Osama bin Laden killed

[Blademaster]

As a former New Yorker, I'd appreciate not being lumped in with the barbarians dancing in the streets over bin Laden's death the same way Al-Qaeda supporters were partying over the deaths of 3,000 people in the Towers. I'd like to believe that the self-proclaimed 'greatest country in the world' is more civilized than a bunch of mud hut-dwelling radical fundamentalists still living in the Dark Ages.

[Roy Karrde]

As a former New Yorker, I'd appreciate not being lumped in with the barbarians dancing in the streets over bin Laden's death the same way Al-Qaeda supporters were partying over the deaths of 3,000 people in the Towers. I'd like to believe that the self-proclaimed 'greatest country in the world' is more civilized than a bunch of mud hut-dwelling radical fundamentalists still living in the Dark Ages.

So you believe that celebrating the death of a ruthless murderer is the same as celebrating the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.

Man you would have been such a buzz kill on VJ and VE day.

[crown34]

He didn't deserve a trial. People who fly under a flag get trials, hence foreign murders get deported and tried in their own country. Osama and his terrorist group flies under no flag, hence no trial.

[woz]

jesus christ

[Blademaster]

I dunno what those days are.

And I'm pretty sure that you, in true Roy Karrde fashion, are unable to process a differing opinion than yours and thus rationalize it in the only way you know how: By believing both scenarios to be identical.

It's not like this is some grand, massive achievement. It's not like it's the morning of September 11, 2001 and Osama is raining down hell and laser death on New York from his flying spider doom fortress, twirling his moustache and drinking a goblet of 100 year-old arak while hundreds of people die, and then John McBadass comes swooping in riding a missile, machine-gunning his way into Osama's throne room, putting 50 bullets through his genetically enhanced cyborg body, and flinging him out the cockpit where he plummets thousands of feet and is impaled through the heart on an American flag.

No. It's ten years later. and while I'm glad bin Laden is gone, I'm not about to rally in the streets like this is some major victory: Trillions of dollars and tens of thousands more lives - civilian and soldier, innocent and guilty, American and Muslim - have been spent in order to find and kill one dirty old man with kidney problems, hiding in a Pakistani village. Not an Afghani underground bunker, an endless labyrinth of unnavigable Indiana Jones caverns, or the Goddamn Death Star, but in plain sight, inside of what was basically a reinforced sand castle.

I hardly see this as worthy of the same level of celebration as it is getting.


EDIT: But, this is of course, all just my opinion. You all can do as you like. Just please refrain from including me in it.

[Master of Paradox]

Personally, I'm finding it impossible to care. Obama is just using this as yet another way to prop up his crumbling reputation. It's like how the troop withdrawal will conveniently be complete JUST IN TIME for the 2012 elections.

(For the record, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe the government had Bin Laden's corpse on ice to be wheeled out when needed. I sure as hell am not a Birther.)

[Dark Sage]

Unbelievable. I'm one of Obama's biggest supporters here, and the person who's agreeing with me most is the biggest Conservative on the TPM!

Did the Allies try to take Hitler alive? No. That's the way it goes sometimes for mass-murderers. Bin Laden was not simply a criminal, and it wasn't the NYPD's job to bring him in. He was a terrorist who had declared war on the United States. He didn't even have any regard for the Geneva Convention and NO regard for the Rules of Engagement; his organization used cowardly tactics like suicide bombings that frequently targeted civilians. He claimed he was fighting a Jihad, and yet many of his victims were Muslims.

This was war. In a war, you can't always take the enemy general alive, or even attempt to do so. With this kind of enemy, you have to do what is necessary to make sure that he's stopped.

[papabopp]

...Allies wanted Hitler alive; Russia however, got there first and fucked him up.
I almost want to claim to be a New Yorker who DOES think it was "handeled inappropriatley" and that i'm NOT "glad" that he is dead just to spite YOU: Dark Sage. Weather or not i agree/disagree I DO refuse to be as Blade said "Lumped in..." with any other group of peoples beliefs or whatever unless I say so myself.
I dont care weather he deserved a trial or how evil he was or anything personal or not, but he was in fact murdered. "Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being with aforethought"-definition of murder.
so far this is probably the first time ive agreed with EVERYTHING that Blade has posted in a thread.

