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It's over finally. Ten years of madness has ended.

Wonder whats going to happen to Al-Qaeda from now on. This must be a huge blow to their morale.

barnest2 wrote:I'm getting a bit cross with british TV.
British debate program has lots of people calling the death an 'assassination'.
From what I've been reading on here, this doesn't sound right. I though Bin Laden was killed in a firefight with the Seals?

Bin Laden was killed in a specifically targeted raid against him, a person who several iterations of US government have declared a person who they are out to kill.

It pretty much fits the text book definition of assassination.

I mean if the headline was: "Terrorist assault kills President during firefight with Secret Service", would you have a problem with labelling that as an assassination?

weemadando wrote: Bin Laden was killed in a specifically targeted raid against him, a person who several iterations of US government have declared a person who they are out to kill.

It pretty much fits the text book definition of assassination.

I mean if the headline was: "Terrorist assault kills President during firefight with Secret Service", would you have a problem with labelling that as an assassination?

Fair point
I dunno, something about the context made it seem... I'm not sure how to describe it.
The context was "evil US assassins" or at least that's what it felt like, considering the way they were saying things.
Can you see what I mean by how it was bothering me?

Sarevok wrote:It's over finally. Ten years of madness has ended.

Wonder whats going to happen to Al-Qaeda from now on. This must be a huge blow to their morale.

Considering the fact that AQ in the Arab Peninsula and AQ in East Africa are pretty much doing their own thing, I doubt it will have a whole lot of impact on the overall situation.

Double thread eradicated after merge, since it had nothing new or any substance.

Flagg wrote:

Sarevok wrote:It's over finally. Ten years of madness has ended.

Wonder whats going to happen to Al-Qaeda from now on. This must be a huge blow to their morale.

Considering the fact that AQ in the Arab Peninsula and AQ in East Africa are pretty much doing their own thing, I doubt it will have a whole lot of impact on the overall situation.

This is probably true. I would also give odds that there will be some form of attacks from these separate groups just to remind people that the new status quo, even without Bin Laden, will be maintained.

Not to mention all the SE Asian spin offs.

hasn't al-queda been getting weaker over the past couple of years? the fact that the non violent protests in egypt succeeded in deposing a corrupt dictator while years of islamic fundementalism failed miserably would have been somewhat damaging to their cause, and we already have the left hand man in custody. If this had occurred during the height of their influence I doubt they would have been weakened for long.

Also, while I'm glad that he's dead I am not sure how this will help weaken the overall amount of terrorism in the region. the taliban are still active as are other terrorist groups, and I think that leaving while they are still strong enough to threaten the ruling government is a bad move (honestly, removing the taliban from power was one of the few good things bush ever did)

Sarevok wrote:It's over finally. Ten years of madness has ended.

AQ won't vanish just because some old geezer with a beard got chucked out to sea. Afghanistan and Iraq are far from over, unless Obama uses his capital to pull the troops out. So, as they say, (snaaaaake) it's not over yet.

Darth Yan wrote:hasn't al-queda been getting weaker over the past couple of years? the fact that the non violent protests in egypt succeeded in deposing a corrupt dictator while years of islamic fundementalism failed miserably would have been somewhat damaging to their cause

Uh. Non-violent protests ousting a government doesn't necessarily have anything to do with terrorist groups or their strenght/weakness. The Philippines had a non-violent protest that kicked out a dictator, but that had no bearing with the state of our own internal terrorist groups and revolutionaries, be they our communists or the Islamic fundamentalists.

I think one of the posters over on Pharyngula said it best: "Now that Bin Laden is dead, may we have our rights back, please?"

OK, folks, I'm going to link to this instead of posting it, as it's gruesome, but there is a photo of a dead bin Laden out on the internet. It does look like him, and he looks very dead. Provided solely for those who feel a need for a visual aid, do not click on link if you are a "younger or more sensitive viewer".

link

Looks a bit fake to me (the picture, not the fact that he's dead, dead, dead).

This is the first time I've ever watched a live address by any President.

Jeezus, did the bullet go through the temples or how did his eyes manage to get all mangled like that?

