Bin Laden is dead! (Updated – there are several)

As a great man once said “Get Er Done” .

I appreciate you stopping by.

We all join together in congratulating our fine men and women in the military for performing this extremely difficult and complex task of taking out Osama bin Laden.

as usual, I think you’ve drunk too much of the conservative Kool-Aid. I’m not sure the data supports your conclusion that torture and enhanced interrogations. Don’t feel badly, many conservatives are pushing this notion that Guantánamo Bay played a central role in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Over the coming days and weeks, hopefully will see a more complete picture. Currently the data is sketchy at best. the best summation that I’ve heard of this is probably from Marcy Wheeler – http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/05/02/the-osama-bin-laden-trail-shows-waterboarding-didnt-work/

Liberals do not have a new appreciation for the military. We’ve always appreciated the military. The problem is conservatives think that liberal speak with one voice. Unlike conservatives, we hold different points of view. Therefore, lumping all liberals together in a basket is wrongheaded. What liberals at UC Berkeley do has little or nothing to do with what I do and believe. By the way, how do you know that the people at UC Berkeley are liberals? Are they wearing T-shirts? Do they have a secret handshake?

Just a little research and you would’ve been able to find what Senator Durbin and Senator Kerry said just as I did. From Senator Kerry (http://kerry.senate.gov/press/release/?id=22a038c8-726c-4d85-a40b-e4237c656f4e): “The killing of Osama bin Laden closes an important chapter in our war against extremists who kill innocent people around the world. We are a nation of peace and laws, and people everywhere should understand that our ten-year manhunt was in search of justice not revenge. Terrorists everywhere must never doubt that the United States will hunt them down no matter where they are, no matter how long it takes.

“We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the men and women of our intelligence agencies and our military for their tireless dedication and enormous sacrifice to bring justice to a man responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 and thousands more men, women, and children around the world.

“I commend President Obama and his national security team for never forgetting the need to secure justice for those who lost their lives nearly 10 years ago and for those who have lost their lives in the war against extremism that continues today.

“A single death does not end the threat from Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups. We must remain vigilant and committed to keeping the world safe and secure.”

from Senator Durbin (http://durbin.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=8870df24-35ec-45ae-8f5e-13ac087a424a): “I was advised by Vice President Biden this Sunday evening that Osama bin Laden has been killed. Though this is not the end of the threat of terrorism, it is a clear warning to our enemies that when they threaten and kill Americans, they will be pursued and held accountable. Our nation owes a great debt of gratitude to our intelligence community and military for pursuing this manhunt for almost ten years and successfully eliminating the most high profile terrorist on earth. Those who believed bin Laden and his network were invincible will now awaken to a new reality.”

I think both statements are extremely thoughtful. What you think? I will not comment on the rest of your diatribe. There’s plenty of evidence to contradict almost everything that you wrote including the fact that President Bush publicly stated that he wasn’t all that concerned about Osama bin Laden. It is also a fact that President Bush in 2005 close the CIA’s counterterrorism unit which were specifically formed to track and hunt down Osama bin Laden. It’s hard to imagine that he was the number one priority of our government if you close a unit that was dedicated to finding him.

Thanks your comments.

It is certainly easy for them to say those niceties now, but what about their earlier smearing and trashing of American troops? Yes, not every soldier is perfect, and some do stupid things, but by and large, they are excellent soldiers (and people), so Durbin and Kerry need to do some serious apologizing before they can be taken seriously. (I did not care if they had made statements; the point was my initial comments says all you need to know about them.)

It was actually the City of Berkley city council that voted to prevent ROTC from coming to their city. And yes, they are liberal if they won’t tolerate a military presence like that. And I thought liberals were supposed to be so tolerant?

And there’s copious info coming forth that going back to Gitmo years ago, and all the mean old Americans’ torture of the poor, innocent, misunderstood Muslim meanies, actually has paid huge dividends. I say “Cut their balls off” it that’s what it takes!

