BREAKING NEWS: OSAMA BIN LADEN NOW DEAD[views:55199][posts:212]__________________________________________ [May 4,2011 9:42pm - Botorious N.I.G. ""] Wouldn't surprise me. The timing was just so very convenient! |
| __________________________________ [May 4,2011 9:46pm - dreadkill ""] Let's focus on the real enemy: the Philadelphia flyers |
| __________________________________ [May 4,2011 11:06pm - brian_dc ""] Fight the real enemy: [img] |
| ______________________________________ [May 4,2011 11:15pm - the_reverend ""] south park called it last fall. |
| ___________________________________________ [May 4,2011 11:30pm - FuckIsMySignature ""] Yeti said:Osama Bin Laden no longer has farty pants. |
| _____________________________________ [May 5,2011 5:30am - The_reverend ""] Nope, that was 10 years ago. I'm talking the jerse shore episode. Navy seal drops down and shoots him in head |
| __________________________________________ [May 5,2011 3:12pm - FuckIsMySignature ""] i'm aware. there was headshot in both episodes |
| ______________________________ [May 10,2011 1:07pm - ark ""] http://www.alternet.org/news/150857/7_dece..._pushed_by_the_obama_administration In his address to the American people, and in subsequent media briefings by senior officials, we were told that a small force of as many as 25 Navy Seals stormed the compound with orders to take bin Laden alive, if possible. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that once inside the compound, they came under heavy fire and “were engaged in a firefight throughout the operation.” The SEALs killed Osama bin Laden's son when he lunged for them on a staircase, and finally encountered their quarry in a bedroom, where, after taking a woman believed to be his wife as a human shield, bin Laden died in a vicious fire-fight. The operation, Obama said, was carried out “with extraordinary courage and capability.” As the week wore on, all of these details were "revised," and the administration claims that the initial, improbably clean account of what happened was merely a product of the "fog of war." And, as Salon's Justin Elliott notes, “despite the major misstatements by the administration on perhaps the biggest story of the year, the media has largely taken a deferential stance” to that position. Let's look at what has changed since that first draft of history was written by the administration. 1. No Firefight John Brennan, White House security adviser, initially told reporters that bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in.” But on Wednesday, unnamed “administration officials” told NBC that only one person fired on U.S. troops from an adjacent guest house, and once they entered the main residence the “resistance” we were told they faced “never materialized.” The compound was cleared quickly, said the officials, and rather than a 40-minute firefight, the commandoes spent most of their time there gathering computer hard drives and other potential sources of intelligence. 2. No Human Shields A senior defense official at the Pentagon told reporters that bin Laden and other combatants "certainly did use women as shields." Jay Carney “revised” that part of the narrative, saying, "a woman, rather, bin Laden's wife, rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed." 3. Kill Team? Bin Laden's daughter alleges that the special forces operators first captured bin Laden and then executed him, though that story hasn't been confirmed. But (yet another) unnamed administration official told Reuters that the team “was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him.” Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that the killing was an act of “self-defense,” but the account given by another official to NBC appears consistent with the idea that they were ordered to kill the terrorist leader. After entering the bedroom where bin Laden was holed up and shooting a woman in the leg, “without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fire two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head.” There were reports of weapons in the bedroom, but bin Laden was “unarmed at the time he was shot.” When asked if the al Qaeda leader had said anything to the operators, CIA chief Leon Panetta told PBS' Jim Lehrer, "To be frank, I don't think he had a lot of time to say anything." 4. Larger Force According to the New York Times, the team comprised 79 special forces operators and a dog, 3 times the number of troops originally reported. This is relevant to the question of whether they could have taken bin Laden alive had that been their goal. As David Dayen noted, “the SEALs were well-trained and had the element of surprise, and this overmatched their foes, who were not plentiful – there was not a phalanx of bodyguards protecting the al Qaeda leader.” 5. No “Picture-Perfect” Operation According to the Associated Press, “Navy SEALs carried out what those involved call a textbook military operation that killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.” It's an odd assertion, given that the raid appears to have resulted in a coveted, highly classified technology falling into the hands of a rival state. ABC reports that one of the four helicopters used in the raid was damaged and destroyed by the SEAL team. But the parts left behind in the compound revealed a “top secret, never-before-seen stealth-modified helicopter” that had previously only been “rumored to exist.” According to the report, “photographs emerged of large sections being taken from the crash site under a tarp,” and former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke “said U.S. officials may have reason to worry about where those parts end up.” "There are probably people in the Pentagon tonight who are very concerned that pieces of the helicopter may be, even now, on their way to China, because we know that China is trying to make stealth aircraft," he said. The Chinese military is known to have a close relationship with the Pakistani military. 