It does certainly look fake. I think this is one time that careful, nice high def, professional type photos are the name of the game.

That photo has two different, what's the term... areas of focus on a face that is pretty close to the would be camera.

Broomstick wrote:OK, folks, I'm going to link to this instead of posting it, as it's gruesome, but there is a photo of a dead bin Laden out on the internet. It does look like him, and he looks very dead. Provided solely for those who feel a need for a visual aid, do not click on link if you are a "younger or more sensitive viewer".

link

That is a fake. It has been retracted by the pakistani news who first published it in this context.
Just google it.

Spiegel.de says it's faked.

Link (German):
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpoli ... 04,00.html

Haven't found an english source yet:

[captain obvious]You don't have to be from the CIA or the NSA to see that this photo is a montage :

They inserted the beard and the lower half of the face on the photo of some random dead people. You can see it from the difference in resolution between the "original" photography and the incrusted part.[/captain obvious]


And cheers for another fucker going down !

You know what ? I think I'm beginning to like 2011.

Damn! Well, egg is on my face. Can't trust any damn news source these days....

This is the best picture I could find of the building where he'd lived for five years:

The building

This picture however doesn't do it justice. According to reports, it did cost one million Dollar (for Pakistan an immense sum) to build, has three meter high walls with barbed wire and had been guarded around the clock. The house itself gave him any luxury he wanted, but had neither telephone nor internet (security reasons).

Neighbors didn't suspect anything, since this is the normal modus operandi for rich fucks in Pakistan if they want to stay unbothered. They were less concerned about the military action and instead were pretty much disturbed that they'd lived with such a man as a neighbor.

Well, yeah, you can't help but be concerned that you were living next door to arguably the most wanted man on the planet. After all, military raids and bombs sometimes slop over property lines. I'm glad the fighting seems to have been confined to the compound.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Since the operation was weeks in planning, I bet Obama deliberately released his birth certificate so he could fuck with Trump and his opponents in the Correspondents Dinner and top it off with delivering OBL's head in a platter the day after, to culminate in a week of total awesome for him.

Which is really quite awesome. Imagine, what kind of bastard one would be if just the other night you were busy cracking jokes at the expense of your political rivals while knowing full well that the next day you're going to tell everyone that you just had one of the world's most feared terrorists shot and killed in his own home thirty kilometers away from another nation's capital?

Osama bin Laden had a pretty sad end. He killed so many people, did so much evil, but now he's dead. And what's his last act? Getting used in Obama's reelection campaign, shortly before getting chucked into the ocean.

No trials, no imprisonment, no defiance, nothing. And what did the man who order his death do in the night before? Make fun of Donald Trump and making Lion King jokes.

Obama's gonna come out looking like greased lightning, his opponents are going to look like assholes and idiots, and Osama looks like a corpse.

Man.

If killing Osama has been the goalpost, and I kept hearing for ten years that it was, it might be a good time to pause the game and look at the score. You know, figure out how much all sides lost, or what we gained, to get to this point. Put a final political and human price point on this man's death.

We should have arrested him, given him a fair trial and thrown him in jail or executed him or whatever. This was an assassination and I don't like that to be the sort of thing my country does...

darthdavid wrote:We should have arrested him, given him a fair trial and thrown him in jail or executed him or whatever. This was an assassination and I don't like that to be the sort of thing my country does...

OK. Join the world of grown ups whenever you want.

This was an enemy combatant and the military leader of an army that declared open war not only against our military, but our civilians. You are also assuming that the SEALs went in guns blazing. If we had just wanted him dead we could have blown the shit out of that compound. There is ample reason to believe that this was supposed to be a snatch job and not an execution.

darthdavid wrote:We should have arrested him, given him a fair trial and thrown him in jail or executed him or whatever. This was an assassination and I don't like that to be the sort of thing my country does...

How do you intend to arrest him? Blanket the whole compound in paralysing agent? Because that's probably the only way that you're going to get it done.

They probably hoped that they'd be able to parade him in front of the cameras at Gitmo (sigh), but y'know, taking dudes alive in this kind of scenario (without massive friendly losses) is haaaard.