God damn it. I wrote an entire response to this and it disappeared. So now I have to do it again.

Now, Bud let me first say — I am an extremely aggressive debater. I do not gloss over anything. So take none of this personally.

As someone who has spent the last six years reporting on intelligence and terrorism issues, I’ve got to say, your comments are both uninformed and offensive. You have poured everything through the filter of partisan hackery, with the result that your arguments demonstrate nothing more than your failure to conduct any research before you reach your conclusions. It is, in my view, both unAmerican and beneath you.

What is so horrible about your comments is not simply the repeated contradictions and errors, but your failure to even come close to recognizing how few facts you marshall to make your arguments. Any objective analysis of these events would not come out weighted so thoroughly to one side or the other. Reality is like that.

Bottom line, before we get into realistic discussion is this: You can’t love this country if you have disdain for half of its population. America deserves better than that.

Before I take this point by point, let me give one demonstration. In point nine, you talk about how Obama “decided” not to shut down Gitmo because we are getting such great intelligence out of it. Here are all of the problems with that:
1. Bush publicly stated in 2006 that he wanted to shut down Gitmo. Senior defense department officials were assigned that task. It didn’t shut down, for reasons that will be explained below. Bush did not “change his mind” because of great intelligence we were getting. He simply couldn’t get the impossible done.
2. The last detainee brought to Gitmo was five years ago. Those men were taken there not to get information out of them, but to lock them up. They had been under CIA control three-to-four years, depending on which ones we are talking about. The Agency concluded that they knew everything there was to know from these guys, and that the CIA didn’t want to be in the detention business. So they were sent to Gitmo.
3. The vast majority of Gitmo detainees have been there for eight to nine years. Both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded long ago that none of them have any actionable intelligence — it is all stale. The organization they know about no longer exists in the form they knew it. Also, none of these guys who were interrogated by the military (except one, al-Qahtani) knew anything about pending attacks. Al Qahtani finished his cooperation in 2003. He cannot be tried, the Pentagon decided, because he had been tortured. And that is what they call it — torture. I will explain why in a moment.
4. Obama approached Gitmo at first with — reasonable — belief that it could be closed. It had become a terrible international symbol, which was the same reason Bush wanted it to be closed. At the time Obama stated his intent, one of the senior Pentagon guys from the Bush Administration told me “Of course, we should close it. Gitmo is just a place. But Obama’s going to find out it’s a lot harder than he thinks.
That is what they found out. For those who could be released (and there were plenty of them), there was no place to send them. the US cannot lawfully send an individual to a country where they have a reasonable belief they may be tortured or killed. That ruled out lots of places. Other countries wouldn’t take them. And — just like with Bush — we were unable to negotiate a deal with a different country to set up a detention center that would be under international control. In other words…no options. So he kept it open. Just like Bush.

But, let’s go through your comments one at a time:

1. This statement is ridiculous. I’m not sure if the argument is that, unless they are down firing weapons, no politician gets credit for the actions they took that led to the death/capture of an enemy.
This is so fundamentally stupid that it is robbing Bush of the much-deserved credit he deserves for decapitating the leadership of al Qaeda. His policies and approved operations led to the capture or killing of KSM, Saddam (not al qaeda, but still — operation red dawn was this one.), Atef, Binalshibh (less than others…big help from the Pakistanis), Zubaydah, al Libi, Nashiri and on and on. His operations led to the destruction of Jemaah Islamiyah in Asia (EXTREMELY important.) I would not on any level deny Bush the credit for any of this. In fact, they are more important the Bin Laden.
But, just like Bush gets credit for all of that — even in those instances where the initial bits of intelligence came from Clinton (which it did with Atef and Zubaydah). There’s a huge difference between buying spices and making dinner.