[DarkestLight]

I don't need a citation to know that everyone in New York was happy that he was dead. I saw the jubilant crowds celebrating at Ground Zero on Sunday after the news had been released. People who lived through 9/11 have been waiting for this for years.

As for everything else, see what Roy said. This is one of the few times I agree with him.

I'm from, and still am a New Yorker (Harlemworld, till I die ¬¬.) I have mixed feelings, but none of them are positively happy. I can point out over 100 NYC'ers that feel how I feel, that this is a caution set of relief within anxiousness. We DON'T know how to feel-'cause we never thought it would come like this. This is again, something new for Americans (least this generation.)

No we shouldn't have run out in the damn streets (IMO) like when Obama won the presidency and when Yanks win a World Series. Yes, the families of those that lost folks in 9/11 do feel some sort of rudimentary closure, even though they know killing one man will not equate to the deaths of thousands here and across the globe. I'm sure that even with this news, they're still not entirely happy, but its a damned step forward.

Now, let me make a statement to Roy.

Right now Roy, you bugged out with that statement. No 3000 does not equal 1. But for those families, that one grew to encapsulate all their rage, fear, hatred and confusion as to WHY someone would do this. If it was just those folks out in the streets, I probably would have been like "Meh-its the folks who have the most reason to care."

But no, it was Johnny McCornball and his College friends slapping each other's asses and dunking on trees and taking photos with Uncle Sam hats like "YEAH WE KILLED OSAMA." They aint do SHIT >_O! Those fucks are the ones that cause drama. Children seeing those folks outside of D.C. and Ground Zero are gonna be confused cause omg we're celebrating a dead bad guy? Pakistanies are gonna see that, and they're not gonna remember how they acted 9 years ago when the towers fell (and for the record, that was not all of Pakistan, that was Al-Qaeda infused cities that were caught cheering, not everyone in Pakistan thought it was the best thing since cable TV, since they got that in 2000). They're gonna be like "Whoa, they're really happy they killed that dude."

No ones taking the time to explain to children, or to themselves why they're celebrating. Everyone's just saying "WE GOT HIM." and not thinking, "well no I'm relieving some of the anxiety I felt for over 9 years." Yeah, Terror is still here. Osama did what he set out to do, and that was break the American Bubble of Invincibility... good job Osama.

So we did what? As Blade said, spend trillions to find his ass. And we did. And they found him. And he shot at us and Johnny McBadass shot him twice in his left eye so he could watch some hot shit coming to fill his face. In this case, fuck due process. He didn't do like Saddam, who crawled in a damn hole and didn't really resist us himself (Which allowed us to do due process). No. He came out like Rambo and tried to eradicate another infidel-only to get tagged up like markdowns in JCPenny. I'm not saying that it was handled inappropriately, but it was handled the way it needed to go down.

Evil gets what evil deserves, and there's no avoiding that. But Dark Sage, I would really appreciate if you take back that comment about all of NY liking Osama being dead :/ I for 1, am no celebrating his death. I'm at most acknowledging some noticeable shift in the scales of balance for us all. It just have a massive epicenter here-and that center is Ground Zero.

[Roy Karrde]

Now, let me make a statement to Roy.

Right now Roy, you bugged out with that statement. No 3000 does not equal 1. But for those families, that one grew to encapsulate all their rage, fear, hatred and confusion as to WHY someone would do this. If it was just those folks out in the streets, I probably would have been like "Meh-its the folks who have the most reason to care."

But no, it was Johnny McCornball and his College friends slapping each other's asses and dunking on trees and taking photos with Uncle Sam hats like "YEAH WE KILLED OSAMA." They aint do SHIT >_O! Those fucks are the ones that cause drama. Children seeing those folks outside of D.C. and Ground Zero are gonna be confused cause omg we're celebrating a dead bad guy? Pakistanies are gonna see that, and they're not gonna remember how they acted 9 years ago when the towers fell (and for the record, that was not all of Pakistan, that was Al-Qaeda infused cities that were caught cheering, not everyone in Pakistan thought it was the best thing since cable TV, since they got that in 2000). They're gonna be like "Whoa, they're really happy they killed that dude."

