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Jolie Rouge

05-02-2011, 05:23 AM

Official: Bin Laden buried at sea
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press – Mon May 2, 3:40 am ET
WASHINGTON – A U.S. official says Osama bin Laden has been buried at sea.

After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.

The official, who spoke Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters, did not immediately say where that occurred.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110502/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden_burial

comments

WHAAAAAAT?!?!

I must be turning into a conspiracy theorist nutjob, because this is all too convenient. Out of the blue, we are told that Bin Laden is dead, ok. Covert ops with Navy Seals, big shootout at hideout, yep. But his body buried at sea? 24 hours within death? to HONOR him and his islamis beliefs? THAT is where I draw the line. The american people deserved better.

--

Don't believe everything you read,something feels real wrong with this picture.Oh sorry , there was no picture.

How Obama’s focused, hands-on pursuit of Osama Bin Laden paid off
Slate - 1 hr 53 mins ago By John Dickerson

At approximately 11:30 p.m. Sunday, President Obama announced to the nation that on his orders U.S forces had killed Osama Bin Laden. His reputation for lawyerly inaction may never recover. Obama's critics have said that he is a weak leader in general and in particular does not understand what must be done to combat terrorism. "They are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required," said former Vice President Dick Cheney in March 2009, in a typical remark. Yet what emerges from the details of Bin Laden's killing (offered, like the heroic accounts of the Bush years, entirely by officials who work for the sitting president) is that from early in his administration Obama was focused on killing Osama Bin Laden and that he was involved in the process throughout.

In June 2009, Obama directed his CIA director to "provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice" Osama Bin Laden. By August 2010 intelligence officials had identified the suspicious compound where Osama lived. Thirty-five minutes outside Islamabad, the walls were up to 18 feet high and topped with barbed wire. The largest structure, a three-story building, had very few windows. Though the house was valued at $1 million, it had no Internet or phone service. Its residents, unlike their neighbors, burned their trash.

Detainees being held at Guantanamo provided some of the strongest information about those who were trusted by Bin Laden. They identified a courier and his brother who lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an affluent suburb where a lot of retired Pakistani military officers live. The final phase of the painstaking process started in mid-February. Intelligence officials started to get good information on the compound. A series of meetings were held in the White House to develop aggressive intelligence gathering operations.Â A family lived at the compound that matched the description of the Bin Laden family.Â By mid-March the president was chairing the national security meetings on the operation. (In all he would chair five such meetings, including the ones on the day the operation took place.)

Early Friday morning before departing to view tornado damage in Alabama, the president gave the order to initiate the operation to kill Bin Laden. On Sunday, he met throughout the day in the Situation Room, making final preparations and receiving updates. The assault team arrived by helicopter. Administration officials were vague about what happened next. Bin Laden "did resist the assault force" and he was killed in a firefight, which leaves plenty of room for details to come out in the screenplay. Bin Laden's oldest son and the two couriers were also killed. One woman, whom a senior administration official said was used as a shield by one of the men, was killed. Two other women were injured.

At about 4 p.m., the president received first word that his orders had very likely led to the successful assassination of the architect of the greatest attack ever on America. No other country, including Pakistan, knew of the attack, but the president in his remarks was clear that the operation couldn't have taken place without the help of the Pakistani government. "Our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding."

The president went to sleep to the sound of cheering outside the White House. At Ground Zero in New York and towns across the country, people gathered to sing the national anthem and chant "USA! USA!" It was a flicker of the post-9/11 unity that the president had referenced in his remarks earlier in the evening.

In his remarks announcing the operation, the president sought to rekindle that feeling, but he went further. He made the latest in a series of paeans to the American spirit. Under assault from conservatives who say he does not believe in the idea of American exceptionalism, Obama took the opportunity to reiterate his belief in the unique qualities of his countrymen:

Today's achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. … Tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it's the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place. Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thus did the president both answer his conservative critics and rise above them. Yes, he was saying, I do believe in American exceptionalism — and so should any terrorist who would wish America ill. All in all, it was a good night to be president.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/analysis-how-obamas-focused-hands-on-pursuit-of-osama-bin-laden-paid-off;_ylt=AlmMq7OUW2xGZDG6oLsS7AxH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTR vcGc4c2Y3BGFzc2V0A3libG9nX2V4Y2x1c2l2ZS8yMDExMDUwM i9hbmFseXNpcy1ob3ctb2JhbWFzLWZvY3VzZWQtaGFuZHMtb24 tcHVyc3VpdC1vZi1vc2FtYS1iaW4tbGFkZW4tcGFpZC1vZmYEY 3BvcwM1BHBvcwM1BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDaG9 3b2JhbWE4MjE3

Jolie Rouge

05-02-2011, 05:30 AM

Bin Laden was found at luxury Pakistan compound
Patricia Zengerle And Alister Bull – 2 hrs 23 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. forces finally found al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not in a mountain cave on Afghanistan's border, but with his youngest wife in a million-dollar compound in a summer resort just over an hour's drive from Pakistan's capital, U.S. officials said.

A small U.S. team conducted a night-time helicopter raid on the compound early on Monday. After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden and an adult son, one unidentified woman and two men were dead, the officials said.

U.S. forces were led to the fortress-like three-story building after more than four years tracking one of bin Laden's most trusted couriers, whom U.S. officials said was identified by men captured after the September 11, 2001 attacks. "Detainees also identified this man as one of the few al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden. They indicated he might be living with or protected by bin Laden," a senior administration official said in a briefing for reporters.

Bin Laden was finally found -- more than 9-1/2 years after the 2001 attacks on the United States -- after authorities discovered in August 2010 that the courier lived with his brother and their families in an unusual and extremely high-security building, officials said. They said the courier and his brother were among those killed in the raid. "When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound," a senior administration official said. "The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harbored a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden," another administration official said.

The home is in Abbottabad, a town about 35 miles north of Islamabad, that is relatively affluent and home to many retired members of Pakistan's military. It was a far cry from the popular notion of bin Laden hiding in some mountain cave on the rugged and inaccessible Afghan-Pakistan border -- an image often evoked by officials up to and including former President George W. Bush.

The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbottabad's center, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.

WALLS TOPPED WITH BARBED WIRE

Intense security measures included 12- to 18-foot outer walls topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound, officials said. Two security gates restricted access, and residents burned their trash, rather than leaving it for collection as did their neighbors, officials said.

Few windows of the three-story home faced the outside of the compound, and a terrace had a seven-foot (2.1 meter) privacy wall, officials said. "It is also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it," an administration official said. "The brothers had no explainable source of wealth."

U.S. analysts realized that a third family lived there in addition to the two brothers, and the age and makeup of the third family matched those of the relatives -- including his youngest wife -- they believed would be living with bin Laden. "Everything we saw, the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers' background and their behavior and the location of the compound itself was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden's hide-out to look like," another Obama administration official said.

Abbottabad is a popular summer resort, located in a valley surrounded by green hills near Pakistani Kashmir. Islamist militants, particularly those fighting in Indian-controlled Kashmir, used to have training camps near the town.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_binladen_compound;_ylt=AiQ8zR5uIWvWwG62Jh5MfSys 0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNvcjZhZzBjBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTEwNTAy L3VzX2JpbmxhZGVuX2NvbXBvdW5kBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bG FyBGNwb3MDNwRwb3MDNARwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hl YWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA2JpbmxhZGVud2FzZg--

And the Pakistan goverment didn't know he was there? How stupid do you think we are now. We want a refund of our war on terror support funds.

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He hated the Western world for capitalism, yet he was living in a luxurious palace?

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[quote] "we give thanks to the countless intelligence & counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names... We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism & unparalleled courage of those who serve our country."
-President Obama, May 1 2011[quote]

Pakistan Taliban threaten attacks after bin Laden's killing
[ 1 hr 25 mins ago

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) – The Pakistani Taliban threatened attacks against government leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistan army and the United States on Monday, after the killing of Osama bin Laden in the country. "Now Pakistani rulers, President Zardari and the army will be our first targets. America will be our second target," Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_pakistan_taliban_binladen;_ylt=ApXC3IKaBygSKuzn dydq7FWs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTQxNnM1aWJpBGFzc2V0A25tLzIw MTEwNTAyL3VzX3Bha2lzdGFuX3RhbGliYW5fYmlubGFkZW4EY2 NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwMxMARwb3MDNwRwdANob21l X2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX2hlYWRsaW5lX2xpc3QEc2xrA3Bha2lzdG FudGFsaQ--

Jolie Rouge

05-02-2011, 07:19 AM

Obama: Osama Bin Laden Dead
U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that the world's most wanted terrorist, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, was killed by U.S. forces Sunday during a firefight at a compound deep inside Pakistan.

Official Obama Osama Bin Laden announcement video. http://www.emergencyemail.org/newsemergency/anmviewer.asp?a=1055&z=34

Bin Laden was living in a multi-million dollar mansion in the city. His whereabouts have been known for some time.

Mr. Obama made the announcement during a live nationwide television address at the White House Sunday night.

This development comes nearly 10 years after the catastrophic attacks by al-Qaida operatives on the United States on September 11, 2001.

U.S. forces have been hunting the Saudi terrorist kingpin ever since. Sunday's action was conducted in Abbottabad, in the Hazara area on the edge of Punjab.

Mr. Obama said bin Laden was not a Muslim leader, but a ?mass murderer of Muslims.? The president said bin Laden was located with the help of Pakistani intelligence, and that he authorized the operation after months of pursuing an intelligence lead.

Mr. Obama called the operation the most significant achievement in the mission to defeat al-Qaida, and said bin Laden's demise should be welcomed by all those who believe in peace and human dignity. The president said ?justice has been done.?

Senior Obama Administration officials said that Mr. Obama authorized the operation Friday. The officials said three other men were killed, including one of bin Laden's sons, and a woman was killed while being used as a human shield.

Mr. Obama said the U.S. took custody of bin Laden's body. The remains are being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition.

The compound in Abbottabad is in a relatively affluent area about 50 kilometers north of the capital, Islamabad. U.S. officials said it has extraordinary security measures, including walls three to four meters high topped by barbed wire.

The U.S. did not share intelligence about the operation with any country, including Pakistan, and that very few people in the U.S. government knew of the plan in advance. Shortly afterward, Mr. Obama contacted Pakistani leaders as well as U.S. allies around the world.

Mr. Obama said he spoke by telephone with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, and that Pakistani officials agreed it was a good and historic day for both nations.

President Obama said there is "no doubt" al-Qaida will continue to pursue attacks, and he said the U.S. must remain vigilant at home and abroad.

http://www.emergencyemail.org/newsemergency/anmviewer.asp?a=1055&z=34

jasmine

05-02-2011, 07:19 AM

hmmmmm

His body was buried at sea, so quickly? How convenient.
I want pictures!
Not saying it's not true, but I would love some proof!

pepperpot

05-02-2011, 07:44 AM

The remains are being handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition.

This I find somewhat annoying. Respecting his beliefs. I understand why they did it, to calm other Islamics and curtail their criticisms and be the better "person"...however, it's still annoying.

Now, let's not ever utter his name again. The trash has been taken out. A hint of justice has occured.

dv8grl

05-02-2011, 08:24 AM

How much money has Obama given Pakistan?

gmyers

05-02-2011, 08:29 AM

I can't believe Pakistan is claiming they doidn't know he was there. I think yahoo said he was just over an hours drive from the capital.

janelle

05-02-2011, 11:10 AM

One person wrote---"I hope he is enjoying those 72 Virginians" LOL

They took the body and I am sure got tons of pictures and his DNA, etc. Burying him at sea prevents any place becoming a shrine.

So glad Obama ordered shoot to kill if he doesn't surrender and we don't have to deal with him anymore.

YNKYH8R

05-02-2011, 12:35 PM

Obama is partying it up with Hitler, Elvis and Saddam.

Then again...it is close to re-election time.

Jolie Rouge

05-02-2011, 07:36 PM

Mon May 2, 4:16 pm ET
Was burying bin Laden at sea a mistake?
By Zachary Roth

Amid the justified celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden, an awkward question is starting to rear its head: Did U.S. policymakers err in burying the al Qaeda leader at sea?

Already, the decision has provoked criticism from some Islamic scholars, who say a maritime burial isn't in keeping with Muslim law. And there are signs that the move could help fuel skepticism, especially among President Obama's critics, about whether bin Laden was really killed at all. The Pentagon has said the body was treated in accordance with traditional Islamic procedures--including washing the corpse--before it was placed in the waters of the northern Arabian Sea. U.S. officials have said they wanted to avoid the al Qaeda leader's grave site becoming a shrine for his followers. They've also said it would have been difficult to find a foreign country willing to accept bin Laden's remains, especially in so short a time: Islamic tradition and practice call for the body of the deceased to be buried within 24 hours of death.

But several Muslim authorities said today that the sea burial in fact violated Muslim tradition--and warned that it could help trigger calls for revenge from militant Muslims. The sea burial "runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values and humanitarian customs," Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand Imam of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque, told the AP.

And Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai's grand mufti, echoed that view. "If the family does not want him, it's really simple in Islam: You dig up a grave anywhere, even on a remote island, you say the prayers and that's it."

He added: "Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances," he added. "This is not one of them."

And Abdul-Sattar al-Janabi, who preaches at Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque declared: "It is not acceptable, and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea," adding that the action "might provoke some Muslims."

But the religious verdict may not be quite that open and shut. Imam Shamsi Ali, of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, told The Lookout that in emergency circumstances, any Islamic law can be overlooked. "For example, you're not allowed to eat pork," he said, but added that if you were starving to death, it would be considered acceptable. Ali said that because the United States appears to have been unable to find a country to take bin Laden's body within 24 hours, this might have qualified as such an emergency.

Islamic practices aside, the decision is already triggering conspiracy theories that cast doubt on whether bin Laden is truly dead--even though DNA testing is said to have confirmed with virtual certainty that the al Qaeda leader was indeed killed. An assertion by Pakistan's Taliban that bin Laden is still living was picked up on several users of the conservative website FreeRepublic.com. In addition, one writer on the Andrew Breitbart website Big Peace called for bin Laden's body to be"digitally scanned" so that Americans could verify his death for themselves. On Twitter, Emily Miller, an editor at the conservative Washington Times, demanded a photo of the body as "proof."

Skepticism could only increase in some quarters if the Obama administration declines to release photos of bin Laden's body. No decision has yet been made on that question, according to White House counter-terror adviser John Brennan, who said this afternoon that doing so could jeopardize future operations.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110502/ts_yblog_thelookout/was-it-burying-bin-laden-at-sea-a-mistake

Not everyone believes bin Laden really is dead
Robert Burns And Calvin Woodward, Associated Press – 54 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Knowing there would be disbelievers, the U.S. says it used convincing means to confirm Osama bin Laden's identity during and after the firefight that killed him. But the mystique that surrounded the terrorist chieftain in life is persisting in death.

Was it really him? How do we know? Where are the pictures?

Already, those questions are spreading in Pakistan and surely beyond. In the absence of photos and with his body given up to the sea, many people don't believe bin Laden — the Great Emir to some, the fabled escape artist of the Tora Bora mountains to foe and friend alike — is really dead.

U.S. officials are balancing that skepticism with the sensitivities that might be inflamed by showing images they say they have of the dead al-Qaida leader and video of his burial at sea. Still, it appeared likely that photographic evidence would be produced. "We are going to do everything we can to make sure that nobody has any basis to try to deny that we got Osama bin Laden," John Brennan, President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, said Monday. He said the U.S. will "share what we can because we want to make sure that not only the American people but the world understand exactly what happened."

In July 2003, the U.S. took heat but also quieted most conspiracy theorists by releasing graphic photos of the corpses of Saddam Hussein's two powerful sons to prove American forces had killed them. So far, the U.S. has cited evidence that satisfied the Navy SEAL force, and at least most of the world, that they had the right man in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The helicopter-borne raiding squad that swarmed the luxury compound identified bin Laden by appearance. A woman in the compound who was identified as his wife was said to have called out bin Laden's name in the melee. Officials produced a quick DNA match from his remains that they said established bin Laden's identity, even absent the other techniques, with 99.9 percent certainty. U.S. officials also said bin Laden was identified through photo comparisons and other methods.

Tellingly, an al-Qaida spokesman, in vowing vengeance against America, called him a martyr, offering no challenge to the U.S. account of his death.

Even so, it's almost inevitable that the bin Laden mythology will not end with the bullet in his head. If it suits extremist ends to spin a fantastical tale of survival or trickery to gullible ears, expect to hear it. In the immediate aftermath, people in Abbottabad expressed widespread disbelief that bin Laden had died — or ever lived — among them. "I'm not ready to buy bin Laden was here," said Haris Rasheed, 22, who works in a fast food restaurant. "How come no one knew he was here and why did they bury him so quickly? This is all fake — a drama, and a crude one."

Kamal Khan, 25, who is unemployed, said the official story "looks fishy to me."

The burial from an aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea was videotaped aboard the ship, according to a senior defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a decision on whether to release the video was not final. The official said it was highly likely that the video, along with photographs of bin Laden's body, would be made public in coming days.

The swiftness of the burial may have raised suspicions but was in accord with Islamic traditions. Islamic scholars, however, challenged U.S. assertions that a burial at sea was an appropriate fate for a Muslim who had died on land. The act denied al-Qaida any sort of burial shrine for their slain leader. Once again, bin Laden had vanished, but this time at the hands of the United States and in a way that ensures he is gone forever.

If that satisfies U.S. goals and its sense of justice, Brad Sagarin, a psychologist at Northern Illinois University who studies persuasion, said the rapid disposition of the body "would certainly be a rich sort of kernel for somebody to grasp onto if they were motivated to disbelieve this."

Also expected to come out is a tape made by bin Laden, before U.S. forces bore down on him, that may provide fodder to those who insist he is alive.

Pakistan, for one, is a land of conspiracy theorists, and far-fetched rumors abound on the streets and in blogs throughout the Arab world. But that's not just a characteristic of the Islamic pipeline. Many ordinary Americans — and one billionaire — persistently questioned whether Obama was born in the U.S. despite lacking any evidence that he wasn't.

Sagarin said most people will probably be convinced bin Laden is dead because they cannot imagine the government maintaining such an extraordinary lie to the contrary in this day and age. Yet, he said, "as with the birther conspiracy, there's going to be a set of people who are never going to be convinced. People filter the information they receive through their current attitudes, their current perspectives."

To be sure, even photos and video, subject to digital manipulation, may not provide the final word to everyone. But Seth Jones, a RAND Corp. political scientist who advised the commander of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan, said the administration should do all it can to minimize doubts. "There are always conspiracy theories," he said. "There are individuals who believe that bin Laden wasn't involved in the 9/11 attacks."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden_dna

hblueeyes

05-02-2011, 08:25 PM

I found it to be unique that they played a video of the prez and secretary of state Clinton and others as they watched as everything played out. This is what makes me skeptical.

Me

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 09:03 AM

Bin Laden wife served as human shield: US official
Mon May 2, 4:58 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – One of Osama bin Laden's wives acted as a human shield in an unsuccessful bid to save the Al-Qaeda leader's life before he was killed in a raid by US special forces, a top US official said Monday. "There was family at that compound, and there was a female who was, in fact, in the line of fire that reportedly was used as a shield to shield bin Laden from the incoming fire," counter-terrorism official John Brennan said.

Pressed on reports the woman shot dead by Navy SEALs during a firefight at a compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan was one of bin Laden's four wives, Brennan told a White House briefing: "That's my understanding."

Brennan said it was not entirely clear "whether or not bin Laden or the son or whatever put her there or she put herself there" or whether the Al-Qaeda chief himself fired rounds during the exchange. "From a visual perspective, here is bin Laden who has been calling for attacks, living in this million dollar plus compound, living in an area that's far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield," he said. "I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years, and so again looking at what bin Laden was doing, hiding there while he's putting other people out there to carry out attacks, again, just speaks to, I think, the nature of the individual he was."

In addition to the woman, Bin Laden was killed by a bullet to the head and senior US officials said two brothers believed to be his couriers and one of the Al-Qaeda chief's adult sons also perished in the raid.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110502/wl_sthasia_afp/usattacksbinladenshield;_ylt=As29XQcHsLuFbsHMB0Lpy H0N97QF;_ylu=X3oDMTM5dGFkOHBiBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExM DUwMi91c2F0dGFja3NiaW5sYWRlbnNoaWVsZARjY29kZQNvZmZ nMTRrBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc 2xrA3Vzb2ZmaWNpYWxiaQ--

Bin Laden's wife not killed in raid, White House says
Mon May 2, 7:56 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A woman killed during the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan was not his wife and was not used as a human shield by the al Qaeda leader before his death, a U.S. official said on Monday, correcting an earlier description.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counter- terrorism adviser, told reporters earlier that the slain woman had been one of bin Laden's wives and had been used -- perhaps voluntarily -- as a shield during the firefight.

However, a different White House official said that account had turned out not to be the case. Bin Laden's wife was injured but not killed in the assault. U.S. officials have said a small U.S. strike team, dropped by helicopter to bin Laden's hide-out near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad under cover of night, shot the al Qaeda leader dead with bullets to the chest and head. He did not return fire.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110502/wl_nm/us_binladen_usa_wife;_ylt=Al.v9gSbgznBipBgI7sJUBXu OrgF;_ylu=X3oDMTM1aWVidXNwBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTEwNTAy L3VzX2JpbmxhZGVuX3VzYV93aWZlBGNjb2RlA29mZmcxNGsEY3 BvcwM1BHBvcwM1BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDYmlu bGFkZW4zOXN3

gmyers

05-03-2011, 09:13 AM

They're saying they have pictures to prove he's dead. I don't know if they'll release them or not.

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 09:18 AM

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/gv050311APR-A20110503044519.jpg

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/mrz050311dAPR20110503124523.jpg

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 09:20 AM

I found it to be unique that they played a video of the prez and secretary of state Clinton and others as they watched as everything played out. This is what makes me skeptical.

Me

I thought that was odd as well. Is that normal procedure ? DO they film all the "secret meetings" for future reference ?

gmyers

05-03-2011, 09:22 AM

They do if election year is coming up. It doesn't surprise me at all.

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 09:30 AM

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/GM110502CLR-ObamaTak20110502065355.jpg

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 01:30 PM

'Osama is alive!' mock Pakistanis outside compound
Tue May 3, 10:33 am ET

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (AFP) – Dozens of Pakistani youths on Tuesday demonstrated outside the upmarket compound where Osama bin Laden was killed, mocking the United States and shouting "Osama is alive!"

Unconvinced by news that the Al-Qaeda kingpin had been living in their leafy city of Abbottabad, one protester dressed up as the world's "most-wanted" man, who was killed in a helicopter raid by US commandos. "Osama is alive, here comes Osama!" he exclaimed jokingly, donning a white turban and hiding his face with a cloth.

Some children as young as four or five joined the spontaneous rally, which was full of laughter and held alongside a heavy police contingent guarding the scene of the now world-famous operation to kill the terror mastermind.

Another in the group, wearing a black turban similar to that sported by the Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Omar, suggested that the raid had been a fake. "Long live Osama, here come Mullar Omar and Osama!" he proclaimed.

