Middle East......can you sing us the UK version or did y'all just co-opt the U.S. one above as if it were a Northern Soul classic?
In effect, you're saying that the lives of the SEAL team were less important than bin Laden's.
dude. no I'm not.
but if the mission was to capture him (not saying it was; we don't know) and he resisted (not saying he did; we don't know), then it's absolutely within the SEAL job description to risk injury to capture him. the idea that no US lives should have been risked in capturing him is silly.
Comments
The BBC had a great special about the history of Al Qaeda and then another one on the raid that killed bin Laden. According to them the SEAL time did have plans to capture bin Laden. He made a threatening gesture, they shot and killed him. They then took his body, took some DNA samples and brought him back to a U.S. ship where they gave him Muslim burial rights and then dumped his body in the sea because they didn't think any country wanted his body out of fear that it would become a shrine for militants to flock to.
I don't have a problem with anything that happened according to that account of the operation.
that said, ^^^^^this?
serious head scratcher. "something went down the way it did and thats how it went down so it's a waste of time to even talk about it." I cram to understand this sentiment insofar as it relates to ANY event.
first of all, i'm against religious extremists of any religion and obviously osama was an insane horrible bastard of epic proportions.but did the hundreds of thousands(possibly over a million) of muslims who've been killed get a trial? think of all those people who were killed as a result of "collateral damage"(our euphemism for innocent civilian deaths), the instability that resulted from our occupation, the lack of medical care as a result of our occupation, the cancer cases resulting from the depleted uranium which they(iraq and afghanistan) were blasted with(we're talking thousands of tons here), (look at the rates of leukimia in children in Iraq today as opposed to before the thousands of tons of depleted uranium were dropped) not to mention all the civilian deaths resulting from our use of drones. the deaths from depleted uranium will continue long after the war is over as the radiation will be there for years to come. did Iraq have anything to do with nine eleven or osama? did the hawks care that so many americans didn't understand that iraq had nothing to do with 9-11? was it convenient for the hawks to have this widely accepted misinformation floating around in the minds of most of the public when it was on the march to war?(i've seen anywhere from 45-70% of the US public thought iraq or saddam was involved). as it turns out most of the dudes on the planes were from saudi arabia, but did we hold them accountable? why weren't they attacked immediately if this was all about justice?(they hold somewhere around a 7% stake in our economy)
in afghanistan, we pay warlords(it's been widely reported that karzai's own brother is one of them) huge sums of money(millions a month) just to get our supply convoys through their territories. equally strange is the fact that poppy production has greatly increased since our occupation there.
all kinds of interesting information about the situation in afghanistan and how we helped them to become the biggest poppy exporter in the world:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-12-17/opinion/17326555_1_poppy-poor-farmers-world-s-heroin/4
here is an excerpt:
Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the CIA sponsored anti-Soviet Islamist extremists, and to finance its covert operations, it fostered the drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs.
As Alfred McCoy reports in "The Politics of Heroin," Afghan mujahedeen -- the guys President Ronald Reagan famously likened to "our founding fathers" -- ordered Afghan farmers to grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani army transported it to Karachi for shipment overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations.
am i mamby pamby to consider that a life is a life no matter what religion or nationality and one country's lives shouldn't be worth any more than anothers? or is that unamerican? god bless america and nobody else right? war is peace?
bottom line: do you think we're any safer after making retaliation and revenge a foreign policy? how many arab/muslim lives are worth the 3500 that we lost? who has more blood on their hands? how many more need to die for the score to be settled? we clearly aren't going to "win the hearts and minds" of the middle east. not with our current strategy anyway.
the atlantic monthly reported that 45% of germans think that we're(the US) more dangerous than Iran: http://atlanticreview.org/archives/726-More-Americans-Believe-that-Saddam-Was-Directly-Involved-in-911.html
one last thing, the talk about respect to international law, is the use of drones ok with the geneva convention? how about depleted uranium? the lingering effects of d.u will kill thousands upon thousands more than osama could have dreamed of.
I'll try and do better next time.
At the end of WWII America and her allies could have killed nazi war criminals by the hundreds.
Instead they were captured and tried at Nuremberg.
For decades the Nuremberg Trials were considered one of Americas greatest moments.
A time when justice, rule of law and The American Way reigned supreme.
Starting in the 80s the American public began to grow tired of TAW.