Here is the thing, that one, is in no way relatable to the 3,000 that died. That one was a mass murderer, a terrorist, a nut job, one who sought out to kill and harm people. Those 3,000 were innocent, they committed no crime against al Qaeda other than being alive. They were innocent civilians that al Qaeda choose to murder.

As such it is absolutely wrong to link one celebration to another, one celebration is to the end of a mass murderer who has haunted this country for far longer than one decade. The other is to celeberate the death of innocent people who died simply for going to work that morning.

Since we are using WW2 as a example here, it would be like saying Jews celebrating the death of Hitler, is the same as German soldiers celebrating the death of Jews. Those two celeberations are in no way comparable.

To put it simply to say the two are the same is to engage in False Moral Equivalency.

[Dark Sage]

Fine, I take it back. I shouldn't have said "everybody".

I keep forgetting that there are no absolutes in this world, except for the one that says that there are no absolutes.

[DarkestLight]

Here is the thing, that one, is in no way relatable to the 3,000 that died. That one was a mass murderer, a terrorist, a nut job, one who sought out to kill and harm people. Those 3,000 were innocent, they committed no crime against al Qaeda other than being alive. They were innocent civilians that al Qaeda choose to murder.

As such it is absolutely wrong to link one celebration to another, one celebration is to the end of a mass murderer who has haunted this country for far longer than one decade. The other is to celebrate the death of innocent people who died simply for going to work that morning.

Since we are using WW2 as a example here, it would be like saying Jews celebrating the death of Hitler, is the same as German soldiers celebrating the death of Jews. Those two celebrations are in no way comparable.

To put it simply to say the two are the same is to engage in False Moral Equivalency.

If I said earlier that they are the same, than I would be I the collective wrong. I don't believe I said that, but I'm going to explain in a hopefully better way what I mean about the witnessing and meaning of the celebrations and why the celebrations themsevles are similar whereas the reasons why they are celebrating can differ so much.

..It would seem that they are in no way comparable. At least, that would be the case, if there wasn't celebrations in the first place. The reasons the celebrations exist are as different as night and day, but the connective tethers? The One and the 3000...

That 1 made 3000 disappear, and then suddenly, this one is finally eradicated...Its like the Damn genocide of the Jedi by Vader Holy crap its wrong, but there is a balance that needed to be restored. We'll never understand that balance, but its there, and it was shifted back toward equilibrium, if only slightly. For that-there was celebration.

If you'd also take a second outlook...consider the 2001 celebrations in Pakistan. Of seeing a massive power in the world crippled by people that this massive country considered lowly. Made them (Al-Qaeda) feel pretty powerful. They felt balance shift in their favor due to in their anarchy. They shifted the scales of terror to now conclusively include America. Now we finally Tagged Osama. That terror scale is shifted back ever slightly for us.

Case being, we're never gonna get our invulnerability back as far as I can see. Balance is too much on their end...this was a boon but it only raised up a slight bit, May take the gen after the current one growing up now before we might even come close to that impervious mindset again, and raise that scale back to being even (if it ever was even). Therefore the celebrations still come, whenever those scales are moved. That's how they're similar. They celebrate because of the success of an event that the parties consider significant

And uhhh...

Most of the natural world hasn't even HEARD of False Moral Equivalency, and aren't going to think of that when they saw/see people cheering in the streets They didn't then, and they aren't going to start now.


Oh. Thank you for the removal of the absolution Dark Sage.

[Roy Karrde]

It would seem that they are in no way comparable. At least, that would be the case, if there wasn't celebrations in the first place. The reasons the celebrations exist are as differnt as night and day, but the connective tethers? The One and the 3000...

So you admit that the celebrations are not comparable.