Conspiracy theories, propped up by distrust of the United States, have spread quickly among residents in the quiet, relatively well-to-do garrison town after the news emerged of bin Laden's death on their doorstep. "We are really surprised about how this is possible," said Mohammad Anwar, another teenager at the gathering.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110503/wl_sthasia_afp/usattacksbinladenpakistandemo;_ylt=As2tFsePUWISU0s J9M4cYGMV6w8F;_ylu=X3oDMTNmZHFtZmdpBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8 yMDExMDUwMy91c2F0dGFja3NiaW5sYWRlbnBha2lzdGFuZGVtb wRjY29kZQNvZmZnMTRrBGNwb3MDNARwb3MDNARzZWMDeW5fdG9 wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrAzM5b3NhbWFpc2FsaQ--

Pakistan has bin Laden wife, children in custody
Chris Allbritton – Tue May 3, 10:30 am ET

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A senior Pakistani intelligence official said one of Osama bin Laden's daughters had seen her father being shot dead by U.S. forces, and was one of about 10 relatives of the al Qaeda leader in custody pending interrogation. The official, who declined to be identified, said the daughter, aged 12 or 13, was one of the people who had confirmed that the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks had been killed by U.S. commandos in a raid early on Monday.

The relatives -- one of bin Laden's wives and up to eight children -- will be interrogated and then probably turned over to their countries of origin, and not the United States, in accordance with Pakistani law, he said. The official said the wife and children were left behind after an American transport helicopter, possibly an MH-60 Sea Hawk, was abandoned because of mechanical problems.

He said there was not enough room for the group on the other helicopters, which were transporting bin Laden's body, other male captives and the commandos. A small U.S. strike team dropped by helicopter to bin Laden's hide-out in Abbottabad, near the Pakistani capital Islamabad, and shot him dead.

The revelation bin Laden had been holed up in a compound in the military garrison town for years has threatened to worsen U.S. ties with nuclear-armed Pakistan, and raised questions over how the al Qaeda leader could live in comfort near Islamabad. The Pakistani intelligence official acknowledged bin Laden's whereabouts may cause problems with the United States, and also embarrass Pakistan. "It looks bad," he said. "It makes us look like a fool or an idiot. It's pretty embarrassing."

But, he added, the CIA had not had any luck finding bin Laden for 10 years either. "Had we known where he was, we would have gotten him ourselves," the official said.

The White House counterterrorism chief said on Tuesday there was no evidence Pakistani officials knew bin Laden was living at a compound deep inside the country, but the United States was also not ruling out the possibility.

Echoing President Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani official said the United States had acted alone in killing bin Laden, and that it had not asked for permission to enter Pakistani airspace. "There is every possibility that what radars were there (in Abbottabad) were jammed," the official said, adding that up to 40 commandos had attacked the bin Laden compound.

But he said it was possible that some of the U.S. aircraft used in the raid had come from the Pakistani air base of Ghazi, just 54 km (33 miles) away from Abbottabad, while the transport helicopters possibly came from Afghanistan.

Ghazi was used by the United States for humanitarian relief operations after the floods of 2010.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110503/wl_nm/us_pakistan_has_bin_laden_wife_children_in_c;_ylt= AvnbbC_yKKhApr2TY9SEOFTuOrgF;_ylu=X3oDMTN2OGxyNzJi BGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTEwNTAzL3VzX3Bha2lzdGFuX2hhc19iaW 5fbGFkZW5fd2lmZV9jaGlsZHJlbl9pbl9jBGNjb2RlA29mZmcx NGsEY3BvcwMxMARwb3MDMTAEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBH NsawNwYWtpc3Rhbmhhc2I-

What? How can they say that "even the US intelligence couldn't get him in 10 years?" That terrorist mastermind wasn't living in our backyard, near our capitol, and barely 100 feet from our highest officer training institution.

There is no way in hell the Pakistani didn't help shield Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Why are we about to give that terrorist-supporting country another 38 billion dollars? Money that we don't have. Money that the American people desperately need right now. I just don't get it.

--

So, a nation that can build, stock and deploy nuclear weapons doesn't know when its radars are jammed and doesn't have a Plan B for when its radar is jammed? Is this how it defends its nuclear arsenal? I think there is more to it then meets the eye.

---

We are not giving Pakistan money to fight terrorism ... we're giving them money to look the other way while we trounce around their backyard. Pakistan knows U.S. forces are inside their country conducting military ops ... they are not as stupid as the media reports. Their govt has a strong contingency of Bin Laden/Taliban empathizers and others who don't feel comfortable w/ another country running around inside their borders. So the Pakistan president doesn't want to inflame one group while aggressively rooting out terrorists.

The U.S. doesn't expect Pakistan to aggressively search for bad guys or root them out ... they just want them to keep quiet and let us do our thing. I"m not saying this is right or wrong, but it the reality there.

Bliss

05-03-2011, 02:33 PM

The news outlet cannot even get their story straight... One minute he's alive, then dead, then he sprung back to life, & in the next breath he's dead again.. He used one of of his wives as a human shield, then she wasn't a shield, Then she may have done it on her own, then she was slain & now she's alive...... You read this crap & all you get is BS after BS.

Next you will read, The people who took Osama out will be charged with murder cause he was not armed..... {shaking head**

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 02:35 PM

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 02:40 PM

Pakistan criticizes US raid on bin Laden
Nahal Toosi And Zarar Khan, Associated Press – 32 mins ago

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan – Pakistan criticized the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden as an "unauthorized unilateral action," laying bare the strains the operation has put on an already rocky alliance.

U.S. legislators along with the leaders of Britain and France questioned how the Pakistani government could not have known the al-Qaida leader was living in a garrison town less than a two-hour drive from the capital and had apparently lived there for years. "I find it hard to believe that the presence of a person or individual such as bin Laden in a large compound in a relatively small town ... could go completely unnoticed," French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told reporters in Paris.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also demanded that Pakistani leaders explain how bin Laden had lived undetected in Abbottabad. But in a nod to the complexities of dealing with a nuclear-armed, unstable country that is crucial to success in the war in Afghanistan, Cameron said having "a massive row" with Islamabad over the issue would not be in Britain's interest.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. is committed to cooperating with Pakistan. "We don't know who if anybody in the government was aware that bin Laden or a high-value target was living in the compound. It's logical to assume he had a supporting network. What constituted that network remains to be seen," Carney said. "It's a big country and a big government and we have to be very focused and careful about how we do this because it is an important relationship."

A day after U.S. commandos killed the al-Qaida leader following a 10-year manhunt, new details emerged Tuesday from Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency and bin Laden's neighbors in Abbottabad. Residents said they sensed something was odd about the walled three-story house, even though bin Laden and his family rarely ventured outside and most neighbors were not aware that foreigners were living there. "That house was obviously a suspicious one," said Jahangir Khan, who was buying a newspaper in Abbottabad. "Either it was a complete failure of our intelligence agencies or they were involved in this affair."

Neighbors said two men would routinely emerge from the compound to run errands or occasionally attend a neighborhood gathering, such as a funeral. Both men were tall, fair skinned and bearded. "People were skeptical in this neighborhood about this place and these guys," said Mashood Khan, a 45-year-old farmer. "They used to gossip, say they were smugglers or drug dealers. People would complain that even with such a big house they didn't invite the poor or distribute charity."

U.S. officials have suggested Pakistani officials may have known where bin Laden was living. Members of Congress have seized on those suspicions to call for the U.S. to consider cutting billions of aid to Pakistan if it turns out the government knew where bin Laden was hiding.

Western officials have long regarded Pakistani security forces with suspicion, especially when it comes to links with militants fighting in Afghanistan. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly said she suspected that some members of Pakistan's government knew where bin Laden was hiding.

However, within Pakistan criticism has been focused on the U.S. breaching the country's sovereignty. The Obama administration has said it did not inform the Pakistanis in advance of the operation against bin Laden, for fear they would tip off the targets.

A strongly worded Pakistani government statement warned the U.S. not to launch similar operations in the future. It rejected suggestions that officials knew where bin Laden was.

Still, there were other revelations that pointed to prior knowledge that the compound was linked to al-Qaida.

Pakistani intelligence agencies hunting for a top al-Qaida operative raided the house in 2003, according to a senior officer, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with the spy agency's policy.

The house was just being built at the time of the raid by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and Abu Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaida's No. 3, was not there, said the officer.

U.S. officials have said al-Libi once lived in the house and that information from him played a role in tracking the al-Qaida chief down. Al-Libi was arrested by Pakistani police after a shootout in 2005 and he was later handed over to U.S. authorities.

The Pakistani officer said he didn't know why bin Laden would choose a house that already had been compromised.

He also insisted the ISI would have captured bin Laden if it had known he was there, and pushed back at international criticism of the agency. "Look at our track record given the issues we have faced, the lack of funds. We have killed or captured hundreds" of extremists), said the officer. "All of a sudden one failure makes us incompetent and 10 years of effort is overlooked."

Al-Qaida has been responsible for score of bloody attacks inside Pakistan, so on the face of it would seem strange for Islamabad to be sheltering bin Laden. Critics of Pakistan say that by keeping him on the run, Islamabad was ensuring that U.S. aid and weapons to the country kept flowing.

The Pakistani government said that since 2009 the ISI has shared information about the compound with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, and that intelligence indicating foreigners were in the Abbottabad area continued until mid-April.

In an essay published Tuesday by The Washington Post, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari denied suggestions his country's security forces may have sheltered bin Laden, and said their cooperation with the United States helped pinpoint him.

The raid followed months of deteriorating relations between the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence service. Those strains came to a head in late January after a CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in what Washington said was self-defense.

In a statement, the Pakistani government said "this event of unauthorized unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule. The government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the U.S.," said the statement, calling such actions a "threat to international peace and security."

The statement may be partly motivated by domestic concerns. The government and army has come under criticism following the raid by those who have accused the government of allowing Washington to violate the country's sovereignty. Islamabad has also been angered at the suspicions it had been sheltering bin Laden.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_bin_laden

Jolie Rouge

05-03-2011, 02:44 PM

Bin Laden targeted by TV's late-night humorists
Frazier Moore, Ap Television Writer – Tue May 3, 11:13 am ET

NEW YORK – Osama bin Laden's death not only dominated the news Monday, but also fueled a wealth of comic relief, punch lines and unapologetic crowing from TV's late-night hosts. "You seem like you're in a good mood," said CBS' David Letterman, greeting his "Late Show" audience with a grin. "You folks enjoy the Osama bin Laden season finale?"

Over on NBC, "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno was all smiles, too, as he declared, "It looks like President Obama has a new campaign slogan: 'Yes I Did.'"

"Great news," said Conan O'Brien on his TBS talk show. "The world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, is dead. Which means now the official No. 1 threat to America is the KFC Double Down."

"It was the first Twitter death rumor ever that turned out to be true," cracked Jimmy Kimmel on ABC.

"Bin Laden is dead!" said "Late Night" host Jimmy Fallon on NBC — "just like the Republicans' chances in 2012."

And on CBS' "Late Late Show," host Craig Ferguson gave extra oomph to his trademark pronouncement, "It's a great day for America, everybody!"

"I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl who just shot bin Laden in the eye," glowed Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report," adding, "I hope I am never again this happy over someone's death."

Colbert's fellow Comedy Central host, Jon Stewart, was no less effusive on "The Daily Show."

"I suppose," he allowed, "I should be expressing some ambivalence about the targeted killing of another human being. And yet — uhhhh, no!"

Instead, Stewart said, he wanted details. Like, what was the look on bin Laden's face when he realized "the helicopters overhead were not giving traffic and weather updates?"

Letterman's Top Ten, "fresh from the State Department," purported to list bin Laden's final words, which might have been "I'm not sure I want to live in a world where 'Fast Five' is the No. 1 movie," or maybe, "I need a house full of Navy SEALs like I need a hole in the head."

The jokes — and there were many — were focused on a handful of basic themes. Like the courageous Navy SEALs who took bin Laden out.

According to O'Brien, "When he heard about it, former President Bush was furious and said, 'Wait a minute — I could have used seals?!'"

"How about those Navy SEALs?" marveled Letterman. "They jump out of a helicopter and they break into the compound, and they fire a warning shot into his head."

"Well, the good news is," he added, invoking another prevalent theme, "bin Laden lived to see the royal wedding."

"Between the death of bin Laden and the marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William," Kimmel said, "it's an exciting time to be in the commemorative plate business."

But what will happen to bin Laden in the next life?

Fallon disclosed that the 72 virgins supposedly awaiting the al-Qaida leader in paradise had turned out to be "just some dudes watching 'Game of Thrones' on HBO."

Letterman had another theory: Owing to a screwup in the paperwork, they were 72 vegans.

The comics took glee in lampooning Donald Trump, who, as an undeclared GOP candidate for the presidency, has noisily questioned both Obama's citizenship and college scholarship.

On NBC, first word of bin Laden's death pre-empted the final few minutes of Sunday's East Coast airing of the Trump-hosted reality show, "Celebrity Apprentice."

"This," said O'Brien, "begs the question: How do we kill bin Laden again NEXT Sunday?"

Kimmel observed that, "On the same night Obama was ordering the Navy to kill bin laden, his potential opponent in 2012, Donald Trump, was busy firing Playmate of the Month Hope Dworaczyk."

And on "Late Night," Fallon impersonated Trump in a sketch, stating that Obama "is so scared of me and so desperate for attention that he felt the need to hunt down and kill bin Laden right in the middle of my show."

Online, much of the comedy reaction revolved around positioning Obama as an action hero. Making the rounds was a picture of a determined Obama and the label: "Everyone chill ... out, I GOT THIS!"

Another photo showed a smiling Obama in sunglasses and suit with the caption: "Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate. I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden."

One of the most popular topics on Twitter through much of Monday was Jack Bauer, the fictional government agent of "24." The Jack Bauer messages typically reflected a pride in the Navy SEALs who carried out the mission.

But Steve Martin took his own, pointedly ironic approach to the startling events: "Slow news day," he tweeted.

pepperpot

05-03-2011, 06:51 PM

There's a picture floating on FB that really has been upsetting me. It's the Statue of Liberty holding OBL's bloody head.....I find it so distasteful that he even be in the same picture of the Statue of Liberty. I just wish people would let him slip away in silence to be the nothing that he was. He doesn't deserve a moment more of my thoughts nor anyone else's.

Bliss

05-03-2011, 07:04 PM

:yeah:

but if you express any concern, reservations, or doubt - you get branded a "racist" and a "hater" :rolleyes:

Yes, I know.

On a different note. I hope the Government & any others involved keeps their mouths shut about the identities of the Navy Seals who took Osama out. It is no one's business. =)

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2011, 06:15 AM

Five Mistakes the Obama Administration Has Made in the Aftermath of Bin Laden Killing
By Mark Halperin – 2 hrs 18 mins ago

Aftermath can be heck.

The White House's brilliant conceptualization and execution of the plan to bring Osama bin Laden to justice has, in the last 48 hours, been complicated by mistakes.

No one can question the heroism of the US military, the doggedness of the intelligence community, or the cajones of the President in making the call. But the administration has since made real errors, some with political costs, some with substantive costs, and some with both.

The major errors so far:

1. Not getting its story straight: Was bin Laden armed or not? What woman served as a human shield? Who actually was killed beyond the main target? The administration deserves mountains of credit for its painstaking, conspicuous effort to brief the world on the mission, knowing a lot of information would have to be held back to protect sources, operatives, methods, and sensitive data. Which makes the carelessness of the errors somewhat surprising. The costs: the media coverage sours, the President's opponents (especially on talk radio) go crazy, other details of the mission unfairly get called into question, and the wild theories of global enemies and conspiracy seekers get a foothold.

2. Not giving George W. Bush enough credit for helping bring bin Laden to justice: Even if the White House believes the previous occupant had nothing to do with OBL's ultimate demise, it would have been better for national unity and Obama's own political fortunes if he had gone out of his way to thank 43. His invitation to Bush to join the event Thursday at Ground Zero (an offer declined) was the right idea, but belated.

3. Letting the photo debate get out of control: The decision about whether to release images of a dead bin Laden is not an easy one. But the administration's conflicting statements and public agonizing has created an extended distraction. The White House has stumbled by violating one of Washington's iron rules: when something becomes famous inside the Beltway for not being released, the pressure from the media to release it becomes unrelenting.

4. Letting the debate about the war in Afghanistan get out of control: There are signs that some of the president's advisers are looking to scale back the commitment in Afghanistan sooner rather than later. But by failing to go on the offensive in defining and defending whatever policy the President wants to pursue, the White House has allowed those pressing for an end of the war to use bin Laden's death as rhetorical leverage.

5. Letting the debate about Pakistan get out of control: The congressional and media demand for a radical change in America's relationship with Pakistan is burning like wildfire. The administration knows that a shift in policy is complicated and compromising, and not necessarily in the United States' interest. Stoking the problem: executive branch officials, publicly and privately, are expressing incredulity that the Pakistanis were unaware bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in their country. There should be and will be a debate about all this, but the administration's actions and inactions is making it less likely it will be on their terms.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/httpthepagetimecom20110503halperinstakemistakeswer emadexidrssfullnationyahoo;_ylt=Ah_gVfMUoyHQFhO30M mOJWOl24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTR2bGxpczU5BGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMj AxMTA1MDQvaHR0cHRoZXBhZ2V0aW1lY29tMjAxMTA1MDNoYWxw ZXJpbnN0YWtlbWlzdGFrZXN3ZXJlbWFkZXhpZHJzc2Z1bGxuYX Rpb255YWhvbwRjY29kZQNvZmZnMTRrBGNwb3MDNARwb3MDNARz ZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2ZpdmVtaXN0YWtlcw--

So three out of the five "mistakes" are allowing public discussion of the issues?

---

Ok, full disclosure on my part:

First, I am a card-carrying member of the U.S. Libertarian Party.
Second, I voted for Bush during his second campaign for President (but not his first).
Thirdly, I despise roughly 95% of President Obama's policies, and 70% of President Bush's policies.

That said, I will be DAMNED if I can sit by and not point out that President Obama, in fact, DID give credit to President Bush substantial credit in the search for Bin Laden. Did the writer of this article not watch President Obama's speech on Sunday night???

---

Count the number of time Obama said "I" in his speech on Sunday

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2011, 06:24 AM

PC Police stike again ....

Senate official: Wrong to link bin Laden, Geronimo
Matthew Daly, Associated Press – Tue May 3, 11:17 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The top staffer for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is objecting to the U.S. military's use of the code name "Geronimo" for Osama bin Laden during the raid that killed the al-Qaida leader. Geronimo was an Apache leader in the 19th century who spent many years fighting the Mexican and U.S. armies until his surrender in 1886.

Loretta Tuell, staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said Tuesday it was inappropriate to link Geronimo, whom she called "one of the greatest Native American heroes," with one of the most hated enemies of the United States. "These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating," Tuell said.

Tuell is a member of the Nez Perce tribe and grew on the tribe's reservation in Idaho. The Senate Indian Affairs panel had previously scheduled a hearing for Thursday on racial stereotypes of native people. Tuell said the use of Geronimo in the bin Laden raid will be discussed.

Steven Newcomb, a columnist for the weekly newspaper Indian Country Today, criticized what he called a disrespectful use of a name revered by many Native Americans. "Apparently, having an African-American president in the White House is not enough to overturn the more than 200-year American tradition of treating and thinking of Indians as enemies of the United States," Newcomb wrote.

After bin Laden was killed, the military sent a message back to the White House: "Geronimo EKIA" — enemy killed in action.

"It's another attempt to label Native Americans as terrorists," said Paula Antoine of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.

A White House spokesman referred questions about the code name to the Pentagon. A Defense Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Jefferson Keel, president of National Congress of American Indians, the largest organization representing American Indians and Alaska Natives, said, "Osama bin Laden was a shared enemy."

Keel said that since 2001, 77 American Indians and Alaskan Natives have died defending the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than 400 have been wounded.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110504/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden_geronimo

Fair enough. Why don't we just call him dickhead instead?

---

It would have been cool to call it OPERATION M.....F...ER!!! Instead of the SEALs saying "we got Geronimo" they would have said "we got the m.....f...er!!"

---

Code names are not meant to be understood by non-natives of, in this case, US citizens. I have Indian blood in me and I understand that.

---

I have American Indian blood on both sides of my family. When I seen the name they used I thought "somebody is going to complain about that, saying it`s disrespectful" and sure enough here it is. My thoughts when I seen the name it didn`t make me think of the famous Indian Chief Geronimo at first. It made think instead of the old saying when someone jumps for a distance they`d yell "GERONIMO!" as if to say all or nothing, taking a chance that might end in injury or death.

So when I thought of the Navy Seals doing the raid the code name made perfect sense because they were doing the same thing when they jumped off the choppers and rushed the compound, it was all or nothing, taking a chance on their lives and the lives of there fellow seals so I`m sure inside several of them felt like yelling "GERONIMO!" I don`t think it was used to say Bin Laden was being compared to Geronimo, I felt it was used because of the big risk they all knew they were taking. Now, if it was confirmed it was used to compare the two then yeah I`d be offended. Geronimo fought to keep what he had. Bin Laden killed just to kill.

However, to yell Geronimo for the reasons I stated above most that yell it don`t use it as a meaning to Geronimo the great chief, but as a word that just seems to fit the situation. But I can also see how they fit in the other way as well because Geronimo was a risk taker as well. I yelled it when I was a kid and when I did I didn`t even know who he was at the time.

--

Now the PC people are starting. What's next? Does the ACLU come out with the following:

"An un-armed man, husband and father, was brutally gunned down by agents of the United States Government in front of his wife without due process? The man's body was then taken by force and then 'disposed of' so that his loved ones would have no monument to his death."

It was a CODE WORD. He was a piece of S*** ! He got better than he deserved and the world right now IS A BETTER PLACE FOR THE ACTIONS OF SEAL TEAM SIX !

---

Sticks and Stones may break my bones but Political Correctness is killing me!

pepperpot

05-04-2011, 06:44 AM

"An un-armed man, husband and father, was brutally gunned down by agents of the United States Government in front of his wife without due process? The man's body was then taken by force and then 'disposed of' so that his loved ones would have no monument to his death."

I've already seen a few posts like this on FB from the "bleeding hearts".....:headshake

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2011, 07:09 AM

I found it to be unique that they played a video of the prez and secretary of state Clinton and others as they watched as everything played out. This is what makes me skeptical.

http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/0/c6/0c6b7779b79147388d6f395a199fb2dd.jpeg

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/rids/20110504/i/r2416590871.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=YNDeyK90zemEaqDMIC1dbg--

Ben Feller, Ap White House Correspondent – Tue May 3, 7:08 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Taut and riveting, the photo takes the world inside history: Around a lacquered table in the Situation Room, the president and his team are watching a heart-pounding hunt for a killer, Osama bin Laden.

President Barack Obama leans forward, deadly serious. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton holds her right hand over her mouth, a worried look on her face. Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates stare stone-faced. So do the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security adviser and the White House chief of staff.

So what exactly were they watching on that video screen?

What's clear is that Obama viewed and listened to updates by the minute on the mission to get bin Laden in his secure compound in Pakistan.

It appears the president would have been able to see one of two U.S. helicopters fall and land hard inside the compound just as the SEALs started sliding down the rope, indicating that the risky mission was not going as planned. Obama was getting the same feed as the one being piped into an operations center at CIA headquarters, an aerial view of the compound. A U.S. official described the tense moments at Langley of the hard helicopter landing, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation. CIA Director Leon Panetta said the president and his team were not getting a direct video feed of the floor-by-floor raid as U.S. commandos searched for, found and killed bin Laden in his compound.

Obama never saw the moment when bin Laden was shot dead.

