Didn't Obama say he was holding a press conference, so people stood outside to see what it was about?

I blame the rap music

Other than the fact that he was the head of a terrorist organization and may have been planning more attacks.

Did you hit your head while you were gone? I thought you would have supported this and Obama.

Well they did find him in his lavish compound in pakistan after all.  Caves, lol.

qft

That would be my guess as well.

From what I am seeing in the news, it would appear that we knew he was there fort some time now. If that is true then the question comes up about why we did not just off him on discovery.

If they found him and offed him right away, then that would just be too damned bad. I doubt many people would shed a tear.

If they found him and sat on the matter, then only the bluff would be a good accounting for the delay. Unless they have a way of determining that it was a bluff but it takes a couple of months to be sure, then OK, that is just a prudent restraint. They would really be trying to not get someone nuked.

However, that would beg the question of just how they could make that determination.

Can they determine that the guy was a liar? If so, why did that not happen when he first said it?

Do they have some way of finding actual nukes in the field? Then why would we be concerned about lost Soviet weapons?

As far as where they would have got the bomb, the odds of it being from PRNK are really slim. We must have had the threat several years ago. Check me on this: Khalid Sheik Mohammad was taken in 2003. PRNK did not have a test until more than three years later.

They could have a Pakistani bomb. Other probable sources would be unlikely. A. Q. Khan sold stuff to Iran (who still don't have one as far as we can tell), Libya (who gave them up under the Bush Doctrine (and how the fuck he has a doctrine I don't quite get but yah...)), and PRNK.

So it is either Pakistan, the Soviets or home grown. If either Paki or home grown, then the smart money is on a “gun type” with a maximum yield of about 15 kt. Probably less. Don't misunderstand me. That will ruin a whole lot of people's day. As far as actual damage goes though, carpet bombing is far worse.

Yah, I have trouble with the idea that we had to take months to plan shit out. We have had ten years to plan shit out and we have boots on the ground who can deal with whatever fuckup happens.

The boots on the ground might make mistakes and then the wrong people will die. The real major fuckups are when the suits in offices can't get it right. Then thousands of wrong people might die. Either that or thousands of right people will not die. Possibly both.

Compare that to Sadam and the spider hole. Apart from the possible tin foil hat crowd, has anyone ever credibly stated that we knew about the matter for months ahead of time? Not so much.

From any source on the matter, we got the wolverines going in a matter of a few hours. You get bonus points if you can explain the name wolverines without googling.

As far as planning, I will say that I am not willing to call this out as a theory but we routinely ban cell phones in court houses. So why the fuck is Hussein's execution on youtube?

I agree with you. However, that was not the point that I was making.

We spent two years getting ready to invade during which time the powers that be did everything to make us think that he was at least as bad as Hitler. Which is probably true despite the fact that a couple of things we were told turned out to be wrong.

I suppose that there really ought not to be an “oops” with war but it is war and well, oops.

In any case, security must have been a concern at his execution. As I said before, I am not willing to make a case that the filming was specifically condoned. Still his execution was filmed and will be around as long as the internet exists.

That seems to me to be a pretty basic lack of security. It only takes a couple of soldiers with rifles to make sure that cell phones do not enter the location. The fact that the film exists is a fuckup. Probably a 2^nd lt. Who should have written the order did not do his job. And the privates with the guns? I guess that that is why we don't put them in charge of shit.

Big difference between Iraq where we had tens of thousands of troops to serve as backup and Saddam was in a hole in the ground with virtually no support and Pakistan where Osama was in a fortified position with an unknown number of body guards and the men going in had no backup readily available. They couldn't phone in for an air strike or artillery support in an emergency. We don't have boots on the ground in Pakistan... at least not the official kind. If the team that went in failed, it is likely that Osama would have gotten away. In Iraq, if the initial assault team failed, Saddam is being tailed by every military asset in the area. 

ok.......if your post wasn't asking why it took months to take out Osama but a significantly shorter period to capture Saddam, I guess I missed the point. Even now looking back at it I don't know what you were trying to say if that wasn't your point.

 Because if they had nuclear weapons they would have used them by now, they want to cause maximum damage and make the US and their allies looks weak, a nuclear bomb would have done that, they wouldn't have waited until bin laden was killed, that's called a bluff, a stupid bluff at that. You don't go on saying you want to cause death to america and it's allies and then say, well we have a nuke and we will use it if you kill our leader.....fuck no, u just use the damn thing and then say fuck with us and we will do it again. That's is how you know they are bluffing.

it's the same name, just a different transliteration from arabic characters.  same as with "muhammad" and "mohammed."  the former represents a more classical arab pronunciation, the latter a more persian pronunciation.  since the dominant cultural influence in middle eastern islam is not arab but persian, you often see these spellings.  it depends on which system the person chooses.  the spelling "osama" just happens to be more in vogue.  i've seen many articles with the "usama" spelling.

I don't remember that but I do remember that Poppy Bush's mispronunciation of Saddam Hussein's name was done as an insult.

I was pleased to see Cheney stick up for Obama and Rice too.