If you'd also take a second outlook...consider the 2001 celebrations in Pakistan. Of seeing a massive power in the world crippled by people that this massive country considered lowly. Made them (Al-Qaeda) feel pretty powerful. The felt balance in their anarchy. Shifted the scales of terror to now include America. Now we finally Tagged Osama. That terror scale is shifted back ever slightly for us.

However that imbalance was created in the blood of 3,000 innocent people, while it was shifted back in the blood of one guilty person. They can celebrate America getting a bloody nose, but it is ignorant to ignore how that bloody nose occurred.

Case being, we're never gonna get our invulnerability back as far as I can see. Balance is too much on their end...this was a boon but it only raised up a slight bit, May take the gen after the current one growing up now before we might even come close to that impervious mindset again, and raise that scale back to being even (if it ever was even). Therefore the celebrations still come, whenever those scales are moved. That's how they're similar.

Again it is too simplistic, you need to understand WHY the celeberations are occuring, HOW they are being brought about. One is being brought about by the deaths of thousands of innocent people, the other isn't. Ignoring that, again is a act of False Moral Equivalency

Most of the natural world hasn't even HEARD of False Moral Equivalency, and aren't going to think of that when they saw/see people cheering in the streets They didn't then, and they aren't going to start now.

You do not need to hear of it to know that the celebration of 3,000 innocent people is not comparable to the celebration of 1 guilty person. Such a thing should be just common sense.

[DarkestLight]

So you admit that the celebrations are not comparable.

The words "would seem" does not implicitly state that I believe they're not comparable. Like when you read Shakespeare. You can read a sentence, and you might think it means one thing, but then you delve deeper and see there's more than how you immediately interpreted it. :O


However that imbalance was created in the blood of 3,000 innocent people, while it was shifted back in the blood of one guilty person. They can celebrate America getting a bloody nose, but it is ignorant to ignore how that bloody nose occurred.

Yes, but do the Al-Qaeda Pakistani's know how many people died? Prolly not. Do they care? No. And yeah it may be ignorant, but that's our take on them and their understanding, not theirs.


Again it is too simplistic, you need to understand WHY the celebrations are occurring, HOW they are being brought about. One is being brought about by the deaths of thousands of innocent people, the other isn't. Ignoring that, again is a act of False Moral Equivalency.

No they dont. I doubt the average Pakistani is watching those fools celebrate, and are willing to find information to understand WHY they're in the streets with OSAMA BIN PWNED shirts (Saw one. Shook head in shame)-HOW they could be so happy about one dude dying. One baseline fact is that both celebrations came about because of death :/ Both sides celebrate due to death. Doesn't matter HOW death came to be. Doesn't matter WHY death came about. Death came about-and people celebrated. That's their hardline similarity and even that's fact.

And the scales are not balanced. They've shifted...but we are still at a MASSIVE deficit.

You do not need to hear of it to know that the celebration of 3,000 innocent people is not comparable to the celebration of 1 guilty person. Such a thing should be just common sense.

Tell that to Saudi Arabia when Saddam was hanged. But they danced in the damn streets. They think its comparable. Common sense is not as cut and dry as one would wish. The sense is in direct correlation to human emotion-so common sense can vary.

[Roy Karrde]

The words "would seem" does not implicitly state that I believe they're not comparable. Like when you read Shakespeare. You can read a sentence, and you might think it means one thing, but then you delve deeper and see there's more than how you immediately interpreted it. :O

Except we have delved deeper into it, the only ones able to make such a connection are those that are taking a simplistic view of the events.

Yes, but do the Al-Qaeda Pakistani's know how many people died? Prolly not. Do they care? No. And yeah it may be ignorant, but that's our take on them and their understanding, not theirs.

You can watch the towers burn and realize that thousands would have died.

Hell you could say that even if one innocent person died compared to Osama Bin Laden makes the situation completely dissimilar. The number really has nothing to do with it, the fact that people are comparing celebrations of innocent deaths, to a guilty one is what matters.