In fact, the tension in the Situation Room was caused largely by the agonizing wait that the president and his team had to endure before learning just what was happening. "Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you, there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know exactly what was going on," Panetta told PBS. "And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information."

The White House refuses to say exactly what was happening in the moment captured by Pete Souza, the chief official White House photographer for Obama. Officials said that revealing details could disclose sensitive information about how such operations are run. "The president and his top national security aides in the Situation Room had available to them minute-by-minute updates on the operation, and that photograph was taken during the operation," Obama spokesman Jay Carney said. "I can't get more specific than that."

The split screens in the Situation Room allowed for Obama to get accounts from different locations. Military leaders were in the Pentagon, in the National Military Command Center, monitoring the operation. From there, Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, communicated with those in the Situation Room via videoconference as the operation progressed, providing updates and seeking decisions from the president when needed.

Meanwhile, Panetta was at the CIA, and his image was piped up on the screen in the Situation Room as he, too, communicated with those there. He and CIA employees were gathered in his conference room near his office on the seventh floor of the CIA, which was turned into a makeshift operations post.

Panetta was overseeing the mission and was in touch with the one who commanded the mission on site, Adm. William McRaven, head of the Joint Special Forces Command. A U.S. official in the room said the CIA team had the same audio and video feed that was being piped into the White House.

One video feed came from aerial surveillance of the compound from above. There was also a video feed from some of the commandos' helmets, though it was not clear that the officials at the CIA and the White House could see the helmet cameras as well. Panetta said: "We did not have direct flow of information as to the conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound." After the tense 20 or 25 minutes, McRaven reported back that commandos had bin Laden.

Regardless of the specific details, the photo from the Situation Room drew intense reactions. "It demonstrates the intensity and emotion for the nation's key leaders, who carry the burden of these decisions," said Juan Zarate, a top White House counterterrorism official under President George W. Bush and now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This was a very risky operation. And the risk is evident in the eyes of the president and the gestures of the secretary of state."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden_white_house_photo

with the tense situation that was going on in the situation room .... they had a photographer snapping pictures ???

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2011, 07:10 AM

commentd---

It is not reassuring to know that the media was provided the identity of the Seal Team that took him out. Richard Marchenko would kick somebody's @#$%. Now, the Pentagon might as well release the name(s) of the trigger man (men). Some things we just don't need to know!!!

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The whole operation was being watched and commanded at the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia. In their situation room they had a monitor for every member of that team so they could make snap decisions if needed. In that room at the White House they do not provide the over-all situation of what is happening on the ground.

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The WH is full of liars. Okay first figure out who Brennan is then tell me all these people after all this time hadn't discusses what would be done with photos?? What?

They don't know the degree of Pakistani involvement? yeah right!!!

Many stories are now questioning WHAT REALLY HAPPENED BECAUSE OF MAJOR INCONSISTENCIES IN WH STORIES ABOUT EVENTS YOU JUST CAN'T GET WRONG!!

If this was a cop on a murder case it would be a conviction!!

No one with a brain believes that in all this time...
A) Know what they would do with photos. Are you kidding, the president and high level intelligence wouldn't ALREADY KNOW what to do with photos???
B) They don't know Pakistan's involvement.
Here are a few things to chew on in an article on this site questioning the WH facts.
Some of the White House contradictions and corrections that have emerged so far:
_White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told reporters Monday that bin Laden's son Khalid was killed in the raid. When the White House released a transcript of Brennan's briefing, it substituted the name of a different son, Hamza. The White House said that was a transcription error.
_Brennan said bin Laden's wife died while shielding the terrorist leader from U.S. gunfire. Carney said Tuesday that the wife hadn't died and was merely shot in the leg, although another woman did die. But it wasn't clear that either of them was trying to shield bin Laden.
_Brennan and other officials suggested that bin Laden was holding a gun and even firing at U.S. forces. Carney said Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed.
_Officials have offered varying accounts of how President Barack Obama and his team in the White House Situation Room were able to monitor the raid. Without providing details on the technology involved, Brennan said that "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."
CIA Director Leon Panetta told PBS on Tuesday that "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."
_The night of the raid, administration officials held a telephone briefing for reporters. "During the raid, we lost one helicopter due to mechanical failure," one of the administration officials said. Later in the same call, another official contradicted that: "We didn't say it was mechanical."

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The CIA gatherd Intel. Navy Seals took him Out. DNA was extracted and only 3 pictures were taken? Alot of US citizens want to see the pictures. Everyone knows pictures can be manipulated digitally. The US Government has total control of this evidence. It will be revealed eventually but how soon? People who died on 9 - 11 came from all religions and ethnic backgrounds. I feel the families who lost loved ones that day should get to see that evidence before the rest of the public does. I think it is only proper to do so. Don't you?

===

am glad that one less evil person is gone from the face of the earth. However, ten more will rise up in his stead. Unfortunately, for me, I have lost faith in the government of my country which has become two separate things. I do not, cannot trust the corporate press and the corporate government in my country.

As a decorated veteran who proudly served, I only thank those responsible for bringing OBL to an end. The Wall Street Marionette, Obama gave the nod -- Nothing more. Yet too many in America do not understand or is blinded by the @#$% that Obama is some sort of demigod. As far as a president goes, he's not all that great but serving a role as a corporate manager. I am not a Republican or Democrat, in fact, I detest both parties cut from the same politically soiled stained sheet. I am living in a land that has forsaken the United States Constitution for the very nemesis that threatens the nation of the people called the "Patriot Act" that is anything but patriotic. It saddens my heart that this "Country" is nothing but a murky shadow of what it once was, a country back then I swore to protect in an oath that is still binding to us fellow United States Veterans. Yet, I feel I am a man without a nation and seeing a government truly corrupt and has lost it's way...

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Thanks "W". This could not have been possible without the information obtained by waterboarding the highrollers at Guantanamo. Obama had no choice but to take UBL. If word got out he had the opportunity and did not take it, well then his chances for a second run would be gone forever.

But I do give Obama some credit because he gave the ok to go with the mission.

Now be a hero in getting this economy in order!

A big thank you to my beloved Navy!

pepperpot

05-04-2011, 07:19 AM

http://l.yimg.com/a/p/us/news/editorial/0/c6/0c6b7779b79147388d6f395a199fb2dd.jpeg

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/rids/20110504/i/r2416590871.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=YNDeyK90zemEaqDMIC1dbg--

With all those lap tops open....the screens are empty?

Although it would be a good idea to "blacken out" whatever was on the screens at the time, it just doesn't look like it was "blackened"....it just looks like none of those lap tops were turned on.....odd.

The photos on the laptops appear to be of the "luxurious compound". :paranoid

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2011, 12:57 PM

With all those lap tops open....the screens are empty?

Although it would be a good idea to "blacken out" whatever was on the screens at the time, it just doesn't look like it was "blackened"....it just looks like none of those lap tops were turned on.....odd.

The photos on the laptops appear to be of the "luxurious compound". :paranoid

Nice catch ... I didn't notice that before. By the relection on the dark screens, it does appear they are OFF rather then "photoshopped" off... turned off for the pictures ?? Not as "spontaneous" as they might want us to think.

]Wed May 4, 12:03 pm ET
Al Qaeda member surrenders, Saudi Arabia says
By Laura Rozen

In the wake of Osama bin Laden's demise, is al Qaeda falling apart?

The Saudi Interior Ministry said today that a senior al Qaeda member on Riyadh's most-wanted list named Khaled al-Qahtani called from abroad and turned himself in.

"Interior Ministry's spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki said in a statement Wednesday that Khaled Hathal Abdullah al-Atifi al-Qahtani contacted the security authorities from an undisclosed country and expressed his wish to come home," the Associated Press reports.

"Al-Qahtani was reunited with his family and his surrender will be taken into consideration while looking into his case, Al-Turki said."

The Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman did not indicate when Khaled al-Qahtani gave himself up, but many members of the group's Yemeni wing, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), have recently fled from Yemen, the AP writes.

It wasn't immediately possible to ascertain whether Khaled Al-Qahtani is the brother or relative of Mohammed al-Qahtani (pictured at right), a Saudi-born al Qaeda militant detained at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mohammed al-Qahtani, now 32, had been picked up in the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan from which bin Laden is believed to have escaped. While at Guantanamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani, 32, was reportedly subjected to severe U.S. torture, the senior official in charge of the U.S. office of military commissions told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward.

Mohammed al-Qahtani flew to Orlando, Fla., from Dubai in August 2001, a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but was sent back to Dubai by U.S. immigration authorities suspicious he planned to remain in the country illegally. U.S. interrogators later said they found airport video surveillance showing the car of lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta waiting to pick al-Qahtani up at the Orlando airport.

The United States dropped charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani in May 2008, for reasons it did not disclose, but presumably related to the inadmissability of evidence obtained under torture. Al-Qahtani is still detained at Gitmo, but his habeas corpus case was reinstated after a Supreme Court ruling in 2008.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theenvoy/20110504/ts_yblog_theenvoy/al-qaeda-member-surrenders-saudi-arabia-says

Airbuswife

05-04-2011, 06:32 PM

The Myth of Bin Laden
The false story of his life meets the false story of his death.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, May 4, 2011, at 7:58 AM ET

First we hunt you down. Then we blow a hole in your face. Then we dump your body in the sea, where no one can find your grave. Then we destroy the last thing left of you: your reputation.

This isn't cruelty. It's strategy. Al-Qaida's greatest strength—diffusion—is also its greatest weakness. It's a scattered network held together by the legend of Osama Bin Laden. We took his life. Now we're out to liquidate his legend.

Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism coordinator, understands this. Killing Bin Laden was only the first step. The next step is to use his death to demoralize and divide his followers. "We have a lot better opportunity now that … Bin Laden is out of there to destroy that organization, create fractures within it," Brennan said at a White House briefing Monday. "The number two, Zawahiri, is not charismatic. … You're going to see them start eating themselves from within."

To accelerate this fratricide, Brennan issued a damning account of Bin Laden's behavior during the raid on his compound. "He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in," said Brennan. During this shootout, "there was a female who was in fact in the line of fire that reportedly was used … to shield bin Laden." Brennan concluded:

Here is Bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.

At a Pentagon briefing, a senior defense official told the same story: Bin Laden was "living in a mansion that was eight times the size of any other structure in the neighborhood, living rather comfortably. He and some other male combatants on the target appeared to use—certainly did use women as shields." A senior intelligence official repeated that Bin Laden "died during a firefight" and that "many of his terrorist associates in other parts of Pakistan and throughout the region are living in much more dire conditions. So you have to be wondering what they're thinking at this moment when they see that their leader was living, relatively speaking, high on the hog."

Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister David Cameron echoed this talking point:

The myth of Bin Laden was one of a freedom fighter living in austerity, risking his life for the cause as he moved around in the hills and mountainous caverns of the tribal areas. The reality of Bin Laden was very different: a man who encouraged others to make the ultimate sacrifice while he himself hid in the comfort of a large expensive villa in Pakistan, experiencing none of the hardship he expected his supporters to endure.

But the image of Bin Laden shooting at U.S. commandos from behind an innocent woman also turns out to be a myth. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney issued a revised "narrative" of the raid, courtesy of the Defense Department. It says the commandos started "on the first floor of the Bin Laden house and worked their way to the third floor." The people who fired at the commandos died on the first floor. Bin Laden was upstairs and "was not armed."

A reporter asked Carney "which of those women was being used a human shield, as Mr. Brennan suggested yesterday." Carney answered: "The woman I believe you're talking about might have been the one on the first floor who was caught in the crossfire. Whether or not she was being used as a shield or trying to use herself as a shield or simply caught in crossfire is unclear." What's clear is that Bin Laden, who was upstairs, couldn't have used her as a shield.

Carney blamed the misleading early reports on the "fog of war." But a fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.

This is the narrative that's really at stake. A narrative isn't just a chronology. It's a tale woven with themes. For 20 years, Bin Laden peddled a tale of oppression and jihad. In elaborate video and audio messages, he depicted al-Qaida's trail of bombings as a Muslim struggle against Western persecution. He wasn't just a terrorist. He was a storyteller.

That's the story Brennan sought to undermine when he cited Bin Laden's use of a human shield to show "how false his narrative has been over the years." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also targeted Bin Laden's story. In a statement trumpeting his death, she argued that "people across the Middle East and North Africa are rejecting the extremist narratives and charting a path of peaceful progress." Carney, too, warned against false interpretations. "It would be a shame," he warned, if Bin Laden's killing "became a piece in a partisan narrative."

Carney is right. So are Brennan, Clinton, and Cameron. Bin Laden was a delusional mass murderer, and his narrative was false. But you can't debunk one false narrative with another. The firefight at Bin Laden's compound, it now appears, pitted two or three men against a dozen or more commandos. Bin Laden didn't engage in the firefight and used no human shield. He wasn't even armed. We shot him dead anyway. That's the truth. Deal with it.

Jolie Rouge

05-05-2011, 05:23 AM

On a different note. I hope the Government & any others involved keeps their mouths shut about the identities of the Navy Seals who took Osama out. It is no one's business. =)

May 5, 2011

"Sort of like Murder, Inc.": Behind the Forces Who Took Down bin Laden
by: Jeremy Scahill The Nation

The team of US Special Operations Forces who killed Osama bin Laden in a pre-dawn raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, were led by elite Navy SEALS from the Joint Special Operations Command. Operators from SEAL Team Six, also known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or just DevGru, are widely considered to be the most elite warriors in the US national security apparatus.

Col. W. Patrick Lang, a retired Special Forces officer with extensive operational experience throughout the Muslim world, described JSOC's forces as "sort of like Murder, Incorporated." He told The Nation: "Their business is killing Al Qaeda personnel. That's their business. They're not in the business of converting anybody to our goals or anything like that." Shortly after the operation was made public, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey called JSOC's operators the "most dangerous people on the face of the earth."

"They're the ace in the hole. If you were a card player, that's your ace that you've got tucked away," said Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was the Chair of the Joint Chiefs on 9/11, in an interview with The Nation. Shelton, who also headed the Special Operations Command during his career, described JSOC as "a surgical type of unit," adding "if you need someone that can sky dive from thirty miles away, and go down the chimney of the castle, and blow it up from the inside—those are the guys you want to call on." Shelton added, "They are the quiet professionals. They do it, and do it well, but they don't brag about it. Someone has to toot their horn for them, because they won't, normally."

JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, is an all-star team made up of the Army's Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, Army Rangers and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the "Night Stalkers." JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. More recently, JSOC added a Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Virginia, to its list of key facilities. For much of the Bush administration, JSOC was headed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Its job was to hunt down and kill individuals designated as "High Value Targets." McChrystal's successor at JSOC, Vice Admiral William McRaven, is himself a former SEAL. The current commander of SOCOM, Admiral Eric Olson, is a former SEAL Team Six commander. McRaven was recently been tapped to replace Olson as SOCOM commander. Several Special Operations sources have described for The Nation a very close relationship between President Obama and JSOC. Some allege Obama has used them to "hit harder" than President Bush.

Marc Ambinder described the bin Laden raid in his excellent report on National Journal: "From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers. After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap—boom, boom—to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by US forces."

It remains unclear what, if any, role Pakistan's military or intelligence forces played in the operation to kill bin Laden. US officials have said only that Pakistani intel aided the eventual operation. "We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan," said an unnamed senior administration official. "That was for one reason and one reason alone: We believed it was essential to the security of the operation and our personnel." The fact that bin Laden's compound was a stone's throw from a Pakistani military installation in an urban area raises disturbing questions about how Pakistan's military or intelligence services would not be aware of his location. As of this writing, the White House has not commented on this fact.

The United States has a lengthy history of US Special Operations Forces conducting targeted kill or capture operations inside Pakistan. "I would like to point out one sensitivity of Pakistan and its people and that it's a violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan," former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told NDTV after bin Laden's killing was announced. "American troops coming across the border and taking action in one of our towns, that is Abbotabad, is not acceptable to the people of Pakistan." Musharraf's comments are ironic given that he personally made a deal with General McChrystal to allow US Special Ops Forces to cross into Pakistan from Afghanistan to target bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders. The so-called "hot pursuit" agreement was predicated on Pakistan's ability to deny it had given the US forces permission to enter Pakistan.

Both President Bush and President Obama have reserved the right for US forces to operate lethally and unilaterally in any country across the globe in pursuit of alleged high value terrorists. The Obama administration's expansion of US Special Operations activities globally has been authorized under a classified order dating back to the Bush administration. Originally signed in early 2004 by then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is known as the "AQN ExOrd," or Al Qaeda Network Execute Order. The AQN ExOrd was intended to cut through bureaucratic and legal processes, allowing US special forces to move into denied areas or countries beyond the official battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. David Petraeus, who is poised to become director of the CIA, expanded and updated that order in late 2009. "JSOC has been more empowered more under this administration than any other in recent history," a Special Ops source told The Nation. "No question."

SEAL Team Six also carried out the operation that killed the Somali pirates that hijacked the Maersk Alabama in April 2009. They flew from a discreet US base in Manda Bay, Kenya. "If it comes down to putting sharpshooters up on the deck of an aircraft, and making sure that first shot doesn't miss, who do you want to do it?," asks General Shelton. Referring to Team Six, he adds: "They're deadly accurate."

Jolie Rouge

05-05-2011, 05:24 AM

The vast majority of JSOC's missions are highly classified and compartmentalized. In some cases, JSOC operators have conducted operations without informing the combatant commanders of their presence. "Only a very small group of people inside our own government knew of this operation in advance," a senior Obama administration official said shortly after bin Laden's killing was announced. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, has alleged that then–Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often circumvented the traditional military command structure in how they used JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," Colonel Wilkerson told me in late 2009 for a story about JSOC in Pakistan. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," said Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions.” He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch—read: Cheney and Rumsfeld— wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."

While JSOC—and the Navy SEALs in particular—will become legendary in a much broader circle as a result of the bin Laden killing, the secretive unit has had its share of controversy. JSOC forces were responsible for the botched rescue that ended up killing British aid worker Linda Norgrove in Afghanistan on October 8, 2010. JSOC also carried out a raid in Gardez, Afghanistan, in February 2010 during which two pregnant women and a US-trained Afghan police commander were killed. In that case, senior Afghan security officials and eyewitnesses claimed that US forces dug the bullets out of the dead women's bodies. Initially, JSOC's forces tried to cover up the incident by blaming the killings on a Taliban "honor killing." Eventually, Admiral McRaven took responsibility for the botched raid and apologized to the family.

Several Special Ops sources say that President Obama has taken concrete steps to once again integrate JSOC more fully into the broader US military strategy globally. The bin Laden operation, which was done in concert with the CIA, seems to be evidence of that. The primacy of JSOC within the Obama administration's foreign policy—from Yemen and Somalia to Afghanistan and Pakistan—indicates that he has doubled down on the Bush-era policy of targeted assassination as a staple of US foreign policy.

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Is it just me - or was this a case of "Too Much Information" being given out??

Considering that some peeps are all about how this is "All Obama" - if the public opinion turns... do you think that Obama ( or his handlers )will suddenly deciede that Obama didn't know as much as he thought he did ?? This article seems to be preparing the ground for that already ... prepping for blame on the previous administrations handling

Jolie Rouge

05-05-2011, 12:51 PM

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/mrz050511dAPR20110505014518.jpg

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/kn050511dAPR20110504044516.jpg

Jolie Rouge

05-05-2011, 03:52 PM

Legal questions remain over bin Laden killing
Andrew Longstreth – Thu May 5, 12:32 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) – International law experts in the United States said important legal questions remained about the killing of Osama bin Laden even as the Obama administration defended the action.

While an act of Congress a week after the September 11 attacks gave the U.S. president broad powers to act against terrorism, the legality of the commando killing of the al Qaeda leader is less clear under international law, some experts said.

President Barack Obama got a boost in U.S. opinion polls, but the killing raised concerns elsewhere that the United States may have gone too far in acting as policeman, judge and executioner of the world's most wanted man.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations made capturing or killing bin Laden a top priority. Each was willing to act alone on intelligence toward that goal even if bin Laden was in Pakistan across the border from Afghanistan. "It's a complicated question as a legal matter," said Steven Ratner, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. "A lot of it depends on whether you believe Osama bin Laden is a combatant in a war or a suspect in a mass murder."

Under the theory that the government is at war against al Qaeda -- which the Obama administration has adopted -- one could argue that the killing of bin Laden was legal. "Whether he has a gun or not really doesn't matter," said Ratner. "You're lawfully permitted to kill combatants."

"LAWFUL," HOLDER SAYS

Attorney General Eric Holder, the country's top law enforcement officer, told a U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday that the operation was legal. "He was the head of al Qaeda, an organization that had conducted the attacks of September the 11th," Holder said. "It's lawful to target an enemy commander in the field. We did so, for instance, with regard to Yamamoto in World War Two, when he was shot down in an airplane."

The White House said on Tuesday that bin Laden was not armed, contradicting an earlier U.S. account that he had taken part in a firefight.

At the Senate hearing, Holder said that even if bin Laden had tried to surrender, "there would be a good basis on the part of those very brave Navy SEAL team members to do what they did in order to protect themselves and the other people who were in that building."

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served in the Bush administration, said the analysis should end there. "He was a military target," Gonzales told Reuters. "We're in a conflict -- there's no question about that. I'm not sure what the debate is about."

COMPLICATED PICTURE

Gonzales added that whether bin Laden was armed or not was irrelevant. "Suppose we fired a missile," said Gonzales. "Would we be asking the question if he was armed or not?"

The legal analysis of a U.S. operation is different if bin Laden is considered a mass murder suspect, Ratner said. "If you're operating in that framework, you would only be able to kill a suspect if they represented an immediate threat to you," he added.

Complicating the picture is that bin Laden was indicted in Manhattan U.S. District Court in 1998 for conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations, said David Scheffer, director for the Center for International Human Rights at the Northwestern University School of Law. "Normally when an individual is under indictment the purpose is to capture that person in order to bring him to court to try him," Scheffer said. "The object is not to literally summarily execute him if he's under indictment."

Ratner and Scheffer said key questions remained about the operation, such as what instructions the Navy SEALs who carried out the mission were given and what efforts bin Laden had made to surrender. Scheffer said if the Navy SEALs were ordered to kill bin Laden without trying first to capture him, it may have violated American ideals if not international law. "It seems to me that with the character of our society, it might have been more consistent with American values to have at least ordered his capture with rules of engagement," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110505/ts_nm/us_binladen_usa_legal;_ylt=AnxUN72nS41a1AsOajdTcXS s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNwbmhoMmhpBGFzc2V0A25tLzIwMTEwNTA 1L3VzX2JpbmxhZGVuX3VzYV9sZWdhbARjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wd WxhcgRjcG9zAzQEcG9zAzEEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl9 oZWFkbGluZV9saXN0BHNsawNsZWdhbHF1ZXN0aW8-

I admit we are guilty! As punishment, we should be forced to leave the UN, NATO, and the World Bank along with all the funding we provide. We should also not be allowed to provide foreign aid to anyone for a probationary period of ten years.

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International law did not pursue him for ten years and did nothing to bring this mass murderer to justice. Those in the world who want to question what America did can kiss us right on our collective :mule:

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OBL and Al Qeada declared war on the US. That makes him and enemy combatant. Why the discussion?

Bliss

05-05-2011, 06:51 PM

May 5, 2011

"Sort of like Murder, Inc.": Behind the Forces Who Took Down bin Laden
by: Jeremy Scahill The Nation

I knew "Murder" would be mentioned.... Jesus Christ, How moronic can people be to leak out the identities? The Government lies constantly but they had to be truthful when the truth can jeopardize the Navy Seal's lives. All we have are a bunch of f'ing idiots running this place.