As bad as I thought Bush was as a president, I did not blame him for the attack itself, although his reaction to it was inept and messy and costly.

These attacks will happen under any president and intel won't always stop it. What I have been pissed off about is the right always looking for a reason to be negitive when they don't have power.

It was nice to finally see some overlap and credit given where it is due.

The irony is that Obama was passed the torch by Bush and kept lots of the intel policies Bush set up. I think there is a reality beyond politics that every president faces on their first day in office.

I think the current revisionist history of Reagan by the neo Republicans is a distortion of a great president. Reagan was a great president. Bush Sr was ok, but certainly not knee jerky like Jr was. All of them handled foreign police much better than Jr did.

Mind you all our presidents, BOTH republican and democrat have dropped the ball on the economy from a long term perspective.  I am strictly talking about Reagan winning the cold war, with words rather than weapons, for the most part.

What does Obama have to do prove himself? If I can give Reagan credit for winning the cold war, and even Bush Sr for handling the first gulf war as best he could, with much more moral certainty, Obama certainly deserves at least this credit.

We are all Americans and we can disagree on how to move forward without always viewing our detractors as being monsters.

Now that Cheney and Rice have said "Good job Obama", could the nutters out there please shut the fuck up and say "thank you" at least on this subject.

  Yes, perhaps in the future the US government should consult with clairvoyants who can see into the future so we can avoid such inconvenient developments.  Alliances are purely based upon what is expedient at the time.  Remember 65 years ago ?  Russia was our friend and ally.  Japan and Germany were our declared enemies.  Things change. Politics is a dirty business.  Stop being so naive.

My position on Israel has changed over the past few years, based on:

a) The breaking of the Israeli agreement to stop settlers from continuing to encroach on Palestinian territory.

b) The attack on the aid flotilla and the extremely brazen dishonesty in claiming that the flotilla was some sort of terrorist assault.

c) The increasing radicalization of the right-wing party led by Netanyahu

d) Reading many of Hitchens's current and old articles on the Israeli / Palestinian issue.

In any case, you haven't made an argument. Saying that I approve of a genocide while disapproving of an assassination, even if that were true, just point out an inconsistency in my own position - it doesn't speak to the actual act of state-arranged assassinations at all.

@Prozac:

Reagan knew full well when he trained and equipped the Mujahideen and drew the Soviets into the trap in Afghanistan that he was dealing with fanatics, and he should have known (though given his stupidity, perhaps it really did just go right over his head) that these people would not just magically disappear after the proxy war was finished. 

We (that is, developed states) do this over and over - support groups of extremely dangerous individuals because we find them to be a convenient proxy at the time without thinking about what the long term consequences might be. We take the easy way out and then future generations have to deal with the mess. 

And, of course, when dealing with this particular mess we took the easy way out again - just shooting Bin Laden in the head, waving a few flags around and calling it a day. No bothering to arrest him and put him on trial, no time given to actually see justice & due process done; a few bullets to the noggin and blurbs in the popular press about how shooting someone is somehow the same as sitting them down in a courtroom is good enough to serve the public.

I would note on behalf of Werner that his involvement in Nazi criminal activity is disputed and not clearly understood. We know that he had no choice in the matter of joining the NSDAP, and that he could not continue his rocketry work at all unless it was conducted within the domain of military application. We have, to Werner's benefit, Gestapo documentation suggesting that he was a communist sympathizer opposed to the war who may have intentionally sabotaged the V-2 project while hoping to eventually construct space vehicles; against his benefit, we have two testimonies from members of the French resistance who claim that Werner was unambiguously a monster & fanatic when it came to the treatment of laborers and/or suspected traitors.

We don't (and probably will never) have the full picture of who Werner was at the time of his surrender; in any case, his adaption into NASA was hardly a negative thing.

those ethics never existed except in press releases.  it was all about racing to get to german expertise before the soviets could get to it.  the nuremberg convicts were mostly just sacrificial lambs: petty bureaucrats who could contribute nothing.  even goering, despite being a field marshall, was hardly a military asset.  the old professional german military had always had a rocky relationship with the nazi party, and party men like goering were rightly considered dilettantes.

as early as 1943, if not earlier, the american military brass was gearing up to go to war with the soviet union.  germany was seen as an annoying but necessary distraction that was already practically beaten anyway.

as for japan, i think that was the whole motivation for dropping the atom bomb: take japan out of the war definitively before stalin has a chance to invade via manchukuo, as he promised he would.  there were other reasons, including reasons of scientific observation, but the whole argument that it saved millions of american lives that would have been lost invading japan is bullshit.  the military knew damn well that japan was already making overtures to surrender, but america demanded total surrender, including handing over the emperor, which was the main bone of contention.  so we drop the bomb, on purely civilian targets--twice, for some reason--and we get our total surrender.  then what does macarthur do as soon as he rolls into tokyo?  saves hirohito's ass.

that's the lasting problem of scientific ethics we've inherited from wwii.  much of our knowledge of human anatomy and how the body behaves comes precisely from nazi and japanese human experimentation, especially vivisections.  we save lives by using it, but torture and murder were the price of it.  so what do we do?