No they dont. I doubt the average Pakistani is watching those fools celebrate, and are willing to find information to understand WHY they're in the streets with OSAMA BIN PWNED shirts (Saw one. Shook head in shame)-HOW they could be so happy about one dude dying. One baseline fact is that both celebrations came about because of death :/ Both sides celebrate due to death. Doesn't matter HOW death came to be. Doesn't matter WHY death came about. Death came about-and people celebrated. That's their hardline similarity and even that's fact.

Again that is a simplistic view. As the situations surrounding those deaths MUST be understood if a comparison would be made, if not you are again making a False Moral Equivalency

Are they both celebrating a death? Yes. However the question then must be asked, are both deaths similar? The answer to that is No. One is a mass murderer, the other is thousands of innocent people. That key fact is what separates the two.

Tell that to Saudi Arabia when Saddam was hanged. But they danced in the damn streets. They think its comparable. Common sense is not as cut and dry as one would wish. The sense is in direct correlation to human emotion-so common sense can vary.

There was celebration in Iraq ( Not sure why you think Saudi Arabia would be celebrating ) at Saddam's death, due to the horrors and pain he brought upon innocent people for decades there.

[Dark Sage]

Darkest Light, I should warn you... Roy never lets up until he has the last word. You'll never win.

[Roy Karrde]

Personally I think I made my point beyond that we are going around in circles and I have finals to attend to.

[Drago]

Going in circles has never stopped these political debates before...

[DarkestLight]

Real fast. No, the situations do not have to be explained. They aren't explained explicitly to children. They aren't explained to people in other countries. The world sees these two events, and to them, I'm sure we would hear a thousand different ideas on the concepts of justification and morality but they'd all say the same thing.

These people dance due to death. Just like how I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream You may make the case yours is a exemplified yell, and not a scream, but that guy over there who just sees up to making sounds. Yeah he'll say "Yeah they were both screaming." Your or my singular outlook will not matter-the collective reasoning will be the one that sticks-Moral Equivalency or not. And that's another factor you cannot change.

Yeah Iraq, not Saudi Arabia. Misspoke there. But yeah, they celebrated. They killed a guy. Pretty sure when he killed a couple thousand folks he and his family were in their palace celebrating the good life. :/ Same thing. Each side has a ....right? No. Not the correct term...

a reason to celebrate. Whether its right or wrong is up for each and every individual to decide. Bringing me back to here. Its about death. That's why they celebrate.
Did you celebrate? No.
Did I? No.
Did we understand the reasoning for celebration. Yes.
Did we understand their reasoning for celebrating? ....Maybe.
Do they know 3000=/=1? Yes
Do they FEEL that way? ...Hard to tell. Some people feel its closure. Some people feel its a start. Some feel nothing at all. They're not denying the number, they're not denying anything. But they are accepting what has happened as some point of leveling the scales-whether explicit or simple.

You can get explicit as you want Roy, the bottom line is this. You're never gonna be right in the eyes of someone that views this as a triumph. They're gonna dance, and yer gonna say its not right, But for them it is :/ Whether simple or explicit...they still line up to people dancing the dance of death.

Anyway...Obama '12! I'll continue later if you feel its not exhausted, otherwise I'm effing hungry and wanna eat .


LOL couldn't resist.

DS: I'm in AMERICA! WE ALWAYS WIN! WE KILLED OSAMA *shot!*

[papabopp]

*pew pew*

[homeofmew]

~ WIN ~

[ChobiChibi]

Did you celebrate? No.

Got this little gem for ya.

I was outside of Bush's house over at Preston Hollow partying!

I bid my farewell *poof*

[RedStarWarrior]

The only trial Osama deserves is the one he has to face before Allah. Any actual trial would have magnified the idea of martyrdom. I believe judge and jury were the shot to the head and the heart and the bitch deserved nothing more. Anyone who disagrees has every right to do so, but it doesn't mean I'll give a shit about your opinion.