This country would be better off without a bunch of mindless morons running it.

Jolie Rouge

05-05-2011, 07:32 PM

The 9/11 Casualties Still to Come
Jeffrey Kluger – Thu May 5, 5:15 am ET

Last January - more than nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks - Osama bin Laden killed Roy Chelsen. Bin Laden never met Chelsen; that's not the way it is when you do your killing en masse. And he certainly didn't kill him quickly.

Chelsen was a fireman, working for the 28th Engine Company on Second St. in Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11. Like so many other first responders, he was called to the Towers that morning and found himself climbing the stairs as the office workers flowed down them. Like too-few first responders, he made it out alive, standing just half a block away when the second tower fell. He then joined thousands of other people working in search and rescue - and later search and recover - operations for weeks afterward. In 2005, he developed multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood, and on Jan. 9 of this year, he died. "Roy had had two marrow transplants but kept relapsing," says his sister Kathy, who was with him at the end. "When we brought him home from the hospital two days before he died, there were trucks from his engine company out front with their lights flashing. His friends had come to help him inside."

At least 1,000 other first responders have died in similar ways since the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and thousands more have gotten sick. And if there's any real surprise about all that, it's that even more haven't been claimed.

In addition to the 40,000 people who labored sifting through the rubble and later clearing it away, 60,000 more worked in the vicinity. The debris cloud that engulfed all of them on the morning of the attacks and long afterward contained an estimated 2,500 different toxins, including such known nasties as lead, mercury, asbestos and dioxin, as well as such less notorious contaminants as silica, cadmium and polycyclic hydrocarbons. All of them are carcinogenic; combined in a single aerosolized mix they are believed to lead not just to cancer but to heart, liver, lung, kidney and central nervous system diseases.

The government acted fast - in its fashion - to provide assistance to the first-responders or at least to track their health. In 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established the World Trade Center Health Program, a monitoring body that would recruit anyone in the New York City or surrounding area who had worked with toxic debris from Ground Zero, asking them to come in for periodic checkups and to report immediately if they had suspicious symptoms. Originally, only 2,579 people signed on, a number that has soared to more than 57,000 since then.

At first, there were only three categories of diseases that qualified for federal first-responder coverage: respiratory ills, gastrointestinal problems and depression or PTSD. Those are still the only ones that make the official cut simply because those were the conditions that were showing up the most. "The challenge from the beginning was to identify which conditions would be linked to working at Ground Zero" says Fred Blosser, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). "The ones that would get covered were the ones that were being diagnosed."

But such a treat-what-you-see (as opposed to anticipate-what-may-come) policy is not the only thing that's gotten in the way. So too has a lack of funding. About $475 million has been spent monitoring and treating 9/11-related ills since the attacks, or less than $50 million per year to follow at least 100,000 potential victims. Things looked worse still late last year when a $7.4 billion proposal for long-term funding came before Congress and was blocked by Republicans in the Senate who threatened a filibuster if a tax-cut deal wasn't struck first.

The official GOP position was that the bill created a "massive new entitlement program," though if our gridlocked political system can agree on one thing, it ought to be that if anyone can be said to be "entitled" to government help it's the people who rushed into the fires of Ground Zero that day while any other sane person was rushing away. Ultimately, the GOP gave in, but only after slashing the allocation to $4.2 billion.

Still, any funding helps, and the law has some smart ways to spend the money that's been made available. Most notably, it establishes a board of medical advisers who will study all of the diseases among the sample population more closely, looking for any hidden - or not so hidden - 9/11 link that may exist. Of the 57,000 people participating in the CDC program so far, nearly 16,000 have sought treatment just in the past year for problems they think or fear are connected to their time on the pile. Not all of those ills will indeed be connected, but 16,000 is a big enough share of the sample group that the scrutiny is warranted. "Making this connection has been a challenge since the beginning," says Blosser. "One of the biggest goals of this program is to help people figure out why they're not well and get them treated if we can."

Roy Chelsen's family never doubted why he died, and multiple myeloma is indeed one of the diseases that's getting close attention from the new panel - even if it's attention that comes too late for many. "When I heard that bin Laden was dead, I was glad that justice had been served," says Kathy, "but it's just too bad Roy wasn't around to see it."

It's a hard truth that many more people are likely to die over many more years as a result of the service they gave on 9/11. But it's some small consolation, perhaps, that at least they will be among the ones who outlived their killer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110505/hl_time/httphealthlandtimecom20110503the911casualtiesstill tocomexidrssfullhealthsciyahoo;_ylt=Aihc75S3pagOqO cb4AFaKY2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTVtb2p2Y3JiBGFzc2V0A3RpbW UvMjAxMTA1MDUvaHR0cGhlYWx0aGxhbmR0aW1lY29tMjAxMTA1 MDN0aGU5MTFjYXN1YWx0aWVzc3RpbGx0b2NvbWV4aWRyc3NmdW xsaGVhbHRoc2NpeWFob28EY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3Bv cwM1BHBvcwMyBHB0A2hvbWVfY29rZQRzZWMDeW5faGVhZGxpbm VfbGlzdARzbGsDdGhlOTExY2FzdWFs

Jolie Rouge

05-06-2011, 09:15 PM

Osama bin Laden's Wife Amal: A Source of al-Qaeda Info?
Tim Mcgirk – Fri May 6, 6:35 pm ET

The U.S. Navy Seal team that killed Osama bin Laden and removed a bonanza of documents and flash drives may have left behind a vital source of intelligence: bin Laden's wife Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah. The story of how she found her way back to bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan from Yemen could well have revealed crucial clues as to whether Pakistani authorities had been aware of the al-Qaeda leader's presence in their country. And if U.S. officials had been tracking her at the time, they might have found bin Laden sooner.

The White House says that Amal, 24, was shot in the calf when she charged at the Seals who burst into bin Laden's bedroom, presumably to protect her husband. Bin Laden's body was taken away for burial in the Arabian Sea. But Amal was left behind, along with her young daughter Safiyah, who Pakistani officials say witnessed her father's killing. It is not clear how many of the dozen other children in the compound were bin Laden's. Pakistani officials say bin Laden's wife and daughter are now recovering in a military hospital in Rawalpindi, and they have released Amal's passport photograph.

The photo shows a pale young woman with generous lips. In accordance with Islamic convention, her face is framed by a headscarf and she is wearing no lipstick or makeup. Later Pakistani press reports suggested that bin Laden may have had several other wives staying with him, but his original spouses are believed to be in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, possibly under house arrest.

In 2002, Amal reportedly gave an interview to a Saudi woman's magazine, Al Majalla, in which she explained how, after the 9/11 attacks, she made her way out of Afghanistan back to Yemen with assistance from Pakistani officials.

Bin Laden's widow told her Saudi interviewer at the time, "When the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan started, we moved to a mountainous area with some children and lived in one of the caves for two months until one of his sons came with a group of tribesmen and took us with them. I did not know that we were going to Pakistan until they handed us over to the Pakistani government."

Parts of that account were confirmed to TIME in a telephone interview with an Arab woman who prefers not to be identified but who knew bin Laden personally in Afghanistan and whose family formed part of al-Qaeda's inner circle. After 9/11, al-Qaeda's leadership decided to evacuate their families. "All the families had to leave Afghanistan swiftly," the Arab woman said. "They didn't want their women and children captured." However, one of bin Laden's former aides in Yemen insists that Amal never reached home.

After bin Laden's young bride - Amal was then 19 - was turned over to the Pakistani authorities, she and her daughter Safiyah were released and allowed to fly home to Ibb, a town not far from Sana'a, Yemen's capital, where her father worked as a minor civil servant. But bin Laden somehow arranged for Amal to rejoin him and his kids in Pakistan. In her magazine interview, she was asked if she would return to her fugitive husband. Her enigmatic reply: "Let us see what happens." Pakistani press quoted officials as saying that Amal claimed to have been living with bin Laden in the Abbottabad safe house for five years.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that U.S. counterterrorism experts spent years trying to decipher the name and the whereabouts of bin Laden's elusive courier, when keeping tabs on his comely young wife might have led them to him sooner.

Then there's the question of whether Pakistani authorities had been aware that bin Laden's wife had returned to their country. Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and a security expert, says it's not impossible to imagine that the Pakistanis could have let Amal leave the country and failed to detect her return. "The Pakistanis would want to get her back home," Grenier tells TIME. "There are cultural taboos that come up with women. They certainly wouldn't facilitate her interrogation by foreigners."

So far, Pakistan is refusing to let U.S. officials anywhere near Amal, now under guard in a hospital. Chances are, that won't change - cultural taboos aside, she may know too many uncomfortable truths. Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani said Thursday, May 5, that Pakistan is ordering all but the "minimum essential" American personnel to leave the country, a sign that the tense relations between Pakistan and the U.S. have worsened as a result of the Abbottabad raid.

Pakistan's security establishment has long been accused of playing a double game: taking billions in U.S. aid while secretly backing select jihadi militants in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's tribal region. Even al-Qaeda types were expected to play ball. Says the Arab woman formerly connected to al-Qaeda: "There was an understanding with the Pakistani army. We would get a tip-off that the army planned to raid one of our houses in the tribal area. We would flee but leave some 'evidence' behind so that the army could show to the Americans that we'd been there."

CIA Director Leon Panetta said this week that "either [the Pakistanis] were involved or incompetent. Neither is a good place to be." But Grenier suggests a more complex scenario: "I'm not giving an alibi for the Pakistanis, but it's virtually inconceivable that Osama and those close to him would have voluntarily allowed their presence to be known by Pakistani officials, especially given the large number of his followers captured by Pakistan. We don't trust the Pakistanis. Why should he?" On the other hand, he adds, "If his whereabouts were discovered by the Pakistani officials, I can envision them saying, 'He's keeping a low profile, and if we turn him over to the Americans, it will create a real firestorm for us.' "

Amal may be said to have leaped to her husband's defense during the Seal raid, but her acquaintance interviewed by TIME remembers her as being shy and meek when she was first brought to Kandahar in 2000 and was staying with one of bin Laden's other wives. "She was new. She was out of place. The sheik's other wives were much older than she was. So were many of his sons," the source claims.

Amal became bin Laden's fifth wife. His first, Saada, never got over the fact that the billionaire's son she married preferred a simple hut in Afghanistan to a palace back home. In 2000, bin Laden sent a trusted Yemeni aide, Abual Fida, on the hunt for a new bride. As Fida later told an interviewer, bin Laden wanted his new wife to be "religious, generous, well brought up, quiet, calm and young enough not to feel jealous of the sheik's other wives."

Despite the huge age gap between Amal and bin Laden, her family considered it an honor to marry off their daughter to him. The al-Qaeda chief reportedly paid $5,000 in jewelry and clothes for his teenage bride, who was then brought to Afghanistan to marry the grizzled warrior - already on the U.S. most-wanted list for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. "To me, it's astonishing that she came back to join him [in Pakistan]," says the source with former ties to al-Qaeda. "None of the other fighters brought back their wives." But did the Pakistani authorities know that she had returned from Yemen? With bin Laden's wife now in Pakistani custody, the White House won't find out anytime soon.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110506/wl_time/08599206993400

Jolie Rouge

05-08-2011, 07:25 PM

My first impression upon reading this headline is "of course it is worth the risk... when YOU are not the one taking the risk..." - JMHO JR

Obama: 'Getting our man' outweighed risks of raid
2 hrs 16 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama ordered the commando raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after deciding the risks were outweighed by the possibility "of us finally getting our man" following a decade of frustration, he said in a Sunday broadcast interview.

The helicopter raid "was the longest 40 minutes of my life," Obama told CBS' "60 Minutes," with the possible exception of when his daughter Sasha became sick with meningitis as an infant.

Monitoring the commando raid operation in the White House Situation Room a week ago, Obama said he and top aides "had a sense of when gunfire and explosions took place" halfway around the world, and knew when one of the helicopters carrying Navy SEALs made an unplanned hard landing. "But we could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound," he said.

Public opinion polls have shown a boost in Obama's support in the days since the raid, and his re-election campaign was eager to draw attention to the interview. Jim Messina, the president's campaign manager, emailed supporters encouraging them to watch the program. The note included a link to a listing of all of the network's local affiliates around the country — and another one requesting donations to Obama's re-election effort.

In the interview, Obama said that as nervous as he was about the raid, he didn't lose sleep over the possibility that bin Laden might be killed. Anyone who questions whether the terrorist mastermind didn't deserve his fate "needs to have their head examined," he said.

Obama said bin Laden had "some sort of support network" inside Pakistan to be able to live for years at a high-security compound in Abbottabad, a city that houses numerous military facilities. But he stopped short of accusing Pakistani officials of harboring the man who planned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000. "We don't know who or what that support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government." He said the United States wanted to investigate further to learn the facts, "and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate."

Some members of Congress have called for a cessation of U.S. aid to Pakistan, at least until it becomes clear what role, if any, the government played in bin Laden's ability to avoid detection for years. But Obama said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, "Pakistan has been a strong counter-terrorism partner with us" despite periodic disagreements.

The president was guarded in discussing any of the details of the raid, and offered no details that have not yet been made public. Discussing his own role, he said the decision to order the raid was very difficult, in part because there was no certainty that bin Laden was at the compound, and also because of the risk to the SEALs. "But ultimately, I had so much confidence in the capacity of our guys to carry out the mission that I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of finally getting our man," he said.

Two influential lawmakers rebutted calls for a cut-off in American aid to Pakistan, an inconstant ally in the long struggle against terrorists. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said: "Everybody has to understand that even in the getting of Osama bin Laden, the Pakistanis were helpful. We have people on the ground in Pakistan because they allow us to have them.

"We actually worked with them on certain parts of the intelligence that helped to lead to him, and they have been extraordinarily cooperative and at some political cost to them in helping us to take out 16 of the top 20 al-Qaida leaders with a drone program that we have in the western part of the country," he said.

The senior Republican on the committee, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, said: "Pakistan is a critical factor in the war against terror, our war, the world's war against it, simply because there are a lot of terrorists in Pakistan." He also noted that the nation possesses nuclear weapons, and said a cut-off in aid could weaken the United States' ability to make sure they do not fall into the hands of terrorists.

Kerry strongly defended the president's decision to order the raid, and the shooting death of bin Laden. The administration has offered shifting accounts of the events that unfolded in the 40 minutes the Navy SEALs were inside bin Laden's compound, most recently saying the terrorist mastermind was unarmed but appeared to be reaching for a weapon when he was shot in the head and chest. "I think those SEALs did exactly what they should have done. And we need to shut up and move on about, you know, the realities of what happened in that building," Kerry said.

National security adviser Tom Donilon said, "I've not seen evidence that would tell us that the political, the military, or the intelligence leadership had foreknowledge of — of bin Laden" being in the country. He said the U.S. has asked the Pakistani authorities for access to people whom the SEALs left behind in the compound, including three of bin Laden's wives. The U.S. also wants access to additional materials collected there, he said.

Officials have said the SEALs took voluminous computerized and paper records when they choppered out of bin Laden's compound. Donilon likened the amount of information retrieved to the size of a small college library. Donilon also sidestepped when asked if waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation of detainees had produced information that led to the successful raid against bin Laden's compound. "No single piece of intelligence led to this," he said.

The national security adviser appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN and Fox. Lugar was on CNN, and Kerry spoke on CBS.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110508/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden

Jolie Rouge

05-08-2011, 07:56 PM

Today’s column by MM summarizes the week in bin Laden narrative bungles. The Navy SEALs did what they were told to do. It’s President Obama’s civilian messengers who can’t tell a straight story and do right by our heroes who risked their lives. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54162.html

The White House Keystone Kops aren’t just squandering a public opinion bump. They’re squandering the victory of our men in uniform, along with the intel-gatherers who made the mission possible. Milblogger Greyhawk reminds us of a past bungled narrative from this administration that undermined troop morale and national security. http://www.mudvillegazette.com/034214.html
As Blackfive military blogger Froggy put it bluntly: “Get your s**t together, Mr President!” http://www.blackfive.net/main/2011/05/squandering-our-victory.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Blackfive+%28BLACKFIVE%29

***

The Fog of Fog
by Michelle Malkin May 6, 2011

The official White House account of Osama bin Laden’s demise has seen more slapdash cosmetic surgery over the past week than your average “Real Housewives” reality-show star. President Obama’s allies attribute the bungled “narrative” (their word, not mine) to the “Fog of War.” But each passing day — and each new set of hapless revisions — shows that what really ails the administration is the Fog of Fog.

Errors happen. Miscommunications happen. Confusing the name of which of bin Laden’s myriad sons died (Hamza, not Khalid), for example, is no biggie.

But the hourly revamping of key details of Sunday’s raid suggests something far beyond the usual realm of situational uncertainty that accompanies any military operation. The Navy SEALs did their job spectacularly. The civilians tasked with letting the world know about the mission, however, have performed like amateur dinner theater actors in a tragi-comic production of “Rashomon-meets-The Blind Men and the Elephant-meets-Keystone Kops.”

Incapable of straightforward answers, Team Obama’s clarity-challenged civilians have led nauseated news-watchers through more twists and turns than San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

Take your Dramamine, and let’s review.

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight.

On Sunday night, Obama dramatically told the world that “after a firefight,” our brave men in uniform “killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Embellishing the story the next morning, White House deputy national security adviser John Brennan said at his briefing that bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. … And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know. … It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight.”

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight.

The day after Brennan disclosed such vivid details, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney walked them back Michael Jackson-style. Bin Laden, he said in version 2.0, “was not armed.” Brennan had clearly implied that bin Laden “resisted” with arms. Carney amended the narrative by insisting that “resistance does not require a firearm.” How exactly bin Laden resisted, Carney would not say.

It’s been all downhill, uphill, K-turns and 180s ever since. Fasten your seatbelts:

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof and it’s more important to avoid offending peaceful Muslims who supposedly don’t embrace bin Laden as a “true” Muslim in the first place.

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time — “minute by minute,” according to Carney — and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute” because there was at least nearly a half-hour that they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill (SET ITAL) or (END ITAL) capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while Decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated Carney on Wednesday.

And they wonder why Americans of all political stripes think they’re blowing smoke.

http://michellemalkin.com/2011/05/06/the-fog-of-fog/

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/mrz050911dAPR20110507114516.jpg

Read also : http://www.mudvillegazette.com/034264.html

Jolie Rouge

05-09-2011, 09:04 PM

NYT: Obama was prepared to have SEALs fight off Pakistani troops
Share posted at 9:58 pm on May 9, 2011 by Allahpundit

I’d been looking forward to the inevitable movies about the Bin Laden raid, but now I’m thinking maybe the alternate-history version would be even more intense.

Coming soon: “Black Hawk Down 2: The Battle of Abbottabad”? Via : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/asia/10intel.html?_r=1

President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In revealing additional details about planning for the mission, senior officials also said that two teams of specialists were on standby: One to bury Bin Laden if he was killed, and a second composed of lawyers, interrogators and translators in case he was captured alive. That team was set to meet aboard a Navy ship, mostly likely the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea…

American forces were under strict orders to avoid engaging with any Pakistani forces that responded to the commotion at the Bin Laden compound, senior administration officials said.

If a confrontation appeared imminent, there were contingency plans for senior American officials, including Admiral Mullen, to call their Pakistani counterparts to avert an armed clash. But when he reviewed the plans, Mr. Obama voiced concern that this was not enough to protect the troops on the mission, administration officials said.

So that’s why we ended up with two extra helicopters packed with SEALs following the main assault team towards Bin Laden’s compound. If the Pakistanis showed up and started shooting, our guys were going to liquidate them and then fly out. Which, really, is all you need to know about the state of relations between the two countries these days. Rather than phone the Pakistani leadership as the SEALs were taking off to tell them that an operation to seize Bin Laden was in progress, O was so worried that they’d either tip off Osama or force a confrontation with U.S. troops by sending Pakistani units to the scene that he decided to chance a firefight.

Anyone need further proof of how high suspicions run about Pakistan’s double-dealing?

As for having lawyers aboard the aircraft carrier, see this post earlier. http://hotair.com/archives/2011/05/09/rosie-odonnell-we-didnt-give-bin-laden-due-process/ According to the Times, “the officials acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing, given the possibility that Bin Laden would be armed or wearing an explosive vest.”

For your viewing pleasure, via the Blaze, here’s the latest far-left objection to the operation. Why does Obama hate Native Americans?
As for having lawyers aboard the aircraft carrier, see this post earlier. According to the Times, “the officials acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing, given the possibility that Bin Laden would be armed or wearing an explosive vest.” For your viewing pleasure, via the Blaze, here’s the latest far-left objection to the operation. Why does Obama hate Native Americans? http://www.theblaze.com/stories/us-military-is-at-war-with-indigenous-people-not-just-geronimo-tomahawk-missiles-apache-helicopters-using-any-native-american-term-is-racist-indian-activist-demands-apology/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AXn-IJ2tPo&feature=player_embedded

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/05/09/nyt-obama-was-prepared-to-have-seals-fight-off-pakistani-troops/

[i]comments

More of the leftist “Obama was SOOO gutsy” narrative.

The other option was having them surrender or die. Either of which would have resulted in Obama’s electoral defeat being sealed.

Plus, the military having the right to defend itself if attacked is pretty much standard. Do we have a modern history of sending in Special Forces without the authorization to defend themselves?

===

all this pick-on-the-Pakistanis is starting to wear on me. Smart Diplomacy (TM) would suggest giving them lots of credit for locating Bin Leaded and facilitating the take-down, rather than rubbing their face in the mud day after day in pursuit of cheap political points in Washington. The idea, mister dippy-Prez, is to give the Pakistani government a graceful way to look like they supported us all along and were working with us even if it meant hiding the operation from their own ISI. It would have created a clear picture of eho is for us and who is against, by name.

----

That. Or, you know, realizing that sending in SEALs only to have them end up as “Black Hawk Down: 2″ would destroy any chance he had at reelection and complete the image of him being the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

But no, letting our Special Forces defend themselves against enemy fire was totally a gutsy call that only a strong leader could make. Or, you know, a five-year-old.

----

At this rate of spin Obama will soon award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.

---

Is there any detail that won’t be provided? I suppose there will be more and more information on Obama’s heroics until he gets the bounce he thinks he deserves? Notice how they are dripping these tidbits out little by little, hoping to keep this story front and center for as long as possible. If attention to this story fades, as it will soon, people will start talking about the economy and the bounce will disappear. And then September of 2012, Hollywood will release the OBL kill movie portraying Obama as more heroic than the Seals themselves.

---

This BS. The Paks knew about it in advance but this gives them plausable deniablity. There was never going to be a firefight, but that doesn’t take away from the gutsy call.

Speaking of gutsy calls Mark Levin played some of my video tonight on Obama’s gutsy calls:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn4Xb9aUd2o

---

But when he reviewed the plans, Mr. Obama voiced concern that this was not enough to protect the troops on the mission, administration officials said.

What a load of bovine excrement. Barry would be yelling for them to raise the white flag. President No Balls wants to claim credit for something he initially tried to stall. Failing that, he had Panetta set to take the fall if things went wrong. The more the whores of the MSM talk to him, the BIGGER his role and “decisiveness” are portrayed.

---

There was also a last contingency which would have PBHO doing a HALO jump into Abbotabad armed with a man-portable rotary machine gun, landing on main street and daring, DARING I say, anyone to face him down.