2. First off, your disparagement of a man who served his nation as a member of Presidential cabinet based on his physical limitation is childish and reflects badly on you.
But, on to substance. Your statement here is a complete contradiction of number one — no one deserves credit, but Bush policies deserve credit. Yah, ok.
As for aggressive interrogation — they got no information about the courier from this. What they got was denial. The valid information came from FBI interrogations at Gitmo. (more on that later.) They DID however, result in crippling Jemaah Islamiyah. So give Bush the credit he deserves (which again, JI is more important than UBL), but don’t then piss over the credit Obama deserves.

3. Too bad conservatives want to bomb abortion clinics and federal buildings. Do you now see the absurdity of your own argument?
Yes, there are far-left wingers who are anti military. But citing them as reflective of half this country is obscene. And I will not allow you to heft up events from decades ago to justify the hatred you just spewed at half of this country.
And you are simply wrong. Somewhere below you mention Berkeley — which not only has had ROTC on campus for many many years, but has an ROTC program that is one of the most successful in the nation. It’s Army ROTC is the Golden Bears Battalion – total kick ass soldiers. Navy ROTC has about 70 midshipmen, and operates a very successful affiliate program with other neighboring schools. Air Force ROTC at Berkeley is Detachment 085 — again, one of the most successful recruiting groups there are. In order to attack “libruls” you have pissed on these fine young men and women, because to recognize their service would not fit in with the partisan story.
Other universities HAVE refused to allow ROTC to operate on campus, but did in turn provide off-campus facilities under non-university control for recruitment. Why? Because every one of these schools had policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. And the legal judgment was that to allow ROTC on campus would violate those policies (opening up the universities themselves for discrimination suits based on their own policies.)
So, with gays now allowed in the military, what has happened? Every one of those schools — including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, yada yada — has either formally reversed their positions or are in the process of doing so. You may think that the universities should have violated their own policies — and taken the legal risk — but that is simply know-nothingism. It had nothing to do with opinions of the military.

4. The Kerry “baby killer” story is made up — and in fact, was made up by Rush Limbaugh. He never said it, never came close to saying it. He OPPOSED the war after serving in Vietnam (something that few prominent conservatives except for McCain did), as was his right. Now, in 2004 the conservatives did everything they could to proclaim (against all evidence to the contrary) that he obtained his Silver Star, Purple Heart and Bronze Star by fraud. This was unbelievably despicable, because it, one again, pissed on the military by proclaiming that these awards for bravery and service could be obtained by fraud — those making every medal winner suspect. It was the irrational preview of “Obama wasn’t born in America.”
Now, Durbin, you understated the situation — unfortunately, your lack of information led you to make a weaker argument. Durbin never called soldiers baby killers — he compared them to the troops of the Third Reich. And he didn’t do that in Vietnam. He did it in 2005. However, he was immediately and roundly condemned by every democrat in congress — literally, every one — and then proclaimed himself a broken man. ““If I believed in Hell,” he said, “I know I’d be going there.” Does not forgive him for what he said, but that’s what happened.
As for why they didn’t comment — they did. Kerrey, who has his expertise in foreign relations, first celebrated the CIA operatives and military folk whose work led to Bin Laden’s killing and then cautioned that we should not lash out at Pakistan, because that country has been an enormous source of intelligence. Which is true.
Durbin said, “We have been devastating their ranks for a long time (ed note: in other words, Bush), and without a lot of fanfare. But cutting off the head of the snake, I think, could demoralize some of his followers….At the end of the day, this evil man died.”
Argue with what they said, but don’t pretend they didn’t say it. And don’t frame the argument with falsehoods.

5. Again, this is just stupid. You are taking one faction of the left and proclaiming them to be representative. Second, most of the criticism of Bush was based on the mishandling of the Iraq war, which was terribly mishandled. How do I knew this? __ because that was the conclusion of that bastion of liberal thought, the Army War College.
Again, stop using sophistry to insult half this country.