[Dark Sage]

The only trial Osama deserves is the one he has to face before Allah. Any actual trial would have magnified the idea of martyrdom. I believe judge and jury were the shot to the head and the heart and the bitch deserved nothing more. Anyone who disagrees has every right to do so, but it doesn't mean I'll give a shit about your opinion.

Not exactly how I'd say it, but I... kinda agree with you there... Kinda... I think...

[DarkestLight]

I do too :/ But I agree wholeheartedly

[shazza]

I haven’t had time to read through this entire thread, although I would be willing to do so when giving more time, but I shall just share my scattered thoughts before I slumber. While I have no doubt that Osama bin Laden was the main person responsible for 9/11, having killed him before a trial leaves no proper proof. This is rather disappointing in one aspect, for a proper trial would have proved his connection; and to see him in the court would be an extremely surreal sight.

He did not deserve to live. But death is an easy way out. There is a part of me that would have preferred for all the families to make him suffer more than an instant shot to the head.

What is done is done, however. This is hopefully the beginning of the end, but I am most probably being idealistic.

And it's rather funny: over the weekend just gone, I was briefly reflecting on the lack of Osama updates over recent months. I Wiki’ed his article and whatnot.

[MeLoVeGhOsTs]

Agreeing with shazza here.

[Shadow Wolf]

*After reading all of this...*

There's no peace... not even in a TPM thread...

Anyway, 3000 human beings... 1 terrorist... thousands of people in Irak... A lot of people in my country... whether its terrorism, war, drugs, idealism... human beings are still dying.

[Roy Karrde]

I personally am a alternate history buff, having done a project in my Sci Fi and Fantasy class based around some alternate history novels. As such some one has already put out a article on how things may have played out if we had captured Bin laden.

They had trained tirelessly and prepared for every conceivable contingency — guards armed with automatic weapons, martyrs with suicide bombs lashed to their bodies, escape routes through which the most wanted man in the world might yet elude them — except for the one that greeted them when they reached the third floor of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and headed for an open door, weapons poised.

A white flag hung from the door. Inside the room, standing against the far wall, her hands raised, was a young woman. Next to her, with his hands raised, stood a 6-and-a-half foot tallman, clad in white robes, a small smile on his face. He spoke a single, brief phrase in Arabic.

“What did he say?” one SEAL shouted to the lone interpreter.

“He said” — the interpreter shook his head in disbelief — “he said: ‘I surrender.’ ”

Seven thousand miles away, the men and women in charge of U.S. national security listened in the Situation Room as the CIA director relayed the news from the SEAL team. After years of effort, months of planning, hours of anxiety, there was a long moment of silence.

“We can’t let the S.O.B. live!” the vice president said. “Leon, he’s a lawful target, right?”

The CIA chief shook his head. “They had full authority to kill him,” he explained. “But under the rules of engagement, if he in fact threw up his hands, surrendered and didn’t appear to represent any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. And if the video showed our guys shooting a man in the obvious act of surrendering . . .” He stopped as the image of the terrorist leader appeared on-screen.

“You know what really gets to me?” the president said. “That smile. Almost like he knows something we don’t.”

By the time 2011 came to an end, all of them had a much better idea of what Osama bin Laden had been smiling about.

It began with a triumph. On Sunday evening, May 1, President Obama strode down a red carpet and spoke to the nation from the East Room of the White House:

“Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that captured Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. It is the unbreakable intention of this country to bring him to justice.”

But by Monday morning, the celebrations — the chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” in city streets, on college campuses, outside the White House, even at a nationally televised baseball game — had given way to questions.

“Why did we take him alive?” a dozen radio talk-show hosts asked. “Aren’t 3,000 dead Americans enough?”

“I am sure,” Rush Limbaugh thundered, “that Attorney General Holder is prepared to bring charges against those SEALs that they didn’t read Osama his Miranda rights.”

Among congressional Republicans, praise for the capture was followed by demands for swift and firm justice — including a suggestion by one House member that bin Laden be executed and buried in pigskin “to prevent him from meeting up with those 72 virgins in paradise.”

But U.S. officials faced a far more consequential challenge: Where would bin Laden go, and what would happen to him?