Of course PBHO was talked out of it, mostly because it would simply have been too much badassedness.

---

By next week the story will have morphed into how President Blood and Guts parachuted in with the insertion team, yelling Geronimo! as he exited the high-flying C-130, doing a HALO drop right onto the roof, where he quickly dispatched the one armed guard with a single shot between the eyes. President Avenger then ran inside, quickly located OBL, yelling “I pronounce you guilty and sentence you to death”, whereupon he dispatched OBL with one shot, while the rest of the insertion team played Hail to the Chief.

Coming to a theater near you, October 2012.

:pepsi: :spit:

Jolie Rouge

11-07-2011, 04:57 PM

Correcting the ‘fairy tale’: A SEAL’s account of how Osama bin Laden really died
The Daily Caller – 8 hrs ago

Forget whatever you think you know about the night Osama bin Laden was killed. According to a former Navy SEAL who claims to have the inside track, the mangled tales told of that historic night have only now been corrected.

“It became obvious in the weeks evolving after the mission that the story that was getting put out there was not only untrue, but it was a really ugly farce of what did happen,” said Chuck Pfarrer, author of Seal Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden.

In an extensive interview with The Daily Caller, Pfarrer gave a detailed account of why he believes the record needed to be corrected, and why he set out to share the personal stories of the warriors who penetrated bin Laden’s long-secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In August the New Yorker delivered a riveting blow-by-blow of the SEALs’ May 1, 2011 raid on bin Laden’s hideaway. In that account, later reported to lack contributions from the SEALs involved, readers are taken through a mission that began with a top-secret helicopter crashing and led to a bottom-up assault of the Abbottabad compound.

Freelancer Nicholas Schmidle wrote that the SEALs had shot and blasted their way up floor-by-floor, finally cornering the bewildered Al-Qaida leader:

“The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. ‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye.”

Chuck Pfarrer rejects almost all of that story.

“The version of the 45-minute firefight, and the ground-up assault, and the cold-blooded murder on the third floor — that wasn’t the mission,” Pfarrer told TheDC.

“I had to try and figure out, well, look: Why is this story not what I’m hearing? Why is it so off and how is it so off?” he recounted. “One of the things I sort of determined was, OK, somebody was told ‘one of the insertion helicopters crashed.’ OK, well that got muddled to ‘a helicopter crashed on insertion.’”

The helicopters, called “Stealth Hawks,” are inconspicuous machines concealing cutting-edge technology. They entered the compound as planned, with “Razor 1″ disembarking its team of SEALs on the roof of the compound — not on the ground level. There was no crash landing. That wouldn’t occur until after bin Laden was dead.

Meanwhile, “Razor 2″ took up a hovering position so that its on-board snipers, some of whom had also participated in the sea rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips, had a clear view of anyone fleeing the compound.

The SEALs then dropped down from the roof, immediately penetrated the third floor, and hastily encountered bin Laden in his room. He was not standing still.

“He dived across the king-size bed to get at the AKSU rifle he kept by the headboard,” wrote Pfarrer in his book. It was at that moment, a mere 90 seconds after the SEALs first set foot on the roof, that two American bullets shattered bin Laden’s chest and head, killing a man who sought violence to the very end.

President Obama stepped up to a podium in the East Room of the White House that night to announce bin Laden’s death. That rapid announcement, explained Pfarrer, posed a major threat to U.S. national security.

“There was a choice that night,” Pfarrer told TheDC. “There was a choice to keep the mission secret.” America, Pfarrer explained, could have left things alone for “weeks or months … even though there was evidence left on the ground there … and use the intelligence and finish off al-Qaida.”

But Obama’s announcement, he said, “rendered moot all of the intelligence that was gathered from the nexus of al-Qaida. The computer drives, the hard drives, the videocasettes, the CDs, the thumb drives, everything. Before that could even be looked through, the political decision was made to take credit for the operation.”

And in the days that followed, as politicians sought to thrust their identities into the details of the bin Laden kill, the tale began to grow out of control, said Pfarrer.

“The president made a statement, and as far as that goes, that was fine, that was the mission statement,” he explained. “But, soon after … politicians began leaking information from every orifice. And it was like a game of Chinese telephone. These guys didn’t know what they were talking about. Very few of them had even seen the video feed.”

Pfarrer suggests that much of the misinformation was likely born out of operational ignorance, even among those sitting in the White House.

“One of the things that happened was that there were only a handful of people who know about this mission,” he said. “On the civilian side, there were only a handful of people in the situation room who were watching the drone feed. They were looking at the roof of a building taken from a rotating aircraft at 35,000 feet.”

“None of those guys, not a single one of them, had a background in special operations, with the exception of General Webb who was sitting there running a laptop,” Pfarrer went on. “No one knew or could even imagine what was going on inside the building. They didn’t know.”

“There was an alternative feed going to CIA headquarters where Leon Panetta sat there with the communications brevity codes [a guide sheet for the mission's radio lingo] in his lap and a SEAL off-screen by his side to be able to tell him what was going on,” he said. “But these guys, none of them, really knew what they were looking at.”

As the media raised more questions, officials gave more answers.

Whether or not bin Laden resisted ultimately developed into a barrage of murky official and unofficial explanations in the days following. And statements from as high as then-CIA Director Leon Panetta offered confirmation that the endeavor was a “kill mission.”

Pfarrer dismisses that assertion.

“An order to go in and murder someone in their house is not a lawful order,” explained Pfarrer, who maintains that bin Laden would have been captured had he surrendered. “Unlike the Germans in World War II, if you’re a petty officer, a chief petty officer, a naval officer, and you’re giving an order to murder somebody, that’s an unlawful order.”

Pfarrer also suggests some of the emerging claims were simply self-aggrandizing “fairy tales.”

“The story they tried to tell — it’s preposterous. And the CIA tried to jump in. About mid-June the CIA tried to jump into the car and drive the victory lap. There’s this whole stuff about the CIA guy joining the operation, the gallant interpreter — he couldn’t even fast rope!” exclaimed Pfarrer, referring to a technique for descending from an airborne helicopter.

“There’s this fairy tale about him walking out of the compound during the operation to tell crowds of Pakistanis to go home and everything’s OK.”

Pfarrer tried to put this in perspective: “Do you mean that during the middle of this military operation at night, with hovering helicopters over this odd house in this neighborhood, that people came out of their houses to ask what’s going on, instead of [remaining] huddled in their basement?”

“And I think that there were so many of these leaks that were incorrect, the administration couldn’t walk them all back,” Pfarrer explained. “And so, in the middle of May, they froze everything.”

It was that freeze-out that left Chuck Pfarrer with nowhere to turn for the real story but the SEALs themselves.

Seal Target Geronimo delivers an account of the night Osama bin Laden died with a level of detail unlike anything previously reported. Pfarrer bills the story as “absolutely factual.”

“That’s the other thing. I’m prepared for the White House to say, you know, ‘this is full of inaccuracies,’ et cetera,” offered Pfarrer. He told TheDC that in order to protect American interests, his book is “full of names that are made up, and it is full of bases that are not quite where they really should be.”

“But the timeline of my events,” he cautions, “and the manner in which it happened is 100 percent accurate. And they’ll know that.”

http://news.yahoo.com/correcting-fairy-tale-seal-account-osama-bin-laden-054233289.html

Jolie Rouge

11-07-2011, 08:33 PM

The Six Biggest Discrepancies in Accounts of the Bin Laden Raid
By John Hudson | The Atlantic Wire – 9 hrs ago

It's time to forget everything you thought you knew about the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound—again. The story of bin Laden's death on May 1 in Abbottabad has already gone through a wave of revisions since President Obama announced the operation over the summer. But a new book by former SEAL Team Six commander Chuck Pfarrer is turning it on its head again, calling into question critical details thought to be established facts in the terror raid. Pfarrer is no light weight: a former assault-element commander for the SEALs in the '80s, he has been published widely on counter-terrorism and special operations and his book is the first account to boast interviews with SEALs who actually participated in the raid. Advance copies of the book SEAL Target Geronimo have been provided to The Telegraph, New York Post, The Daily Caller and The Daily Beast and each publication is publishing different revelations about the raid. Here are the main discrepancies between Pfarrer's account and those from anonymously-sourced government officials who have framed this story in the public conciousness:

How the SEALs entered the compound Contrary to earlier reports that the SEALs first landed two stealth Blackhawk helicopters and then entered the compound on foot, Pfarrer's account has the copters coming in from the roof. As The Daily Caller notes, the SEALs "dropped down from the roof, immediately penetrated the third floor, and hastily encountered bin Laden in his room." In an interview with the Post, Pfarrer emphasized that point. "Pfarrer told the Post that his sources are adamant that the SEALs entered via the third floor, from the roof, and did not conduct the raid from the ground up." Contrast that with this video reportedly taken from helmet cams on the SEALs and then leaked to CBS News in May, showing the SEALs moving up the stairs of the compound and confronting bin Laden

Bin Laden was unarmed This was a point that varied in different accounts. In an excerpt in the Post, Pfarrer says bin Laden was not carrying a gun, but had one nearby. "He was not carrying it, however; it was lying by the headboard. When he saw the SEALs, he lunged to grab it."

Bin Laden's Wife as a human shield One of the more embarrassing retractions of first account of the Abbottabad raid was U.S. officials saying bin Laden used his wife as a human shield, a statement that was later taken back. According to The Telegraph's review of the book, "Pfarrer writes that bin Laden did, in fact, place his wife between him and the attacking SEALs, as senior US officials stated in the aftermath of the raid before later withdrawing this. This led to Amal being shot in the leg, before bin Laden was killed with two shots while reaching for his gun."

Was there a firefight? Several accounts, including the helmet cam one above, detailed a firefight between the SEALs and Osama's henchmen. In particular, the account of the raid in The New Yorker which spoke of a "45-minute" firefight. Pfarrer's account disputes that. Here's the Telegraph's account of the book.

Rather than ... a prolonged firefight, SEALs landed on the roof, burst in through the third floor and killed him within 90 seconds, he claims.

"A door in the third-floor hallway opened," he writes. "Osama stuck his head out, saw the Americans, and slammed the door loudly". Pfarrer says two SEALs pursued him into the room, where they found him with Amal, his youngest wife, who screamed "It's not him" and "No, no, don't do this," in Arabic.

As The Daily Beast notes "There was no '45-minute' running gun battle. The SEAL team fired only 12 bullets, and the whole operation lasted only 38 minutes."

Bin Laden's code name There have been a lot of military codenames for bin Laden from Geronimo to Cakebread. While not necessarily a contradiction, Pfarrer says the SEAL's code name for the terrorist leader was "Crankshaft" and "Burt."

The Helicopter crash Contrary to the widely-reported "crash landing" of the stealth helicopter that occured before the SEALs raided the compound, Pfarrer tells The Daily Caller the sequence of events is all wrong.

They entered the compound as planned, with “Razor 1″ disembarking its team of SEALs on the roof of the compound — not on the ground level. There was no crash landing. That wouldn’t occur until after bin Laden was dead.

Meanwhile, “Razor 2″ took up a hovering position so that its on-board snipers, some of whom had also participated in the sea rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips, had a clear view of anyone fleeing the compound.

As depicted in the Post, the crash actually happened afterwards and is still somewhat shrouded in mystery. "Razor 1 had experienced technical difficulties with its flight instruments, although exactly why the high-tech chopper crashed is still not known." He tells the Post why he thinks so many reporters got it wrong. “One of the things I sort of determined was, OK, somebody was told ‘one of the insertion helicopters crashed.’ OK, well that got muddled to ‘a helicopter crashed on insertion.’”

http://news.yahoo.com/six-biggest-discrepancies-accounts-bin-laden-raid-174908464.html

comments

The bottom line is that he is DEAD.

The only ppl who should be telling this story are the ppl who were actually there. this account is given by anonymously sourced govt. officials..lol ya i believe everything THEY say!

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What did the article actually "reveal?" You can have 10 different people see a car wreck, and each has different version---of basically the same things of the event.All this article does,is go to reinforce the conspircy clowns and their myth making.The man was a pig,he was no different than any other ther cult leader,he was a hypocrite,a liar,and he's dead.

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So, former Seal Team Six Commander Chuck Pfarrer, says that he talked to the current members of Seal Team Six, but, didn't they JUST report that they (or most of) died from an I.E.D. attack???? Make up your mind what story, you guys are going with. Rest in Peace, gentlemen.

Three rules: 1 Never belief the government 2 Never ever ever believe the media and 3 Everything is not a conspiracy despite the lies of the prior pair.

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funny Obama supposely watch it live and got updates as it happen. Why then should their be any revisions in what he said happened. Even when it is good news and we got Osama. Our President cant tell the truth... this changes little.

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So we can see Gadafyi's body, but not OBL?

Jolie Rouge

05-01-2012, 05:02 AM

SEALs slam Obama for using them as 'ammunition' in bid to take credit for bin Laden killing during election campaign
By Toby Harnden PUBLISHED: 18:35 EST, 30 April 2012 | UPDATED: 19:34 EST, 30 April 2012

Serving and former US Navy SEALs have slammed President Barack Obama for taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and accused him of using Special Forces operators as ‘ammunition’ for his re-election campaign. The SEALs spoke out to MailOnline after the Obama campaign released an ad entitled ‘One Chance’. In it President Bill Clinton is featured saying that Mr Obama took ‘the harder and the more honourable path’ in ordering that bin Laden be killed. The words ‘Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?’ are then displayed.

Besides the ad, the White House is marking the first anniversary of the SEAL Team Six raid that killed bin Laden inside his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan with a series of briefings and an NBC interview in the Situation Room designed to highlight the ‘gutsy call’ made by the President.

Mr Obama used a news conference today to trumpet his personal role and imply that his Republican opponent Mr Romney, who in 2008 expressed reservations about the wisdom of sending troops into Pakistan, would have let bin Laden live. ‘I said that I'd go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did,’ Mr Obama said. ‘If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they'd do something else, then I'd go ahead and let them explain it.’

Ryan Zinke, a former Commander in the US Navy who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, said: ‘The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call. ‘I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice - it was a broader team effort.’

Mr Zinke, who is now a Republican state senator in Montana, added that MR Obama was exploiting bin Laden’s death for his re-election bid. ‘The President and his administration are positioning him as a war president using the SEALs as ammunition. It was predictable.’

Mr Obama has faced criticism even from allies about his decision to make a campaign ad about the bin Laden raid. Arianna Huffington, an outspoken liberal who runs the left-leaning Huffington Post website, roundly condemned it. She told CBS: ‘We should celebrate the fact that they did such a great job. It's one thing to have an NBC special from the Situation Room... all that to me is perfectly legitimate, but to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do.’

Campaigning in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Mr Romney responded to a shouted question by a reporter by saying: ‘Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.’

A serving SEAL Team member said: ‘Obama wasn’t in the field, at risk, carrying a gun. As president, at every turn he should be thanking the guys who put their lives on the line to do this. He does so in his official speeches because he speechwriters are smart. ‘But the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, “Come on, man!” It really didn’t matter who was president. At the end of the day, they were going to go.’

Chris Kyle, a former SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed and another 95 unconfirmed kills to his credit, said: ‘The operation itself was great and the nation felt immense pride. It was great that we did it. ‘But bin Laden was just a figurehead. The war on terror continues. Taking him out didn’t really change anything as far as the war on terror is concerned and using it as a political attack is a cheap shot. ‘In years to come there is going to be information that will come out that Obama was not the man who made the call. He can say he did and the people who really know what happened are inside the Pentagon, are in the military and the military isn’t allowed to speak out against the commander- in-chief so his secret is safe.’

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command. Mr Kyle added: ‘He's trying to say that Romney wouldn't have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it's going to get him some pretty good mileage.’

A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape. ‘In the end, Obama was forced to make a decision and do it. He knew that if he didn’t do it the political risks in not taking action were huge. Mitt Romney would have made the call but he would have made it earlier – as would George W. Bush.’

Brandon Webb, a former SEAL who spent 13 years on active duty and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said: ‘Bush should get partial credit for putting the system in place. ‘Obama inherited a very robust package with regards to special ops and the intelligence community. But Obama deserves credit because he got bin Laden – you can’t take that away from him. ‘My friends that work in Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that have been on video teleconferences with Obama on these kill or capture situations say that Obama has no issue whatsoever with making decisions and typically it's kill. He’s hitting the kill button every time. I have a lot of respect for him for that.’

But he said that many SEALs were dismayed about the amount of publicity the Obama administration had generated about SEAL Team Six, the very existence of which is highly classified. ‘The majority of the SEALs I know are really proud of the operation but it does become “OK, enough is enough – we’re ready to get back to work and step out of the limelight.” They don’t want to be continuously paraded around a global audience like a show dog. ‘Obama has a very good relationship with the Special Operations community at large, especially the SEALs, and it’s nice to see. We had the same relationship with George W. Bush when he was president.’

It was ‘stretching a little much’ for Mr Obama to suggest only he would have made the decision. ‘I personally I don't think Romney would have any problem making tough decisions. He got a very accomplished record of making decision as a business professional. ‘He may not have charisma but he clearly has leadership skills. I don’t think he'd have any problem taking that decision.’

Clint Bruce, who gave up the chance of an NFL career to serve as a SEAL officer before retiring as a lieutenant after nine years, said: ‘We were extremely surprised and discouraged by the publicity because it compromises the ability of those guys to operate. ‘It’s a waste of time to speculate about who would and wouldn’t have made that decision. It was a symphony of opportunity and intelligence that allowed this administration to give the green light. We want to acknowledge that they made that decision. ‘Politicians should let the public know where they stand on national security but not in the play-by-play, detailed way that has been done recently. The intricacies of national security should not become part of stump speeches.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137636/SEALs-slam-Obama-using-ammunition-bid-credit-bin-Laden-killing-election-campaign.html#ixzz1tcMEJH5b

Watch the ad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD75KOoNR9k&feature=player_embedded

Jolie Rouge

05-01-2012, 05:03 AM

comments

Bush was made fun of for taking out Iraq and Saddam Hussein and his vicious National Army in 30 days. " Mission Accomplished". Saddams Regime was destroyed in 30 days. Obama took out 3 ladies and Bin Laden in his Pajamas in bed. So now we have an annual celebration?? Really.. This country is controlled by the media.

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The comments by these SEALs is an accurate representation of how the guys I know in SOF feel (Many in the MIL in general, period). They did their job, but keep the details of them and the operation out of the limelight! Sorry to say, but our President is nothing short of a complete showboat, and it is one of a few reasons for why I truly despise him.

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When you look at the photo provided by the White House, it looks like "O" was photo-shopped into that picture. He is the smallest person in the room His divisive criticism of everyone and everything except his own efforts is embarrassing. Those who blindly worship him are truly frightening and have lost all objectivity.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/01/article-2137636-12D85064000005DC-985_468x322.jpg

When you look at the photo, you see Obama in the corner on a low chair. He was on the golf course until 20 minutes before the raid. He's wearing golf clothes so he was given a jacket to throw over his golf shirt. He talks about making the gutsy decision, but he is not sitting around the table where advisers are. To use the raid is a campaign ploy, and even prominent Democrats are disgusted by it.

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He said "Go." He's SUCH a tough guy. Uttering that one word then sitting back, having a coffee, and watching a screen is literally exactly like strapping on 60 lbs of tactical gear, slinging a weapon, and kicking in the door of a hostile location. He's pretty much a SEAL already.

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The 0 will use every thing at his disposel to get reelected so he can do what he wants without ever worring about another election.. That incudes putting American lives at risk to make the 0 look good. It's not like he was the 1 that put his life on the line, it was a lot of people that brought the deal together, 0 just happened to be there when asked.

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The hero's are the SEALS. Big deal Obama said 'Go'.. 99.9% of all Americans would have said it too.

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This charade is all Obama's got. Otherwise, his adminstration has been a horrendous failure. In my mind, as far as the economy, and national security overall, the Big 0 is a greater threat to national security than Osama ever was.

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The mission was successful so the big O took credit. Had it been otherwise, it would have been Bush's fault. After all, the SEAL's were inherited from Bush's administration.

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I hear that as this was supposedly transpiring (and I use the term "supposedly" with emphasis) -- as this was supposedly transpiring, they had to call him off the golf course to make it to "the situation room" in time for the photo-op. And these SEALs better be careful for their outspokenness. Dear Leader has a notoriously thin skin to go with his pathological narcissistic disorder.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137636/SEALs-slam-Obama-using-ammunition-bid-credit-bin-Laden-killing-election-campaign.html#ixzz1tcPCdWr4

Jolie Rouge

05-01-2012, 05:41 AM

1 year on from OBL raid, no answers from Pakistan
By CHRIS BRUMMITT and ZARAR KHAN | Associated Press – 5 hrs ago

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (AP) — One year since U.S. commandos flew into this Pakistani army town and killed Osama bin Laden, Islamabad has failed to answer tough questions over whether its security forces were protecting the world's most wanted terrorist. Partly as a result, fallout from the raid still poisons relations between Washington and Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment, support for Islamist extremism and anger at the violation of sovereignty in the operation can be summed up by a Twitter hashtag doing the rounds: 02MayBlackDay.

The Pakistani government initially welcomed the raid that killed bin Laden in his three-story compound, but within hours the mood changed as it became clear that Pakistan's army was cut out of the operation. Any discussions over how bin Laden managed to stay undetected in Pakistan were drowned out in anger at what the army portrayed as a treacherous act by a supposed ally.

That bin Laden was living with his family near Pakistan's version of West Point — not in a cave in the mountains as many had guessed — raised eyebrows in the West. The Pakistani army was already accused of playing both sides in the campaign against militancy, providing some support against al-Qaida but keeping the Afghan Taliban as strategic allies.

A week after the raid, President Barack Obama said bin Laden had a "support network" in Pakistan and the country must investigate how he evaded capture. Pakistan responded by announcing the formation of a committee to investigate bin Laden's presence in Pakistan as well as the circumstances surrounding the U.S. raid. Soon after it began its work, the head of the committee said he was sure that security forces were not hiding bin Laden. Other statements since then have also suggested the report will be more of a whitewash than a genuine probe.

Last week, committee spokesman retired Col. Mohammad Irfan Naziri said its findings were being written up but they might not be released publicly. "We're disappointed," said a U.S. official about the investigation. "They promised to do it, but they haven't yet."

The public line of the Obama administration is that no evidence has emerged to suggest bin Laden had high-level help inside Pakistan. Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency said bin Laden's long and comfortable existence in the country was an "intelligence failure."

But suspicions have increased following recent disclosures by one of bin Laden's wives in a police interrogation report that the al-Qaida leader lived in five houses while on the run and fathered four children, two of whom were born in Pakistani government hospitals. "I just find the idea that he lived in a place like Abbottabad without the ISI's knowledge strains credibility," said Shawn Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at Bradford University in the U.K. "It is ridiculous that he wasn't being protected."

Since the raid, Pakistan has tried to close one of the most notorious chapters in its history. The three-story compound in Abbottabad that housed him for six years was razed by bulldozers in a surprise, nighttime operation. Just last week, his three wives and 11 daughters, children and grandchildren were deported to Saudi Arabia; their side of the story is unlikely to be told anytime soon.

In this relatively wealthy and well-ordered town that has become infamous for hosting bin Laden for so long, it's hard to find anyone prepared to say they supported the American operation. Many don't believe bin Laden ever lived in the house, reflecting the popularity of conspiracy theories in a country where the rulers often obscure the truth.