6. You are absolutely correct. But again, you can’t say “it was because of Bush we got Bin Laden,” anymore than you could say “It was because of Clinton that we got Atef.”
As stated before, we should all bask in the glow of the successes Bush had in decapitating al Qaeda. They deserve our country’s respect and thanks for that. And conservatives should stop trying to minimize the success of Obama, pissing on the president of the united states in un-American partisan psychosis.

7. Actually, you are wrong. In 2001, Bush did proclaim Bin Laden our main target — because at that point, the full scope of al Qaeda was not understood. (The real breakthrough in that — and the most important interrogation conducted in that time — was the FBI’s questioning of Nasser Ahmad Nasser al Bahri in a prison in Yemen.) Once that information filtered through to the White House (On October 18, 2001) you did not hear Bush make any more of his “dead or alive” comments (September 17, 2001.)
Instead, he went down the decapitation path. Which is why he said:
“Who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not. We haven’t heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He’s just a person who’s been marginalized…. I don’t know where he is. *I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you*.”
And….an “emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.”
And…why he shut down the Bin Laden unit in 2006.
Had Obama said or done any of these things, you and the talk radio boys would be raging and calling for his impeachment. But Bush did it — AND he was right — but you all remained silent.
But Bush did, i believe, underestimate the psychological importance of getting Bin Laden. But he was too busy with the other folk.
Now, when Obama came into office, there were two major people left — Zawahiri and Bin Laden. Zawahiri was pushed off the table for now — or, as he would be known by 99 percent of Americans, Zawa-who? And Obama did instruct the CIA to make killing (not capturing, but killing) Bin Laden as priority number one. That was the right thing to do. Had he been in office in 2002, it would have been horrible mistake.
Thankfully, it is Bush and Obama who were making the decisions, based on the national security needs of the country, and now a bunch of talk radio partisan hacks.

8. What I love is your ability to assert knowledge about intelligence operations based on nothing more than what you pull out of your ass. There was, in fact, a major intelligence operation involved in this, orchestrated by the Obama national security team. Saying “they did nothing” would be the same as saying that Bush did nothing with Operation Red Dawn (the one that caught Saddam.) You would be wrong on both counts. On the other hand, this point is kind of the same as # 10, so i will deal with that more below.

9. Wrong on every level, as explained above. As for civilian trials….It is true that Obama has tried 70 terrorists in civilian courts in the last three years, and has had only one military commission. So, I guess there is a strong question about his commitment to military commissions.
Oh WAIT!! That ISN”T true. Those were Bush’s numbers. Because Bush — rightfully, again — did not go all politico-blind with the idea that its all one or the other. He stated publicly, they will do military when appropriate and civilian when appropriate. That’s why Richard Reid, Moussaoui and dozens of others went through civlian trials. Of course, when the shoe bomber launched his failed attempt to blow up a plane just before Christmas– stopped by passengers — conservatives cheered; under Bush, he was read his rights, tried and is now in supermax. When the underwear bomber launched his failed attempt to blow up a plane just before Christmas– stopped by passengers — conservatives wailed, because, under Obama, he was read his rights and sent to criminal court for trial.
Now, let’s look at a few others. Conservatives also wailed and moaned when Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was moved from Gitmo to NY for trial. This stemmed from the 1998 embassy bombings. They did no such wailing or moaning when the 20 other guys were tried (in person or in absentia) in the very same court under Bush.
Again, Bush made the right call as did Obama. Because the bombings took place in 1998, there was a strong legal argument to be made that they fell outside of the authority of the United States to try them under the laws of war. Taking them to a military commission would tie everyone up in court, once a conviction came down, and both Administrations would almost certainly have lost. That’s why Bush and Obama made the same decision.
KSM presented (and presents) a similar problem. The cause of death on each of the 3,000 people was determined by civilians and deemed murder. There is no murder charge available in military commissions — so the defense would be able to make a legal argument about venue, which would tie up the case. It is less of a clear-cut situation, so it could be reversed. But there are strong reasons that KSM should be tried in the US — and Bush would have probably tried the same thing. (Then of course, everyone would be fine with it.)
Now, what is the big deal about military commissions? Bear in mind, there have been two commissions — and only one that went all the way to completion — in the past 10 years. During that same time, there have been 95 criminal trials (70 under Bush, 25 under Obama so far.) The average sentence for those tried in criminal court has been 22 years. The ones directly linked to actual or attempted attacks — and not just planned — have received life. (Of course, the Ghailani case, the only one of this category under Obama, also resulted in life, and the conservatives wailed.)
And the military commissions? Time served, plus five months. Some guilty pleas have resulted in a few years. Not one has been of the length of time imposed in 80 percent of the criminal cases.
This is, again, one of the reasons that Bush rightly decided to use both military commissions and criminal trials. At this point, the rationale for military commissions is no longer there, so it would be fine for most of these guys to go to criminal trials. Unfortunately, the wailing kills that possibility.