Revenge, Hollywood Western justice and Dirty Harry justice became what the public longed for.*
Only a small percentage** of people think putting war criminals on trail is a good idea these days.
To be clear, I do not cry for ObL I am glad he is dead.
I just think we could have made a stronger statement about the kind of society we are by trying him.
* This is my observation, not empirical fact.
** Actually I have no idea what the percentage is.
One difference I would point out is that, unlike OBL or Al Quaeda, the Nazis had surrendered.
Currently he is viewed as a seasoned guerrilla fighter and a mastermind, a charismatic holy man who inspired a generation, a stealthy genius who out witted the worlds intelligence agencies for decades and who crushed the Soviet Union and mired the USA in 2 wars.
If bought to trial, I think, he would have appeared small, beaten and a rich egomaniac who because he had great wealth was able to take credit for others fighting, masterminding, devotedness and intelligence.
I don't think the US government could stand the embarrassment of having been played so ordinary a person.
Thus in death his myth survived. He will be remembered along side the other evil geniuses.
In all fairness, James Carville isn't THAT evil
This was a military operation. According to the BBC the SEAL team was told to capture bin Laden. However he made a threatening gesture so they ended up shooting and killing him.
The basics of any military training is to protect yourself and the other members of your unit. If your goal is to capture bin Laden alive no matter what so that you can put him on trial you would have to change this unit's rules of engagement. That means if he was going for a gun when he made that threatening gesture you would have to hope that you could subdue him some how before he shot at you so that you could capture him alive. In fact, you might even have to let him shoot at the unit and get some sailors wounded and killed because your goal is not to protect the sailors' lives first, but rather capture bin Laden. In effect, you're saying that the lives of the SEAL team were less important than bin Laden's. Would you be willing to give that order?
That's why I think the issue is moot. They went in to capture him, he threatened them, they acted in self-defense. I am not willing to sacrifice more people for that motherfucker just so I could put him in a court room.
a learned german friend wrote that. just throwing it out.
Yes, America must learn to not respond when they are attacked on their own soil and thousands of their citizens are murdered.
That's a valuable lesson.
And the UN has such an amazing record of dealing with these things...
rich.
im gonna step out now.
Right - 'cos that never happened.
Bye.
So in your opinion
innocents dying as a result of American policies < innocent Americans killed ?
Please be serious.
In your opinion, should the response to 9/11 have been straight out of Animal House - "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
The invasion of Iraq was stupid. Using torture was evil and stupid. Invading Afghanistan and trying to break the Taliban and (eventually) killing bin Laden seem well justified.
How do you think the US should have responded to 9/11?
No. I'm just very tired of Americans (some on this site) treating 9/11 as some out-of-the-blue event and not a response to wide-spread imperialism with casualties all around the globe.
In terms of innocent people dead Osama doesn't hold a candle to the US government. That doesn't make Osama any less evil, but it should quell some of this self-righteous noise.
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
[lead singer] Terrorists, your game is through
'Cause now you have to answer to
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] So lick my butt and suck on my balls!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[all] ...Ame-eri-ica!
[lead singer] America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[lead singer] Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day yeah!
America!
[all] Fuck yeah!
[backup singers] Freedom is the only way yeah!
It's the dream that we all share
It's the hope for tomorroo-o-o-ow
[lead singer] Fuck yeah!
This was a big hit by Tommy Facenda.......I understand he recorded a version for every ally country fighting a war in the Middle East......can you sing us the UK version or did y'all just co-opt the U.S. one above as if it were a Northern Soul classic?
Our one's bit old, probably drops some words about Queen Vic, the dangers of drawing lines in the sand, and asking when the next tea break is.
I said nothing of the kind, please stay on topic or start another thread.
They wouldn't be Stealth Helicopters if you could :shh:
Friggin' guy won't just recognize that America is the Great Satan....Ban Him!!!
Nah dude, there is a new updated Blair version on the Atlantic label....gives a shout out to all the countries that have Brit soldiers on the ground.
b/w
I have heard Lil' Kim Jong Ill is a big Man U fan
dude. no I'm not.
but if the mission was to capture him (not saying it was; we don't know) and he resisted (not saying he did; we don't know), then it's absolutely within the SEAL job description to risk injury to capture him. the idea that no US lives should have been risked in capturing him is silly.