Umair Ishaq, who grows vegetables close to the empty lot, said he remained angry about the raid. "You go there to the compound, there is a still a fragrance from those who were killed," he said, referring to Islamic belief that those who die as a martyr to the faith give off a sweet smell at death. "They were innocent and they were martyrs."

Most of the rubble has been hauled away from the site, on which local children now play cricket. Farmers cross over it on their way to the fields, and on a recent day older boys were smashing away at bits of masonry, trying to extract the metal poles inside so they could sell them. After the helicopter-borne operation, the country's generals retaliated by kicking out U.S. special forces trainers operating close to the Afghan border, cutting intelligence cooperation with the CIA and restricting the travel of foreign diplomats and aid workers.

Authorities arrested a Pakistani doctor who assisted America in tracking down bin Laden. The doctor remains in detention, facing possible treason charges. The country has made not made public the arrests of anyone connected bin Laden's time on the run.

Relations had barely recovered when in November U.S. airstrikes inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. Pakistan immediately blocked U.S. and NATO supply routes across its soil into Afghanistan. They remain shut, despite U.S. attempts to renegotiate a new deal with Pakistan.

Even before the raid, anti-American sentiment was so rampant in Pakistan that anyone who opposed Washington was lauded by many sections of society. Bin Laden was no exception, even as his followers carried out numerous bloody attacks inside the country. "OBL was considered as a hero by the general public at large, and his death generated a lot of sympathy," said Aftab Khan Sherpao, a lawmaker from the northwest who has three times been targeted by Islamist militant suicide bombers. "No one has been able to control and contain his supporters."

Despite reservations about Pakistan's commitment to U.S. goals in Afghanistan and doubts over how bin Laden managed to evade capture for so long, the Obama administration feels it has little choice but to ally itself with the country. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and will remain important in the fight against al-Qaida in years to come.

Many believe Islamabad's cooperation will be essential for getting any Afghan peace deal to stick, allowing the U.S. to withdraw troops.

http://news.yahoo.com/1-obl-raid-no-answers-pakistan-062524769.html

comments

This article states that Pakistan has failed to answer tough questions. That isn't true. They have answered "THE" question. The answer? - They are double dealing - Plain and simple. If Afghanistan wasn't land locked we wouldn't need fly over permission from Pakistan. We also wouldn't have to give billions to a country that works both sides of the war on terror, but it is, so we do. It also pays to maintain a presence in, and keep a close eye on, a country that is NUCLEAR and has such a large and powerfull terrorist population within it's borders.

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With allies like Pakistan the US doesn't need enemies.

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Of course Pakistan has failed to respond to our tough questions. They are too busy counting all the aid we give them to really care!

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You mean to tell us that it is hard to understand why they took money to look for him AND took money to protect him? It was one of the biggest rackets in history, of course they were not going to find him.

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With $1 Billion coming in annually why would they ever want to find someone that might end the "Gravy Train" from hauling loads of cash to them. Screw them! This country finally did something right when they left our good friends the Paki's out of the loop for this op!

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Boycott their, ...their,... uh,... actually, what DOES Pakistan produce?

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And we continue to send them billions why?

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From the way it looks now we will have a Osama Day or a Bin Day as a national holliday. If they call it Bin Day we can throw in Bin Lying with Osama and take care of the "Liar in Chief" in DC at the same time. After dying nine times the news media once again has to dig him up in order to make a story about the 'wonderful messiah' on the campaign trail

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It is real simple.......Pakistan knew......and they got caught and now have been embarassed because they are now afraid we will pull them off the U.S Government's nipple! They were playing both sides of the track on this thing!!!!! Wake up, Washington!!!!

Jolie Rouge

05-01-2012, 06:38 AM

Obama's spiked football

Michael Mukasey, who served as Bush's attorney general after the unlamented departure of Alberto Gonzales, rightly smacks down Obama's self-praise for ordering the raid on bin Laden's compound and the entire approach the Obama administration has taken towards intelligence. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303916904577374552546308474.html?m od=djemEditorialPage_h

Moreover, the president does not seem to have addressed at all the possibility of seizing material with intelligence value—which may explain his disclosure immediately following the event not only that bin Laden was killed, but also that a valuable trove of intelligence had been seized, including even the location of al Qaeda safe-houses. That disclosure infuriated the intelligence community because it squandered the opportunity to exploit the intelligence that was the subject of the boast.

The only reliable weapon that any administration has against the current threat to this country is intelligence. Every operation like the one against bin Laden (or the one that ended the career of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen and al Qaeda propagandist killed in a drone attack last September) dips into the reservoir of available intelligence. Refilling that reservoir apparently is of no importance to an administration that, after an order signed by the president on his second day in office, has no classified interrogation program—and whose priorities are apparent from its swift decision to reopen investigations of CIA operators for alleged abuses in connection with the classified interrogation program that once did exist.

Mukasey rightly compares Obama's self-congratulation and focus on himself in how he emphasized his own role in the killing of bin Laden rather than focusing his praise to those who gathered the intelligence, planned the attack, and carried it out.

While contemplating how the killing of bin Laden reflects on the president, consider the way he emphasized his own role in the hazardous mission accomplished by SEAL Team 6:

"I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority . . . even as I continued our broader effort. . . . Then, after years of painstaking work by my intelligence community I was briefed . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . And finally last week I determined that I had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . ."

asey draws the contrast with other great leaders at similar moments of triumph in their presidencies. Just think of how Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural, given at a time when the collapse of the Confederacy was imminent, spent his speech contemplating how slavery was "somehow the cause of the war," and how the "scourge of war" would last "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." And then he went on to ask for "malice toward none, with charity for all" as we fought on until the end of the war. Every time I teach Lincoln's Second Inaugural, I marvel at the modesty of that speech and how Lincoln took a moment when any other president might rightly have taken the opportunity to praise himself and the course he took to stick out the fighting even at the lowest moments when so many in the North advised some sort of negotiated conclusion and instead spent the address to contemplate the country's sin of slavery and how this war was God's righteous reaction to that offense. And he concluded by attempting to bring the nation together just as the war was going to force the country back together.

No such grace for Obama. Mukasey reminds us of how George W. Bush announced the capture of Saddam Hussein. Note the contrast to Obama's announcement.

The man from whom President Obama has sought incessantly to distance himself, George W. Bush, also had occasion during his presidency to announce to the nation a triumph of intelligence: the capture of Saddam Hussein. He called that success "a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq." He attributed it to "the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers. . . . Their work continues, and so do the risks."

He did mention himself at the end: "Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them."

While the orders for the raid on bin Laden's compound included an escape clause that put the responsibility on Admiral McRaven for the "operational decision making and control" and the presentation of the "risk profile" given to the President, contrast that with Eisenhower's behavior on the eve of ordering the D-Day landings.

Dwight Eisenhower is famous for having penned a statement to be issued in anticipation of the failure of the Normandy invasion that reads in relevant part: "My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

A week later, when the success of the invasion was apparent, Eisenhower saluted the Allied Expeditionary Forces: "One week ago this morning there was established through your coordinated efforts our first foothold in northwestern Europe. High as was my preinvasion confidence in your courage, skill and effectiveness . . . your accomplishments . . . have exceeded my brightest hopes.

Eisenhower did mention himself at the end: "I truly congratulate you upon a brilliantly successful beginning. . . . Liberty loving people everywhere would today like to join me in saying to you, 'I am proud of you.'"

Such examples are worth remembering every time President Obama claims bin Laden bragging rights.

Is Obama spiking the football in Romney's face because that is the only thing he has left to run on? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303916904577376203268225224.html?m od=djemEditorialPage_h

The increasingly unavoidable conclusion is that this is the only thing this President thinks he can campaign on. ObamaCare and the stimulus, his two main legislative achievements, are unpopular. Even liberals say Dodd-Frank didn't solve the too-big-to-fail bank problem. Two-thirds of the country thinks the economy is still in recession.

Ergo, wave the bloody shalwar kameez of bin Laden in a way that would have got Karl Rove hooted out of Washington had he tried anything remotely like it.

Voters aren't likely to believe that any Presidential candidate would fail to pursue the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But there is a danger in all of this for the incumbent in the White House.

One of Barack Obama's remaining campaign advantages is that most people still like and respect him personally. Lose that advantage, and we wouldn't want to be the campaign strategist who has to break his fall.

And now he has repeated his criticism of Romney from the White House during a joint press conference with the prime minister of Japan. http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-smirks-again-suggests-romney-wouldnt-have-killed-bin-laden_642246.html

The increasingly unavoidable conclusion is that this is the only thing this President thinks he can campaign on. ObamaCare and the stimulus, his two main legislative achievements, are unpopular. Even liberals say Dodd-Frank didn't solve the too-big-to-fail bank problem. Two-thirds of the country thinks the economy is still in recession.

Ergo, wave the bloody shalwar kameez of bin Laden in a way that would have got Karl Rove hooted out of Washington had he tried anything remotely like it.

Voters aren't likely to believe that any Presidential candidate would fail to pursue the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But there is a danger in all of this for the incumbent in the White House.

One of Barack Obama's remaining campaign advantages is that most people still like and respect him personally. Lose that advantage, and we wouldn't want to be the campaign strategist who has to break his fall.

How crass to issue such a crack during a joint White House press conference. The man has no class or sense of what is appropriate in a true leader. Even present and former Navy SEALs are saying enough is enough.

Obama's need to not only take credit for the attack on bin Laden but then to try and argue that somehow he knows that Mitt Romney wouldn't have ordered the attack in a similar situation has distracted from the praise that Obama is due for the death of bin Laden. His spiked football, that he told us Americans didn't need to do, has muddied Obama's message. But then grace and modesty are not characteristics that have ever been associated with Barack Obama.

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2012/05/obamas-spiked-football.html

think the point is the Obama I, I, I, I, I speech. The examples of previous leaders speeches in equally monumental moments is one of humility and of praise for the people who actually did the ground work and gathered the intelligence. A leader who makes the decision to "go for it" says yes or no. At the time Obama made his announcement I was taken back by his arrogance. I would have the same opinion of his arrogance whether he was D / R / I / or Nazi.

Jolie Rouge

05-01-2012, 07:06 AM

May 1, 2012
The Realization of Osama bin Laden's Dream
By Tara Servatius

Don't let this week's anniversary of Osama bin Laden's assassination fool you. President Barack Obama may have killed bin Laden, but no one on Earth has done more to help al-Qaeda and the world's radical Islamists achieve their goals in the last year than our president.

Bin Laden's ultimate goal was for radical Islamists to rise up and retake control of the Middle East from largely secular, American-backed leaders. Bin Laden's strategy was to use terror attacks on the West to inspire this.

Just a few years ago, bin Laden probably couldn't have fathomed that it would be an American president who would ultimately accomplish his goal of bringing radical Islamist leaders to power in Middle Eastern countries, or that the same American president would get closer to accomplishing those goals in just three years than bin Laden himself did in his entire multi-decade terror career.

Bin Laden also didn't know he wouldn't be alive to see it because that president, Barack Obama, would preside over his assassination just as radical Islamists were on the brink of bringing the caliphate to life with the American government's help.

Today, a year after bin Laden's death, a sizable chunk of Middle Eastern real estate is either in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and other like-minded groups or on the brink of falling into their hands. The newly empowered Muslim Brotherhood, which as recently as two years ago was banned from political life in most of the countries it now runs, comes to and goes from the White House with impunity.

This happened thanks to a consistent, persistent strategy by the Obama administration of using American pressure, diplomacy, and firepower, or the lack of it, to ensure that country after country slips from secular rule into Islamist control.

In the beginning, when the people in Washington were pressuring secular leader and long time U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt, the Obama administration would still distance itself from groups like the Brotherhood, assuring the American public that they wouldn't be strong enough to take over Egypt, or that if they did, they wouldn't really be that radical. Today the Brotherhood controls the Egyptian parliament, and an ex-Muslim Brotherhood leader whom the media is selling as moderate stands poised to take the presidency of that country.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is finally beginning to come out of the closet on its real plans for radical Islamists like the Brotherhood -- to put them in power in country after country. Obama administration officials call this strategy "legitimate Islamism."

The theory is that with secular leaders who were former U.S. allies out of the way in Middle Eastern countries, radical Islamists will now have an outlet for their Islamism and won't join al-Qaeda.

Obama administration officials were pretty blunt about this in a recent National Journal interview, explaining that the president came to a "realiz[ation that] he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively 'moderate' Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere."

"It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists," administration officials told the Journal. "Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaeda see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism."

Today, the Obama administration no longer hides its goal of bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and other like-minded Islamists to power.

And that's exactly what Obama has been doing. After American and international firepower drove former leader Moammar Gaddafi from power in Libya, the country came to be run by the Transitional National Council, which the Obama administration recognizes as the official government of Libya. It is packed with activists, lawyers, Islamic scholars, and others who have ties to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

In 2007, the LIFG formally joined al-Qaeda, an event so well-documented that even Reuters covered it. Its goals at the time included killing Gaddafi, setting up an Islamic caliphate in Libya, and waging international jihad. With Obama's help, they are well on their way to accomplishing these goals.

The National Transitional Council, which is backed by the Obama administration, has already decreed that the country will be run in accordance with sharia law. The Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are expected to make a strong showing in the next election. And they'll have plenty of dough with which to carry out their plans, since the Obama administration and NATO turned the country's oil fields, which are capable of generating billions of dollars of oil revenue a year, over to them.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration is conducting "peace talks" with the Taliban aimed at bringing them into the government, even as Taliban operatives kill U.S. troops daily on the battlefield. Given the Taliban's obvious inability to win control of the Afghan government for themselves on the battlefield, the Obama administration's determination to hand it to them at the negotiating table is baffling. This would create yet another radical Islamist-dominated Middle Eastern nation -- the exact opposite of what American troops have been fighting and bleeding for in that country for a decade.

In Syria, where the Obama administration is calling for dictator Bashar Assad to step down, the U.S. has left secular forces to fend for themselves and backed an Islamist-dominated group called the Syrian National Council, which has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The list goes on and on, but in country after county, the results are the same. Osama bin Laden's dream, which he thought would take decades to achieve, is coming to life in a single term of Obama's presidency. Bin Laden's Middle Eastern caliphate is rising. Once united in Islam, the caliphate was supposed to turn outward, conquering the rest of the Earth for Allah. No word yet on where Obama stands on that part of the plan. Perhaps we'll have to wait for a second term to find out.

While Americans focus this week on the anniversary of the killing of bin Laden and feel smug about our destruction of al-Qaeda's main cell, they need to understand that with bin Laden's dream already in motion, al-Qaeda is in many ways is an outdated relic whose purpose has already been served.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/the_realization_of_osama_bin_ladens_dream.html#ixz z1tcvQzEAr

Jolie Rouge

05-02-2012, 08:58 AM

'I Had 100% Faith in the Navy SEALs'
The president describes planning the mission, what the SEALs knew & how they kept it secret.http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/02/11493919-president-obama-bin-laden-raid-is-most-important-single-day-of-my-presidency?lite

Jolie Rouge

05-04-2012, 02:44 PM

O spiking the Bin Laden football.

With some trying to turn bin Laden’s death into a campaign talking point for Obama’s reelection, it is useful to remember that the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site — all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration — and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.

–Jose A. Rodriguez

So now we have the sorry spectacle of the President of the United States, as our economy and international prestige circle the crapper, reduced to basing his reelection hopes on the death of a strategically irrelevant fugitive in Pakistan. A man so small that he can’t be bothered to mention the skill of our troops or intelligence agencies in his orgy of self-congratulation.

http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2012/05/01/barack-obama-a-legend-in-his-own-mind/

Jolie Rouge

05-07-2012, 02:58 PM

SNL cuts sketch critical of Obama, replaces it with Fox News parody
Published: 12:25 PM 05/06/2012

The Daily Caller has obtained a scrapped sketch critical of President Barack Obama that was intended for airing at the opening of last night’s “Saturday Night Live” on NBC.

http://cdn2.dailycaller.com/2012/02/fred-armisen-300x168.jpg

In the skit, President Obama addresses Americans soon after the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden — and he makes sure to remind viewers that all credit for the raid on the terrorist leader’s compound belongs to him. “I hope you had a safe and joyous first anniversary of his killing,” the president, portrayed by Fred Armisen, begins. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to be at home this year, as I had to fly to Afghanistan, to remind President Karzai that, exactly one year ago, we killed Osama bin Laden, and that the decision to do so was a gutsy one,” the president continues. “And was mine.”

The president then outlines what gifts are appropriate on the anniversaries of “Killing Osama bin Laden Day,” and reminds his audience that “heavy drinking, and Killing Osama bin Laden Day, are never a good combination.”

The full text of the skit, which was authored by comedian Jim Downey, is viewable below. It is not clear why the skit was scrapped.

The real President Obama has faced harsh criticism in recent weeks for allegedly politicizing bin Laden’s death by taking too much credit for the operation that killed him. Instead of the skit, NBC opted instead to air a parody of Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends.” That skit, which also featured Armisen, mocked Fox News personalities by portraying them as clueless partisans. “Shame on President Barack Obama, who is running a campaign ad that argues that Mitt Romney would not have made the decision to launch the raid,” said Taran Killam, who portrayed Fox personality Steve Doocy. “I can name one person who wouldn’t have launched that raid: Barack Obama!” Bobby Moynihan, playing Fox host Brian Kilmeade, interjected.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/06/scrapped-snl-skit-mocks-obama-for-taking-credit-over-bin-laden-killing/

http://www.scribd.com/embeds/92595122/content_inner?access_key=key-2jkq3dr3oxcrhhhvh59h&start_page=1
http://www.scribd.com/embeds/92595122/content_inner?access_key=key-2jkq3dr3oxcrhhhvh59h&start_page=1

http://www.scribd.com/doc/92595122/Obama-Address-Cold-Open-May-6-2012
http://www.scribd.com/doc/92595122/Obama-Address-Cold-Open-May-6-2012

comments

If it had been a skit about George W Bush, it would have played!!!!!!!!! What a bunch of cowards.

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I agree 100%. And since when did SNL care about offending anyone?

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SNL has always had a leftwing political agenda. It's all about shaping public opinion through the omission of information (or omission of mockery). It's part of the 'new wave' of propaganda, where the left seeks to brainwash my generation with comedians - Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, SNL, etc.

They are very successful - the 17-30 year olds have short attention spans and won't watch boring political/news shows - but they watch Stewart/Colbert religiously. Studies have shown that this my age group gets their news primarily from TDS/TCR.

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exactly...we all remember the on-going sarah palin parody! Those in the audience probably believe that she actually said "you can see russia from my house"! and these people vote!! :/

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Obama used the military that Bush built, that's all. They found him and they killed him, Obama just called the photographer for the photo opp, nothing more.

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Face, everyone in the media is sold out for the Obama Machine. It's sad that our country has lost it's principal of freedom but when the country collapses, perhaps finally then people will see the mistake they have made. I guess kind of like Germany right around 1945.

http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Car/b/payn_c9896920120507120100.jpg

Jolie Rouge

05-23-2012, 10:52 AM

Obama aides gave Hollywood team rare CIA, Pentagon access on bin Laden raid info
By Olivier Knox | The Ticket – 1 hr 21 mins ago

Barely one month after Navy SEALs staged the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Hollywood came knocking at the Pentagon. "Hurt Locker" screenwriter Mark Boal's late-night June 5, 2011 email to a Defense Department spokesman led to unlocked doors at the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA -- even getting him access to a SEAL planner closely tied to the raid. The remarkable cooperation on the development of a movie about the raid has a top congressional Republican crying foul and angrily asking whether administration officials inappropriately shared the nation's secrets. The White House denies any wrongdoing.

The conservative activist group Judicial Watch obtained reams of documents related to the filmmakers' access with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed earlier this year. The movie, tentatively titled "Zero Dark Thirty," is scheduled for release in December 2012.

Boal and Katherine Bigelow, who directed the Oscar-winning "Hurt Locker," sat down on July 15, 2011 with a handful of Pentagon officials, including Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers. According to a transcript of the meeting, Vickers simultaneously offered up the SEAL planner and warned that the Pentagon couldn't seem too forthcoming because of the repeated official warnings against talking to the media. Specifically, Vickers said, Adm. William McRaven, the head of Joint Special Operations Command and the man in charge of the May 2011 raid, wanted to avoid the appearance of a double-standard.

"Now, on the operators side, Adm McRaven and Adm Olson do not want to talk directly, because it's just a bad, their [sic] just concerned as commanders of the force and they're telling them all the time -- don't you dare talk to anybody, that it's just a bad example if it gets out -- even with all sorts of restrictions and everything," Vickers explained to Boal and Bigelow.

Instead, "the basic idea is they'll make a guy available who was involved from the beginning as a planner; a SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander," Vickers said.

"That's dynamite, by the way " Boal replied, in a transcript of the exchange, one of the documents Judicial Watch posted online.

"That's incredible," added Bigelow."He'll speak for operators and he'll speak for senior military commanders," Vickers explained. "And then with [redacted name of the SEAL] the only thing we ask is that you not reveal his name in any way as a consultant."

"Because again, it's the same thing, he shouldn't be talking out of school, this at least gives him one step removed and he knows what he can and can't say, but this way at least he can be as open he can with you and it ought to meet your needs and give you lots of color," said Vickers.

"That's fabulous," said Bigelow. "That's dynamite" said Boal. And, a bit later, the screenwriter tells the Pentagon team: "You delivered."

The White House on Wednesday denied that any secrets may have been inappropriately shared.

"When people, including press, authors, filmmakers, documentarians, who are working on projects that involve the president ask to speak with administration officials, we do our best to accommodate them to make sure the facts are correct," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

"That's hardly a novel approach to the media. We do not discuss classified information. The information that the White House provided about the bin Laden raid was focused on the President's role in that decision making process. The same information was given to the White House press corps," he said in an email to Yahoo News.

But House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King blasted the revelations on Wednesday, saying in a statement that the documents revealed "the damning story of extremely close, unprecedented, and potentially dangerous collaboration" with Hollywood.

King singled out the disclosure that the filmmakers visited "a classified facility so secret that the name cannot even be seen by the public."

The episode appears to have begun with an 11:27 p.m. email from Boal to Geoff Morrell, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates's spokesman on June 5, 2011. In it, Boal asked to be able to talk to Vickers, and notes: "Naturally, I understand the sensitivities, and more than anything, am simply hoping for an opportunity to briefly tell him about the project's scope."

Three minutes later, Morrell pushed the email into the chain of comment, with the note "what do you all think? These guys are the Oscar winning team behind the Hurt Locker."

In another email, on June 9, Pentagon spokesman Robert Mehal fleshed out some of the details of the film project. "They were just about to begin filming a moving focusing on the Battle of Tora Bora (2001) when 1 May changed everything," Mehal wrote.

Mehal also noted that Boal was mindful of national security worries, and "indicated that he was proud of not giving anything away in Hurt Locker."

On June 13, Vickers wrote that senior officials were thinking over whether to cooperate with the filmmakers. "They would like to shape the story to prevent any gross inaccuracies, but do not want to make it look like the commanders think it's okay to talk to the media," he wrote. One option was to "offer up" a SEAL "who played a key role and knows the operators and story well."

The CIA cooperated with Boal and Bigelow at then-director Leon Panetta's direction, but were "not, obviously, giving away anything they shouldn't, but answering questions such as 'How did you feel at that point?'" according to another message.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-aides-gave-hollywood-team-rare-cia-pentagon-162654363.html

comments

Seal Team 6 members were later targeted, ambushed and killed by al Qaida/Taliban forces when their helicopter was shot down. Obama Administration exposed them for pure, selfish political gain. And SEALs died. Find the TRAITOR in the Obama Administration who got our TRUE heroes killed just so that Obama could prance around like some Rambo wannabe.