10. Total complete unadulterated crap.
There were many issues involved in this operation, the most important being the United States was engaging in a military operation inside of Pakistan, which has been a very useful ally in the GWOT. (global war on terror.) During the campaign, Obama specifically stated he would authorize operations inside of Pakistan; McCain specifically stated he would not, and both McCain and Palin slammed Obama for being “naive” for advocating such a thing. Rush and Sean chimed in with the same argument.
Oops.
Since coming into office, Obama has engaged in military operations — usually involving the predator — inside of Pakistan. That also set lots of teeth gnashing in the talk-radio world. BUT it was those operations (I know this) that stepped up the cooperation from Pakistan, which actually played an important — but complex — role in killing UBL.
Next, saying that they knew 99.9 percent that they were right demonstrates an utter lack of understanding about intelligence. There is no such thing as a 99.9 percent certainty. Most is 40 percent or so, none rise beyond the level of 60 or so.
Let’s take the closest example similar to this during the Bush Administration. Because of intelligence involving following certain people’s cars and watching some communications links (not actual communications, but knowing which wires were operation and which weren’t) Bush had reason to believe that Saddam was hiding out in a place called Dora Farms. Tenet told him the intelligence was “as good as it gets” — about 60 percent certain. Bush anguished over the decision — what if it was a set-up, trying to lure the US into attacking a bunch of innocents, like orphans? Hour upon hour was spent discussing this. Finally, Tommy Franks told him that, if the operation was going to launch, he had 2 minutes to give the order. Otherwise it could not occur. Bush checked his gut and ordered the attack. Dora Farms was destroyed. The intelligence, however, was wrong. Saddam wasn’t there.
Obama had intelligence of about the same quality — and in fact, based on almost the same information. He agonized over making the decision, fearful that he was being set up by factions within the ISI (pakistani intelligence) to lure the US into killing a bunch of innocents. And he had another issue on his plate — given that he would be attacking inside of Pakistan, the issues were far more significant. If he was wrong, he could easily have been facing impeachment. Can you imagine the bitching and wailing that would have occurred if Obama killed a bunch of widows and orphans? But that was why they did a boots-on-the-ground attack, rather than missiles. They could pull back if needed, and a missile attack could kill too many innocents.
The problem is, you guys do nothing but try to spin every single fact in a way that reinforced your ability to attack the president of the United States, even in military operations. You rightly proclaimed (although sometimes you abused it to silence all dissent) that attacking Bush when we were engaged in war was a disservice to our troops. Yet you have felt no compunction in declaring our commander in chief to be a foreign-born manchurian candidate — and we have actually had military men refuse to follow orders on the argument that Obama is not a lawful president. He had to consider the fact that — even if he succeeded in killing UBL — he would be attacked by the right, or have his accomplishment dismissed (for proof, see everything you wrote above.)

continued below…….

OH…and reply back. I love a good debate.