The arguments began almost from the moment bin Laden arrived at Bagram air basehigh in the mountains of Parwan province in Afghanistan. Every possibility came with serious flaws.

Put him on trial for mass murder in a New York federal court? Nearly 3,000 had died there. But what if information about his whereabouts had been obtained through “enhanced interrogation techniques” and was ruled inadmissible? What if bin Laden acted as his own lawyer, turning the trial into a months-long denunciation of America and the West? What if one holdout resulted in a hung jury?

And anyway, the furious reaction to previous efforts to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in Manhattan — New York politicians reversing themselves, Congress denying any funds for such a trial — made that idea impossible.

What about an international tribunal, to drive home the fact that bin Laden’s crimes were against humanity?

“As a political matter,” one White House insider reflected anonymously to the press, “that would have brought the wrath of the right down on us: ‘We were the ones he attacked, and we’re going to be the ones to deal with him.’ ”

“Besides,” she added, “there were much more serious objections. The International Criminal Court could deal only with crimes committed after 2002. As for a war crimes tribunal at The Hague, that court would not impose the death penalty — can you imagine the president signing off on that small detail?”

A military commission at Guantanamo Bay, then? The process was agonizingly slow (only five cases concluded in nine years), and a death sentence for bin Laden would mean years of appeals.

Even those legal questions were nothing next to the global security consequences of capturing, rather than killing, bin Laden.

His survival further enhanced his image as an outlaw-hero whose cunning and skill outwitted the West. When an anonymous solider or worker at Bagram snapped a cellphone picture of Osama, smiling and flashing a V sign with his hand, that image appeared on Web sites around the world and on posters in the streets of a dozen cities, with supporters chanting: “The sheik lives!”

And far, far worse, early on the morning of Dec. 22, members of Lashkar-i-Taiba, the Pakistan-based terror organization responsible for the Mumbai slaughters of 2008, seized an elementary school in New Delhi, holding more than 200 children and teachers hostage and threatening to kill them unless bin Laden was released within 72 hours. Simultaneously, a dozen armed terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, killing three guards before being repulsed.

Within the Obama administration, suspicion immediately arose that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency was linked to these attacks. The ISI, long believed to have links to the Taliban, if not to al-Qaeda itself, had been enraged at Washington for violating Pakistani sovereignty when it captured bin Laden. Those suspicions further eroded relations between the United States and the nation long considered indispensable to the Afghan war effort.

More broadly, the attacks stirred fears of similar acts aimed at U.S. Embassies, bases and businesses around the globe. Back home, airport security was heightened so much that holiday travelers faced four-hour delays at security checkpoints, countless missed flights and jangled nerves.

On Christmas Eve, the president — forced by political pressure to cancel his own Hawaii vacation — gathered his inner circle in the Oval Office for a cheerless Christmas toast.

“Any wishes for the holidays?” someone asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” the president said. “I wish someone had pushed that bastard out of the helicopter seven months ago.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...O8F_story.html

The article does mention something interesting I never thought about. Capturing Bin Laden with all his stature in the Arab world, and really all around the world. Could bring about hostage situations in which demands are made for Bin Laden's release. Killing him may bring retaliatory attacks. But those are painful yet swift. How many times could America watch as a Jihadist captures a school full of children, and holds them hostage for hours on end, demanding for the release of Bin Laden, and all of us knowing in the end, there is a pretty good chance all of those kids will be dead.

[Telume]

I don't care, I'm just glad he's dead.

[Dark Sage]

Bin Laden wasn't a criminal, he was the commander of an enemy regime and a terrorist, who had decalred war on the United States. He was a legitamate target. This was not a "political assassination" because Bin Laden was not a politician. He was a terrorist.

How many times do we have to drive that into your heads?

Are you one of those people who believed all of Trump's lies? Like the one where he said he was sending teams to Hawaii to investigate Obama's citizenship? Or even better, the one where he said he was considering running for President?

Like he would really cancel The Apprentice and open his financial records to do it.

[MeLoVeGhOsTs]

Osama is so two weeks ago.