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This is totally wrong of Obama to do this... and now he wants the movie to be released in Oct. 2012 just before the election? Why? This was confidential stuff and should have never been released to a movie maker. http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11816421-obama-aides-g

hblueeyes

05-23-2012, 03:52 PM

Yet he keeps sealed the Fast and Furious information

Me

Jolie Rouge

05-29-2012, 11:39 AM

If this were the Bush administration ... wouldn't the MSM be having a fit ??

Obama’s ‘secret kill list’ shows president is final word on terrorist killing missions
By Dylan Stableford | The Ticket – 3 hrs ago

When it comes to the "secret kill list"—a regularly updated chart showing the world's most wanted terrorists—President Barack Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate, according to the third in a series of New York Times articles assessing his record.

And despite his liberal background, Obama has taken an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.

The Times said it interviewed three dozen current and former advisers to Obama, who described his "evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda":

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was "an easy one."

Part of Obama's "evolution" on terror apparently began early in his term, when a drone strike resulted in civilian casualties:

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. "The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, 'I want to know how this happened,'" a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a "near certainty" that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead. "The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets," the Times said, "and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration's 'false choice between our safety and our ideals.'"

And Obama's success limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes is, in part, due to "a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" embraced by Obama. According to the Times, the White House considers "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

Obama's personal involvement in counterterrorism operations can be seen in his study of the "baseball card"-like "kill list." For example, in January 2010—four months before he ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden—Obama questioned the ages of some of the al-Qaida suspects on it. "How old are these people?" Obama asked during his regular Tuesday briefing with intelligence officials--dubbed the "Terror Tuesday" meeting—in the White House Situation Room. "If they are starting to use children, we are moving into a whole different phase."

The White House has also struggled with the so-called "Whac-A-Mole" approach to counterterrorism—an al-Qaida leader killed in, say, a drone strike is simply replaced with another. "One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes 20?" William M. Daley, Obama's chief of staff in 2011, told the Times. "At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-secret-kill-list-shows-president-final-word-151204051.html

comments

It takes a special level of narcissism to critize a predecessor for putting water up the nose of suspected terrorists but reserve the right to kill them indiscrimantely on your say so.

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Show me in the Constitution where it says the President can kill whomever he wants without repercussion.

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First paragraph: "President Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate". I thought the law would be a better determining factor than one man.

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Kudus for killing Bin Laden! However, this President had a scapegoat all lined up if the operation went bad. Oh, and maybe just a touch of credit to President Bush for providing all the tools and the intelligence that was needed to track down Bid Laden. With our President the story is never as straight forward as he likes to portray.

Jolie Rouge

06-03-2012, 11:54 AM

Al-Qaida leader recalls Osama bin Laden’s ‘generosity’
By Associated Press Sunday, June 3, 2012

CAIRO — Osama bin Laden spent all his personal wealth on jihad, considering meat and electricity as luxuries so he could save his money to help fund terror attacks, according to recollections from his deputy and successor posted online late Saturday

Al-Qaida’s new leader Ayman al-Zawahri, in the second of his "Days with the Imam" series of videos, said that bin Laden would however pay readily for hospitality for his guests — although he lived mostly on bread and vegetables, he once invested in an entire herd of sheep to slaughter in case visitors came by.

Al-Zawahri, who became head of al-Qaida after bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid last year, spoke conversationally while dressed in a white Arab robe and turban.

He is believed to lack his predecessor’s personal authority within the far-flung terror network, and may be trying to boost his own popularity by emphasizing his closeness to the more charismatic bin Laden.

Bin Laden was born to a wealthy family, but ran into financial troubles after he was pushed out of Sudan in 1996, al-Zawahri said.

Shortly thereafter, he said, Bin Laden spent $50,000 to help finance 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania at a time when he only had $55,000 to his name. Those bombings killed 224 people. Bin Laden’s personal wealth also helped finance the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

"He is well-known for living austerely but he spent all his money for jihad," al-Zawahri said "If you enter his house you would find simple furniture .. and if we were invited to eat, he offered us what was available in his house, bread and vegetables."

But the terror leader was "generous to his guests by slaughtering sheep for them and because of continuous visitors, he once bought a herd of sheep so that he would be always ready for them."

Al-Zawahri said bin Laden used to encourage the mujahideen — "holy warriors" — to live without electricity which he considered as luxury.

"Luxury is the enemy of jihad and if the mujahideen were brought up to live in asceticism, they would tolerate the burden of jihad," al-Zawahri quoted bin Laden as saying.

Al-Zawahri said bin Laden was also generous to his bodyguards, who were devoted to him. Once in Afghanistan, he came under shelling, but the bodyguards took bin Laden to a wall and formed a human shield around him.

In the first video in the series, posted on jihadist Web sites in November, al-Zawahri said he wanted to show bin Laden’s "human side." He described a sensitive man who cried when his friends lost family members, remained close to his children despite the hard life of an international jihadist, and fondly remembered — by name — the 19 men who carried out the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/international/middle_east/view/20120603al-qaida_leader_recalls_osama_bin_ladens_generosity/srvc=home&position=recent

Jolie Rouge

06-10-2012, 06:40 PM

Good Reads: a few tips about how to stay off Obama's 'kill list'
This week's best reads include an investigation into how the Obama administration chooses targets for drone attack, a stirring defense of dictator intelligence, and a scientific explanation of optimism.
By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer / June 1, 2012

Obama’s ‘kill list’

Few weapons have changed the nature of warfare in recent years as much as the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, also known as a drone. Virtually unheard of a decade ago, it has become the weapon of choice for the Obama administration, both for surveillance of suspected terrorists and for their elimination.

The New York Times’ Jo Becker and Scott Shane have written a lengthy investigative piece, backed up with interviews of current and former Obama administration officials, looking into the legality and the many uses of drones and how the Obama administration learned to love the drone. Whether drones make the world safer, of course, depends on your definition of safe. But for now, much of the debate centers on whether drone use is legally or morally defensible.

Fans of this article have pointed out how the White House team decides who is a “legitimate target,” and the article says Obama’s legal team “… in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants….”

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

Foreign policy consensus

For all their controversy in intellectual circles, drones will not be a major campaign issue in the upcoming fall elections. Sure, we’ll hear that one candidate would likely hand the keys to the country over to The Enemy, or that another candidate secretly dreams of kicking off the End Times by bombing a Middle Eastern country. But when it comes to foreign policy or military issues, Americans just aren’t that into them.

Truth be told, America’s ambivalence on foreign policy issues is mirrored in the attitudes of its politicians in Washington. Congress may have difficulty passing budgets from this president, and Mr. Obama may have difficulty ordering breakfast without thunderous criticism – French toast? Really? – but when it comes to foreign policy, there really isn’t much difference between Republicans and Democrats, according to a study by Joshua Busby, Jonathan Monten, and William Inboden in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

In a survey of Republicans and Democrats who have served in the White House, there was broad agreement over some of the most contentious issues of the past decade, including multilateralism, nuclear nonproliferation, and human rights. The differences came down to just how to carry out these basic principles.

As the authors say, this broad consensus is positive for the US. even on areas with significant partisan difference, ideological orientation need not result in acrimony and policy paralysis. Vigorous partisan debate can improve the quality of policy by restraining overreach by each side, injecting new ideas into the debate, and helping the United States drive a better bargain on the international stage.

Dictator’s learning curve

It’s been noted, in this column and elsewhere, that the past two years have not been kind to dictators. Street protests, cellphones, Facebook, Sacha Baron Cohen, and well-armed rebel groups have made the world a much less caring place for the likes of Muammar Qaddafi et al.

But Christian Caryl, in this week’s Foreign Policy magazine, says it’s too early to write off dictators, just because of the missteps of a few. In a review of Will Dobson’s new book, “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” Mr. Caryl says dictators are not as loopy as they look.

The key message that emerges from Dobson's investigations is that today's autocrats are not idiots. They have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Putin is not Stalin, and Hu Jintao is not Mao Zedong. In many cases, Dobson writes, modern dictators understand that it's in their interest to observe the appearance of democratic norms even while they're subverting them.
Optimism explained

The late columnist and self-described cynic H. L. Mencken once wrote that an optimist is “simply a pessimist with no job experience.” Scientists have long thought that predisposition to look positively or negatively on the world depended on experience, and could be tied up with the human instinct for survival.

But if your world view is starting to sour – either because of electoral politics, or strained loyalties for an absolutely hopeless baseball team – take a quick look at an interview with Elaine Fox, author of “Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain,” by the New Scientist’s contributor Catherine de Lange. Clearly, optimists and pessimists see the world through different eyes, Ms. Fox says, with the former overlooking negative signals around them and pessimists obsessing about those same signals.

Here’s one trait that could be either powerful or useless, depending on your perspective: Optimists are more persistent.

Lab based research does show that optimistic people are more persistent, [Ms. Fox says in the interview.] In one study, people were rated on their level of pessimism or optimism and then were given anagrams to do, some of which were impossible. People who were optimistic stayed significantly longer trying to do the impossible anagrams - so they didn’t give up - that’s good experimental evidence.

An optimist who doesn’t give up: there’s something to give one hope.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Keep-Calm/2012/0601/Good-Reads-a-few-tips-about-how-to-stay-off-Obama-s-kill-list

Jolie Rouge

06-10-2012, 06:53 PM

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SEMI-SECRET DRONE WAR NEEDS PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY
By Cynthia Tucker – Sat, Jun 9, 2012.

In response to terrorist threats, President Obama has done what he promised he would do. He has used unmanned predator drones to attack and kill al-Qaida operatives wherever they hide. National borders have not deterred him, nor have the complaints of presidents and strongmen who cannot or will not go after the jihadists who use their lands as training grounds. During his first campaign, Obama's rivals castigated him for that pledge, claiming he was naive or uninformed or delusional to think he could strike inside other countries. The president deserves credit for sticking to his commitment to decimate al-Qaida, for taking the fight to the enemy.

But Obama's "targeting killing" campaign has a glaring flaw: It has remained shrouded in semi-secrecy, a classified program that flouts the full disclosure and public debate that democracy demands. The president has protected the United States from the murderous impulses of Islamists, but he has not defended the constitutional principles he is sworn to uphold.

Few outside a small group of committed civil libertarians have challenged Obama on his drone war. Nor has there been much complaint about the Obama administration's retention of several extra-constitutional policies and procedures introduced by President George Bush. As long as the threat is abated, as long as 9/11 keeps receding in the national memory, it's only too easy for most Americans to turn a blind eye, to keep their mouths shut, to believe these uncertain times call for extraordinary measures.

One of the problems with the advance of robotic weaponry such as unmanned aircraft is that it is anesthetizing, reducing U.S. casualties (a good thing), but also numbing us to the inevitable human toll of war (not so good). People die in war, and there is no way to guarantee that all of those we kill are our enemies.

But Obama's GOP rival, Mitt Romney, is quite unlikely to chastise Obama over his aerial war. Romney has hired much of Bush's old neoconservative foreign policy team, a group mired in resentment and envy that Obama brought Osama bin Laden to justice, not Bush. In an irrational effort to paint Obama as a weak commander in chief, Romney makes up threats (Russia), pledges to increase spending on a bloated military and castigates the president over Iran. Don't expect Romney to act as a voice of restraint.

The president's most disturbing decision was his apparent approval of last year's deadly strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, an American who had taken refuge in Yemen to pursue his war against his homeland. Al-Awlaki was a genuine problem. His jihadist rants against the U.S. inspired the shooting spree by Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who mowed down fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

U.S. intelligence officials claim al-Awlaki had gone well beyond mere rhetoric to providing operational support to his fellow terrorists, but he was still an American citizen who should have been given the full protections of the U.S. Constitution. (Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in a drone strike.)

I have little use for Ron Paul's politics, but he issued a principled criticism of al-Awlaki's assassination: "If the American people accept this blindly and casually, that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad."

The New York Times has reported that Obama oversees a highly secret "kill list" compiled by his intelligence advisers, reserving to himself the right to decide which alleged enemy moves up into the crosshairs of those predators. I don't envy the president the staggering burdens of his office, but the account was chilling.

A spate of recent news reports outlining Obama's strategies to counter threats have prompted Republicans to complain of selective leaks designed to boost the president's image, and a bipartisan array of senators has complained that the news stories compromise the effectiveness of those strategies. They want the leaks investigated.

The use of unmanned drones, however, is hardly a secret, despite the fact that the program remains classified. The public needs more information about the president's drone war, not less. At the very least, the Obama administration ought to release the memos its lawyers have written to justify its "targeted killings." That would be a step toward the accountability that the citizens of a democracy deserve. After all, the Obama administration is carrying out its drone war in our names.

http://news.yahoo.com/semi-secret-drone-war-needs-public-accountability-050012435.html

comments

ll, for once Cynthia actually does kind of have a point. I'll wager that most of the libs, who thought Bush was evil incarnate for ordering water boarding, i.e. simulated drowning, are down with Obama serving as judge, jury, and executioner of those he deems worthy of receiving the Death Penalty for unproven crimes against the US. I also expect that most libs are passionate in their opposition to executions in the US after a person is found guilty by a jury and has numerous appeals available, but sit on their hands when Obama orders the execution of suspects who have been convicted of nothing cause they never got a trial.

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Personally, I'm on the horns of a dilemma. I support getting the bad guys. But, I'm concerned about killing everyone who happens to be standing in the general vicinity of the bad guy. Not to mention annnointing Obama Judge, Jury, and Executioner.

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It's not so much the outcome I worry about, it's the criteria used to reached that outcome that concerns me.

To err is human, lord knows I'm human, but what standard is being used to say, "This person is an enemy of the state?"

What recourse does the 'Accused' have when the government can label you a terrorist and you either get sent to some foreign prison without a phone call or blown up by a robot?

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A lot of people are missing the fact that by capturing these people, we could gain intelligence information on what they are planning. This way, we are just encouraging vengeful people to take their place and plan what to do next.

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This editorial, if anyone listens or reads, is an attempt to justify the leaks coming from this administration regarding the use of drones to eliminate terrorist who kill anyone (not just Americans) at random.

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what point does a US citizen lose that citizenship, not by an overt declaration, but by actions against the country of his birth? Do the principles defined in the US Constitution apply to everyone, or just to citizens and residents of the US? I am sure that there could be a lively debate on this question, but if you are not a "citizen" any longer and you are actively trying to harm the US, what makes you any different from Sadam or Bin Laden?

Jolie Rouge

06-16-2012, 12:41 PM

This nugget regarding Obama explains a great deal
Ed Lasky June 9, 2012

Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek has written a new book, Kill or Capture, about the Obama administration's anti-terror policies, containing much information that obviously came from insiders, some of which is now the subject of demands for a special prosecutor to investigate leaks. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Moyar quotes a passage that is frighteningly illuminating about the management style of the man upon whom our national security depends:

In one of his most telling passages, Mr. Klaidman depicts a passive commander in chief who often procrastinated in the hopes that problems would go away, a sharp divergence from the engaged and proactive president of the official narrative. "The president's own elusiveness created confusion about who was in control of policy," Mr. Klaidman writes. "In this vacuum his advisers fought brutally, each side invoking the president in support of its cause."

This seems to epxlain the president's policy toward Iran. It also explains why we should be frightened about his ability to contain the threat to our survival posed by Iranian nuclear arms

Obama's passivity and dilatory approach towards decision-making gave rise to the characterization that he tended to vote "present" when he was a legislator in Illinois. When he became president, his fear of making decisions led one of his own advisers to sum up his foreign and national security policy as one of "leading from behind" -- how far we have come since John Kennedy's stirring words!

Perhaps this is a reflection of his refusal to listen to experts -- and to rely on himself and a small circle of "advisers" from Cook County who are sorely lacking in experience themselves. According to a recent Vanity Fair article, he's a "total introvert" and "he doesn't need people." For some odd reasons he seems dependent on Valerie Jarrett -- a person he admits he runs all his decisions through. He also seems to have outsourced decision-making to the likes of political strategist David Plouffe and David Axlerod (Axelrod, for example, attended meetings between Obama and Israeli leaders and attended Oval Office meetings when Obama compiled his "kill list" of drone targets). This troika has zero geopolitical experience.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/06/this_nugget_regarding_obama_explains_a_great_deal. html#ixzz1xzEQeCIy

Jolie Rouge

07-30-2012, 11:12 AM

Book bombshell: Obama canceled Bin Laden ‘kill’ raid three times at Jarrett’s urging
Published: 9:10 PM 07/29/2012

At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL mission, according to an explosive new book scheduled for release August 21. The Daily Caller has seen a portion of the chapter in which the stunning revelation appears.

In ”Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,“ Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the “kill” mission in January 2011, again in February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.

Miniter, a two-time New York Times best-selling author, cites an unnamed source with Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.

Obama administration officials also said after the raid that the president had delayed giving the order to kill the arch-terrorist the day before the operation was carried out, in what turned out to be his fourth moment of indecision. At the time, the White House blamed the delay on unfavorable weather conditions near bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

But when Miniter obtained that day’s weather reports from the U.S. Air Force Combat Meteorological Center, he said, they showed ideal conditions for the SEALs to carry out their orders. “President Obama’s greatest success was actually his greatest failure,” Miniter told The Daily Caller Friday. ”Leading From Behind,“ he said, traces the arc of six key Obama administration decisions, and shows how the president made them — and, often, failed to make them.

Another chapter, he told TheDC, concerns the push to pass the Affordable Care Act. The president, Miniter said, was less interested than then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in passing his own signature legislative achievement.

Osama bin Laden steered the global operations of the al-Qaida terror network until his death last year at the hands of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six. The president and his surrogates have made the terrorist leader’s death a focal point in Obama’s re-election campaign, painting Obama as a decisive leader who took down America’s greatest mortal enemy.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/29/obama-canceled-bin-laden-kill-raid-three-times-valerie-jarrett/

Okay, while the usual caveats about unnamed sources apply, this just nauseates me. The man simply does not get his role. Message to “President” Obama: you are the Commander in Chief. You are in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Osama bin Laden massacred nearly 3,000 of our people in an act of jihad — war. When you have him in the crosshairs, you whack him; you do not go running to your political nursemaid to see if it’s a good idea.

And who the Hell is Valerie Jarrett, a corrupt slum lord, that she should have what appears to be a deciding voice on military operations?

Next time, President Obama Short Pants, just let Jarrett handle the press conferences. She’s clearly the one in charge.

http://sistertoldjah.com/archives/2012/07/30/president-gutsy-call-turns-out-to-be-president-valerie-may-i/

pepperpot

07-30-2012, 11:34 AM

In ”Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,“ Richard Miniter writes that Obama canceled the “kill” mission in January 2011, again in February, and a third time in March. Obama’s close adviser Valerie Jarrett persuaded him to hold off each time, according to the book.
I wish they would have provided the reason cited as to WHY the order was cancelled. There may have been reasons, such as "chatter" to find out about a pending terrorist plan? If they took him out, would they lose their position? Would the "plan" have been accelerated? Did the delay in taking him out lead to a thwart of a plan?

It could be a number of things. Hopefully none of them are it wasn't politically favorable for him to do so, so far in advance from a possible re-election. Face it, it's good PR for a sitting president to take out such an adversary, voters have short memories.:twitch

Jolie Rouge

07-30-2012, 12:32 PM

I wish they would have provided the reason cited as to WHY the order was cancelled. There may have been reasons, such as "chatter" to find out about a pending terrorist plan? If they took him out, would they lose their position? Would the "plan" have been accelerated? Did the delay in taking him out lead to a thwart of a plan?

I agree - there are quite a few reasons why they may have deceided to "wait" ... not enough information ... and I also have a certain distrust of "unnamed sources"

Jolie Rouge

07-30-2012, 08:45 PM

White House Spokesman Calls Miniter’s Bin Laden Bombshell “a Fabrication”,
Miniter Responds: “Let’s See the Timeline”
July, 30, 2012 — nicedeb

http://nicedeb.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/leading-from-behind.jpg?w=780

Oh yeah, this is getting good.

The White House’s principal deputy press secretary, Josh Earnest, filling in for Jay Carney, at today’s WH press briefing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya0uIMSH1q8 dismissed the revelation in Miniter’s book, ”Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him", that Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest and most trusted aide, talked Obama out of executing the bin Laden operation on three separate occasions.

Neil Munro of The Daily Caller reports: http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/30/author-challenges-white-house-to-show-timeline-of-bin-laden-raid/#ixzz229L8MV43

“That is an utter fabrication,” Earnest said. “It seems pretty clear that Mr. Miniter doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he insisted, adding that Jarrett “was not ‘read in’ on the operation on the mission against Osama bin Laden.”

“So I wouldn’t put any stock into that vignette — or into the book itself,” he added.

Earnest’s answer was focused on Jarrett’s role. He did not explicitly deny Miniter’s revelation that the raid was delayed three times.

Miniter, a well respected investigative journalist, and best selling author, responded by demanding that the white House back up its denials with some documentation.

“I call on them to release the full [planning] timeline, starting in October 2010, of each of the major decisions that the president made relating to the bin Laden mission,” author Richard Miniter told The Daily Caller.

TheDC asked Miniter if his inside sources might go public with their accounts of presidential indecision. “Yes, yes,” he replied. “There is a chance.”

Any confrontation between national security officials and President Barack Obama in the months preceding the 2012 election could hamper to his chances of winning a second term.

That is putting it mildly. The administration and its media flunkies spiked the football, and repeatedly called the decision to take out bin Laden a “gutsy call” by Obama.

Their partisan end zone dance cheapened what all Americans should see as a national security triumph -sadly for this administration, its only foreign policy triumph.

Read the rest of the report at the Daily Caller http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/30/author-challenges-white-house-to-show-timeline-of-bin-laden-raid/#ixzz229aw8i2A as Munro makes the excellent case that Obama’s claims of national security competence are severely undermined by the rising power of Islamist political parties, and by Iran’s rush to develop nuclear weapons.

http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/white-house-spokesman-calls-miniters-bin-laden-bombshell-a-fabrication-miniter-responds-lets-see-the-timeline/

Jolie Rouge

08-15-2012, 04:15 PM

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Special ops group attacks Obama over bin Laden bragging, leaks
By Mark Hosenball | Reuters – 3 hrs ago.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives is set to launch a media campaign, including TV ads, that scolds President Barack Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and argues that high-level leaks are endangering American lives.

Leaders of the group, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, say it is nonpartisan and unconnected to any political party or presidential campaign. It is registered as a so-called social welfare group, which means its primary purpose is to further the common good and its political activities should be secondary.

In the past, military exploits have been turned against presidential candidates by outside groups, most famously the Swift Boat ads in 2004 that questioned Democratic nominee John Kerry's Vietnam War service.

The OPSEC group says it is not political and aims to save American lives. Its first public salvo is a 22-minute film that includes criticism of Obama and his administration. The film, to be released on Wednesday, was seen in advance by Reuters.

"Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not," Ben Smith, identified as a Navy SEAL, says in the film.

"As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy," Smith continues. "It will get Americans killed."

An Obama campaign official said: "No one in this group is in a position to speak with any authority on these issues and on what impact these leaks might have, and it's clear they've resorted to making things up for purely political reasons."