6. Not Living in Luxury On Monday, defense officials told reporters that bin Laden was holed up in a million-dollar compound and wondered what other terrorists might make of the situation "when they see that their leader was living, relatively speaking, high on the hog." I fell for this one myself, writing on Monday that “bin Laden was living in the lap of luxury among our allies, not in either of the countries we've invaded and occupied since 9/11.” But according to The Guardian, “local estimates suggest the house is worth $250,000.” Footage from inside the compound shows little sign of luxury. Cooking equipment was shown on the floor, the decor seemed shabby, medicines were left on a shelf with no cabinet and the pantry seemed rudimentary. The paint was peeling outside the building and there was no sign of air-conditioning. 7. White House Wasn't Watching the Whole Operation Unfold On Monday, John Brennan said, "We were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation from its commencement to its time on target to the extraction of the remains and to then the egress off of the target.” This gave way to the now iconic images of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others watching intensely from the White House situation room. But the next day, CIA Director Leon Panetta told PBS, “Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. There were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.” |
| __________________________________ [May 10,2011 1:37pm - brian_dc ""] John Brennan is definitely an epic twat. |
| _________________________________________ [Aug 17,2011 8:06pm - Headbanging_Man ""] brian_dc said:John Brennan is definitely an epic twat. You got that right! Dude said it was a good idea to ship "terror" suspects to Syria, Egypt, etc. because that allowed the "families to get involved" in the interrogations. I.E. maybe we'll get better information if the "terrorists" are forced to watch their wives being raped or their kids being castrated. And apparently he's the driving source behind the latest "official" version of events in The New Yorker... But the great Russ Baker has deconstructed that mythology quite ably: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/08/17/raidbinladen/ Original Investigation: Who–and What–Are Behind the “Official History” of the Bin Laden Raid? By Russ Baker on Aug 17, 2011 The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden. ... ... as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. ... One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser... The mere fact of Schmidle’s reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that’s the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid... At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one—that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable. So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners—get ready–the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan. ... Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests. The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a “counterterrorism expert”—he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out. ... The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.” That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece ... It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that day—or from influencing what transpired. ... Taken together, here’s what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions. Then Brennan, the CIA’s man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operation—with Special Ops under its direction). What we’re looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It’s exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too “conspiracy theory.” ... Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future: - It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle’s own father could have been one of those “unnamed sources.”) - It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin. - The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility. - The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable. - Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything. - Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized. - The eyewitnesses from the house—including the surviving wives—have disappeared without comment. Those are just some of the juicier quotes, the whole thing is worth a read though. |
| ____________________________________ [Aug 21,2011 11:34am - Boozegood ""] LOL at people thinking it is strange that an after-action report was fucked up when it was first released. I can see why people would expected the report on this to be peachy-clear right off the bat, or at least when they released the info, but that is the fault of higher-ups, as usual. Just because this was an extremely important operation doesn't change the fact that it was still a ground-unit body dropping, door kicking, hard-knock. Expecting the government to report such an operation correctly right off the bat is like expecting staff officers to report shit right, multiplied by a thousand. How about before people jump to accusing this of not happening they first learn to stop saying 'SEAL Team Six', start to learn about cordon/searches, intelligence gathering, and a million other things. Don't get me wrong, there is tons of stuff that sure sounds fishy, it's just annoying when people start pointing fingers and pretty much talking shit about DEVGRU, when they can't even take the time to learn simple facts. |
| _________________________________________ [Aug 22,2011 5:12pm - Headbanging_Man ""] After-action report??? Where??? All we've gotten is White House/CIA/Pentagon propaganda, and really poorly thought-out propaganda at that. |
| _________________________________________ [Aug 22,2011 5:21pm - Headbanging_Man ""] Also, no one's blaming the propaganda and disinfo on anyone BUT the higher-ups... If you actually read the article you'd note that all on-sight witnesses have been kept from the press, except for a few alleged initial quotes from alleged OBL relatives, since MIA. Clearly Russ Baker and other responsible reporters are putting the fault with the higher-ups, since they're the only ones talking (lying). Where did anyone "talk shit" about Seal Team 6/DEVGRU?? |