Obama has highlighted his foreign policy record on the campaign trail, emphasizing how he presided over the killing of bin Laden, as well as how he ended the war in Iraq and set a timeline for winding down the war in Afghanistan.

However, Obama has come under sharp attack from Republican lawmakers who have accused his administration of being behind high-level leaks of classified information.

They have pointed to media reports about clandestine drone attacks, informants planted in al Qaeda affiliates and alleged cyber-warfare against Iran that Republicans say were calculated to promote Obama's image as a strong leader in an election year.

The White House has denied leaking classified information.

The president of Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, Scott Taylor, is a former Navy SEAL who in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Virginia.

Calling itself "OPSEC" for short - which in spy jargon means "operational security" - the anti-leak group incorporated last June in Delaware, a state that has the most secretive corporate registration rules in the U.S.

It also set itself up as a nonprofit organization under section 501(c)4 of the U.S. Tax Code, allowing it to keep donors' identities secret. Spokesmen for the group declined to discuss its sources of financing.

Several group representatives say their main motivation for setting up OPSEC was dismay at recent detailed media leaks about sensitive operations.

In an interview, Taylor denied OPSEC had any political slant. He described the group as a "watchdog organization" but added that the current administration "has certainly leaked more than others."

OPSEC spokesmen said the group has about $1 million at its disposal and hopes to raise more after the release of its mini-documentary, entitled "Dishonorable Disclosures," which aims, in spy-movie style, to document a recent spate of leaks regarding sensitive intelligence and military operations.

Following the film's release, OPSEC's spokesmen said, the group expects to produce TV spots on the anti-leak theme that will air in a number of states, including Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada - key battleground states.

Fred Rustmann, a former undercover case officer for the CIA who is a spokesman for the group, insisted its focus on leaks was "not a partisan concern." But he said the current administration had been leaking secrets "to help this guy get re-elected, at the expense of peoples' lives.... We want to see that they don't do this again."

Chad Kolton, a former spokesman for the office of Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration who now represents OPSEC, also said the group's message and make-up are nonpolitical.

"You'll see throughout the film that concern about protecting the lives of intelligence and Special Forces officers takes precedence over partisanship," he said.

Responding to criticism about the president taking credit for the bin Laden raid, an Obama campaign official pointed to an interview with CNN last month in which Admiral Bill McRaven, commander of the raid, said: "At the end of the day, make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions, that was instrumental in the planning process, because I pitched every plan to him."

"I think Admiral McRaven knows more about the President's role in the bin Laden operation than this group," the campaign official said.

http://news.yahoo.com/special-ops-group-attacks-obama-over-bin-laden-011757844.html

Jolie Rouge

08-21-2012, 10:24 AM

August 20, 2012
Obama Takes On Navy SEALS: 'I Don't Take These Folks Too Seriously'
By BYRON TAU

President Obama said Monday that he isn't too worried about two groups of military veterans running campaign ads against him.

Last week, two groups — Special Operations Speaks and Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund - formed to criticize Obama on national security policy, the Osama bin Laden raid and intelligence leaks. “I don’t take these folks too seriously. One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary," Obama told The Virginian-Pilot. "You’ve got another who was a tea party candidate in a recent election."

"This kind of stuff springs up before election time," Obama said.

http://nation.foxnews.com/barack-obama/2012/08/20/obama-takes-navy-seals-i-dont-take-these-folks-too-seriously#ixzz24CbUTdqF

comments

Still waiting for the Fast & furious papers. Maybe the deficit plan? Immigration? Jobs? Anything?

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Obama only takes his golf scores seriously! Doesn't know anything about military or leadership anyway.

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The Commander in Chief doesn't take the SEALS seriously???? What is wrong with this man? How could anyone possibly think we can put up with four more years of this arrogance?

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t's pretty obvious to me that our current president has never held any respect for our military, unless he thinks they can help his popularity or further his agenda in some manner. Of course he tries to dismiss and belittle them now. Even he knows that they respect and hold allegience to the office, not the man.

Jolie Rouge

09-11-2012, 10:01 AM

So why isn't Obama attending about half of his daily intelligence briefings? Could campaigning be more important? Ya think? His advisers have talked up how much of a leader Obama is at these briefings in the way he drills them with questions. Yet, now that he's not attending them, they think it's just fine if he reads the briefing and doesn't actually talk to them.

Why is Obama skipping more than half of his daily intelligence meetings?
By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: September 10 2012 The Washington Post

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor about the findings, and whether there were any instances where the president attended the intelligence meeting that were not on his public schedule. Vietor did not dispute the numbers, but said the fact that the president, during a time of war, does not attend his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis is “not particularly interesting or useful.” He says that the president reads his PDB every day, and he disagreed with the suggestion that there is any difference whatsoever between simply reading the briefing book and having an interactive discussion of its contents with top national security and intelligence officials where the president can probe assumptions and ask questions. “I actually don’t agree at all,” Vietor told me in an e-mail, “The president gets the information he needs from the intelligence community each day.”

Yet Vietor also directed me to a Post story written this year in which Obama officials discuss the importance of the intelligence meeting and extol how brilliantly the president runs it. “Obama reads the PDB ahead of time and comes to the morning meeting with questions. Intelligence briefers are there to answer those questions, expand on a point or raise a new issue,” The Post reported. “One regular participant in the roughly 500 Oval Office sessions during Obama’s presidency said the meetings show a president consistently participating in an exploration of foreign policy and intelligence issues.”

Not so consistently, it seems. Since Obama officials have actively promoted the way the president runs his daily intelligence meeting as evidence of his national security leadership (even releasing a photo of him receiving the briefing on an iPad), it is fair to ask why he skips the daily meeting so often.

According to former officials who have detailed knowledge of the PDB process, having the daily meeting — and not just reading the briefing book — is enormously important both for the president and those who prepare the brief. For the president, the meeting is an opportunity to ask questions of the briefers, probe assumptions and request additional information. For those preparing the brief, meeting with the president on a daily basis gives them vital, direct feedback from the commander in chief about what is on his mind, how they can be more responsive to his needs, and what information he may have to feed back into the intelligence process. This process cannot be replicated on paper.

While the Bush records are not yet available electronically for analysis, officials tell me the former president held his intelligence meeting six days a week, no exceptions — usually with the vice president, the White House chief of staff, the national security adviser, the director of National Intelligence, or their deputies, and CIA briefers in attendance. Once a week, he held an expanded Homeland Security briefing that included the Homeland Security adviser, the FBI director and other homeland security officials. Bush also did more than 100 hour-long “deep dives” in which he invited intelligence analysts into the Oval Office to get their unvarnished and sometimes differing views. Such meetings deepened the president’s understanding of the issues and helped analysts better understand the problems with which he was wrestling.

When Obama forgoes this daily intelligence meeting, he is consciously placing other priorities ahead of national security. As The Post story that the Obama White House sent me put it, “Process tells you something about an administration. How a president structures his regular morning meeting on intelligence and national security is one way to measure his personal approach to foreign policy.”

Indeed it is. So is how often he holds it. With President Obama, it seems, the regular morning meeting on intelligence is not so regular.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-is-obama-skipping-more-than-half-of-his-daily-intelligence-meetings/2012/09/10/6624afe8-fb49-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html

Jolie Rouge

10-11-2012, 06:43 AM

Father of fallen Marine outraged over condolence ‘form letter’ from president
posted at 11:56 am on October 10, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

The choice on Nov. 6 is simple. On the one hand you have Mitt Romney, a greedy, money-hungry capitalist who doesn’t care about the middle class and wants to eliminate Big Bird. On the other you have President Barack Obama, who so identifies with the common man and feels his pain that he believes empathy should be a factor in matters of jurisprudence.

Well, that’s what he says anyway. His compassion was in short supply when he sent out a letter of condolence to Houston resident Tom Logan, whose son, USMC Cpl. Joseph D. Logan, was killed Jan. 19, 2012 in a helicopter crash. The elder Logan insists that the letter, which arrived by UPS truck four months after Cpl. Logan’s death, “opened up a wound in our heart you can’t fix. You can’t send another letter. You can’t make it right.”

Apart from the lateness of its arrival, the letter struck Logan as impersonal, a sense that was confirmed when he shared it with station KPRC in Houston. Reporters there compared the letter with two others Obama had sent to families of soldiers killed in action. Except for the name, rank, and service branch, the letters were identical: All were typed, short (about a third of a page), and impersonal. The letters, both dated May 9, can be viewed here and here.

Although there is no standard protocol regarding presidential condolence letters, one might expect a man who places so much importance on compassion to reach out in a more heartfelt way to families who suffered so grievous a loss. His much-maligned predecessor, George W. Bush, did. He sent personal letters of sympathy, some of them handwritten, to each of the 4,000 troops who died in Iraq and Afghanistan during his two terms in office. He also met personally with 500 grieving families. But the true test of his commitment to being what he called “comforter in chief” was a clandestine operation he and Dick Cheney set up inside the White House to provide aid and comfort to families of slain servicemen. These activities, moreover, were kept off the public calendar and often done behind the backs of the media.

But Obama’s biggest failing as “comforter in chief” was his decision to send a form letter to the families of fallen SEAL Team 6 members following an especially deadly mission in Afghanistan in August of 2011. The 30 troops who died in that conflict deserved better, and so did their families.

In fairness, Obama has sent at least one personal condolence letter since taking the oath of office. It was to the family of rapper Heavy D, who died at 44 this past August. Part of the letter, which Al Sharpton read at the funeral reads”
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/08/obama-sent-personal-letter-of-condolence-to-rappers-family-sent-form-letter-to-families-of-fallen-seals/

We extend our heartfelt condolences at this difficult time. He will be remembered for his infectious optimism and many contributions to American music. Please know that you and your family will be in our thoughts and prayers.

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/10/10/father-of-fallen-marine-outraged-over-condolence-form-letter-from-president/

And don’t forget that Obama took the time out of his busy schedule to personally call Sandra Fluke on the phone to give her encouragement when she demanded that the taxpayers pay for her birth control.

He said that he did that because he was thinking of his daughters, and that he wanted them to think about speaking up and engaging in a thoughtful discussion of issues. Yep. That’s what he said.

Apparently both he (and Sandra) believe that one way of “thoughtfully” approach an issue is by telling lawmakers that contraception and abortion are 100% purely a private matter, but that, it is also fine and dandy to loudly demand that people and institutions who are morally opposed to birth control and abortion, must nevertheless damn well pay for them for others, under the penalty of law!

Very thoughtful, don’t ya know?

Anyway, when it comes to a letter of condolence to the parent or spouse of a soldier who was killed in combat fighting on behalf of the people of the United States, why, get out the auto pen and just send ‘em DOD Condolence Form 1-01!

He’s just too busy with phone calls to Sandra and others like her, or playing golf, or goin’ to see Dave Letterman, or Beyonce, to even think about havin’ to scratch out a personal note!

Given the use of the autopen I doubt he’s ever even seen most or perhaps even all of those letters!

Jolie Rouge

11-01-2012, 09:13 PM

Obama in Wisconsin: Al Qaeda has been decimated
By Doug Powers • November 1, 2012 04:31 PM

Earlier in Wisconsin, President Obama said this: http://twitchy.com/2012/11/01/outrageous-delusional-obama-in-wis-says-al-qaida-is-decimated/

I was waiting for him to stop himself: “Did I say Al Qaeda has been decimated? I meant the economy… sorry.” But it wasn’t to be. Yes, Osama Bin Laden is dead, but making that synonymous with the decimation of Al Qaeda is not only ridiculous, but in light of recent events in Libya, outrageous and dangerous.

Using the obsolete definition of “decimated,” Obama basically said Al Qaeda is at 90 percent strength. https://mobile.twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/264033388489486337?p=v# The modern meaning is “to destroy a great number or proportion of.” The former isn’t brag-worthy, and applying the latter is to exaggerate more than Joe Biden describing the size of the Romney/Ryan tax cut. https://twitter.com/GT327/statuses/264036676752506880

In addition to Libya, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are still very active elsewhere: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/22/politics/fact-check-al-qaeda/index.html

“Even as al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan struggles to remain relevant, the terrorist threat we face has become more diverse,” Olsen said. “Al Qaeda has turned to other groups to carry out attacks and to advance its ideology. These groups are based in an array of countries, including Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and in Iraq.”

Of particular concern is al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which operates in Yemen.

When Obama took office in 2009, AQAP was a newly formed affiliate, the result of a merger between al Qaeda forces fleeing Saudi Arabia and jihadists in Yemen. A locally focused group quickly became a more powerful al Qaeda franchise soon plotting attacks outside Yemen’s borders.

First there was the failed attempt by a suicide bomber in the summer of 2009 to kill the Saudi prince who ran the country’s counterterrorism campaign. By the end of that year, AQAP was behind the attempt by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit on Christmas Day. Plans by AQAP to blow up cargo planes destined for the United States in 2010 and to put a suicide bomber aboard a passenger aircraft earlier this year were thwarted by U.S. and allied intelligence services.

UPI published this just yesterday: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2012/10/31/Al-Qaida-mounting-a-comeback-in-Iraq/UPI-90581351702185/

Nearly a year after U.S. forces left the country there are signs al-Qaida is mounting a comeback in Iraq, a U.S. inspector general found.

U.S. combat forces left Iraq in December 2011 according to the terms outlined in a status of forces agreement. A quarterly report by U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen said the number of violent attacks in Iraq is up to levels not seen in more than two years.

The report said the civil war in neighboring Syria was contributing to regional instability.

“Domestic security also has declined amid regular reports of a reviving al-Qaida in Iraq,” the report stated. “Overall in Iraq, violence this quarter was the worst in two years.”

But after making an entrance today like the one in the video below, Obama wasn’t about to go to the microphone and say “as evidenced by the Benghazi attack, Al Qaeda is still very much active.” They say Team Obama’s plan is to make him look more “presidential” now, and today in Wisconsin we saw Air Force One, a bomber jacket, confident jog, “Forward!™” signs (note the period has been replaced by an exclamation point for the final stretch) and teleprompters — reality can wait until after the election: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o810Mr9z8Vg&feature=player_embedded

**Written by Doug Powers http://michellemalkin.com/2012/11/01/obama-wisconsin-al-qaeda-decimated/

Jolie Rouge

02-11-2013, 08:25 PM

SEAL Who Allegedly Shot and Killed Bin Laden Reveals Stunning New Details About the Raid
— And You Won’t Believe How He Says the Gov’t Has Treated Him Since
Feb. 11, 2013 2:28pm ~ Erica Ritz

Phil Bronstein spent more than a year researching a piece published Monday in Esquire http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313 on the life of the Navy SEAL who allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. He formed a friendship with the man, whom he refers to only as “the Shooter” throughout the piece for safety reasons, learning new details about the famous raid and — more shockingly — the Shooter’s life post-retirement.

The Shooter isn’t exactly able to write on his résumé that he’s the man who killed Osama Bin Laden– details about the mission are strictly classified and he adheres to a “quiet professional” code. The Shooter says he has no interest in making himself a public figure like the author of No Easy Day, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/08/22/navy-seals-first-person-account-of-bin-laden-raid-coming-out-sept-11/ who was also on the raid and was one of the men to shoot Bin Laden after the terrorist had been killed by the Shooter. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/09/mark-owen-60-minutes-interview_n_1869417.html

So where is he now?

Apparently, in the same boat as many of America’s other veterans.

This is a man who recalls the Osama bin Laden raid not from images on a television, but from a first-person perspective. He related grisly new details in his first-ever interview, even sharing what he was thinking at the time:

[Bin Laden] looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn’t appear to be hit…

For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That’s him, boom, done.

In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.

And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I’ve ever done, or the worst thing I’ve ever done? This is real and that’s him. Holy sht.
[...]
His forehead was gruesome. It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face. The American public doesn’t want to know what that looks like.

So where is he now? The Esquire article explains: http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313

“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

“Personally,” his wife told me recently, “I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,” when her husband joined ST6.

When the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs’ homes.

The Shooter and his wife are actually separated, but still live in the same house to save money. The $60,000 a year he made with extra bonuses for different activities has dried up, and they haven’t yet found a way to replace it.

“We’re actually looking into changing my name,” she explained. “Changing the kids’ names, taking my husband’s name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.”

According to Bronstein, the only assistance The Shooter was offered was a witness-protection like program where the national hero would be “driving a beer truck in Milwaukee.” The family would have to sever all connections to their former life.

A former SEAL and mentor to the Shooter noted: “These guys have millions of dollars’ worth of knowledge and training in their heads…All sorts of executive function skills. That shouldn’t go to waste.”

Retired Marine major general Mike Myatt added: “It’s criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked…They’re the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I’d try to get my hands on any one of them.”

http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Screen-Shot-2013-02-11-at-1.28.35-PM-620x395.png
School students supporting Pakistani political and Islamic party Jammat-e-Islami (JI), march during an anti-US protest rally in Karachi on December 19, 2011

Bronstein says one conversation in particular exemplifies the abandonment: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/11/the-navy-seal-who-killed-osama-bin-laden-is-now-uninsured/

“I left SEALs on Friday,” [the Shooter] said the next time I saw him. It was a little more than thirty-six months before the official retirement requirement of twenty years of service. “My health care for me and my family stopped at midnight Friday night. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You’re out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your sixteen years. Go [f--k] yourself.”

The Esquire article concludes with the Shooter’s perception of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, the author adding that a line from the film has been haunting him.

The tactics “sucked,” the Shooter said, and “the mission in the damn movie took way too long,” but other than that he said he was largely pleased.

But the real-life risks and ramifications were summed up by the actor playing the CIA station chief, who warned: “Once you’re on their list, you never get off.”

...

UPDATE: The blog Stars and Stripes is reporting that the Navy SEAL that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden actually does have health care.
http://www.stripes.com/blogs/the-ruptured-duck/the-ruptured-duck-1.160117/esquire-article-wrongly-claims-seal-who-killed-bin-laden-is-denied-healthcare-1.207506

Except the claim about health care is wrong. And no servicemember who does less than 20 years gets a pension, unless he has to medically retire.

Like every combat veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the former SEAL, who is identified in the story only as “the Shooter”, is automatically eligible for five years of free healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But the story doesn’t mention that.

[...]

The writer, Phil Bronstein, who heads up the Center for Investigative Reporting, stands by the story. He said the assertion that the government gave the SEAL “nothing” in terms of health care is both fair and accurate, because the SEAL didn’t know the VA benefits existed.

“No one ever told him that this is available,” Bronstein said.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/11/seal-who-allegedly-shot-and-killed-bin-laden-reveals-stunning-new-details-about-the-raid-and-you-wont-believe-how-he-says-the-govt-has-treated-him-since/

Jolie Rouge

11-19-2013, 08:05 PM

If this doesn't make you think..you're not much of a thinker...pass it on..very interesting...

SEAL Team 6 Bin Laden Shooter Says Suspect Did Not Look Like Bin Laden – Must See Video

(BIN) -- During a 60 Minutes interview, a SEAL Team 6 member who fired at a subject alleged to be Osama Bin Laden, said that he did not recognize the suspect ...
http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/seal-team-6-bin-laden-shooter-says-suspect-did-not-look-like-bin-laden-must-see-video

Jolie Rouge

11-19-2013, 08:10 PM

Puts a differnt view on this .... don't you think ?

Official: Bin Laden buried at sea
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press – Mon May 2, 3:40 am ET

WASHINGTON – A U.S. official says Osama bin Laden has been buried at sea.

After bin Laden was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in Pakistan, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition. That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist would have been difficult, the official said. So the U.S. decided to bury him at sea.

The official, who spoke Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters, did not immediately say where that occurred.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110502/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden_burial

comments

WHAAAAAAT?!?!

I must be turning into a conspiracy theorist nutjob, because this is all too convenient. Out of the blue, we are told that Bin Laden is dead, ok. Covert ops with Navy Seals, big shootout at hideout, yep. But his body buried at sea? 24 hours within death? to HONOR him and his islamis beliefs? THAT is where I draw the line. The american people deserved better.

--

Don't believe everything you read,something feels real wrong with this picture.Oh sorry , there was no picture.

No pictures ... no body ... most of the Seal Team killed in a 'copter crash ... there go most of the witnesses

Jolie Rouge

11-20-2013, 09:13 PM

'SCANDAL GREATER THAN BENGHAZI': Congress to Probe Crash that Killed SEAL Team 6 Members...

(THE HILL) -- Congress has launched an investigation of the helicopter crash that killed 30 Americans in Afghanistan, including members of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 unit, The Hill has learned.

The victims’ families say the Pentagon hasn’t provided answers to their many questions about the deadly attack, which took place on Aug. 6, 2011, three months after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by Team 6 forces.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on National Security, told The Hill, “We’re going to dive into this.”

Chaffetz said he met with the victims’ families about a month ago in what he described as an “emotional” gathering. He is poised to send questions to the Pentagon and may hold hearings on the matter.

Charlie Strange, whose son Michael was among those killed, said he asked President Obama two years ago at Dover Air Force Base to fully investigate. The death toll in the crash was the largest of any single incident for the U.S. military during the Afghanistan war.

Obama praised Michael’s service to Strange, who responded, “I don’t need to know about my son. I need to know what happened to my son.”

The president promised he would investigate, Strange said, but he never heard back from the White House. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has provided him and others with incomplete and contradictory information, he said.

Administration leaks that emerged after the bin Laden raid prompted members of Team 6 to worry about their safety. For example, Michael Strange told his father he was working on a will before he returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, his father said.

Documents provided to the families indicate that the Pentagon doesn’t believe the SEALs were targeted in the wake of the bin Laden operation on May 1, 2011.

The Hill reviewed many of those documents which total more than 1,000 pages.

In a transcript, a Department of Defense official disputed claims that there was an “established ambush.” The official states, “it was a lucky shot of a low-level fighter that happened to be living . He heard all the activity and he happened to be in the right spot.”

Yet, Strange says insurgents were boasting on the Internet they had taken out Team 6 shortly after the helicopter crashed.

Shortly before the CH-47 Chinook helicopter took off on a rescue mission (operation Extortion 17), seven Afghan commandos who were on the passenger list were replaced by other Afghan military officials.

It remains unclear why the manifest was incorrect, raising red flags among the victims’ families. They have noted that their sons didn’t trust Afghan soldiers. One was quoted as saying, “They are loyal to the highest bidder.”

In the transcript related to the Pentagon’s probe, a Defense official confirmed that all seven names of the Afghan soldiers were incorrect.

The official said, “I cannot talk to the back story of why…” before being interrupted by another Department of Defense employee.

The Chinook was shot down by Afghan militants, and all 38 on board perished. Among the dead were 30 Americans, including 22 Navy SEALS, seven Afghan soldiers and one Afghan translator. Their bodies were later recovered, [I]but the helicopter’s black box was not. Pentagon officials have said that it could not be recovered, citing a flash flood that happened soon after the assault.

All the bodies were cremated in the Middle East. The Pentagon has defended the cremation to the soldiers’ families, saying the bodies were badly burned.

Chaffetz, however, said he has seen a photo of a deceased SEAL that was not. “The body I saw didn’t need to be cremated,” Chaffetz said, adding that the Department of Defense’s explanation of its failure to find the helicopter’s black box seems “awfully odd.”

The Utah congressman said the families deserve answers: “That’s why you do an investigation. I want to be as factual as I can.”

Two soldiers from Chaffetz’s district were killed in the attack.

Strange said he has visited Capitol Hill to discuss the issue with several members, including his own congressman, Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).

He has also met with Chaffetz and Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

Some of the victims’ families are being represented by Freedom Watch, which is headed by Larry Klayman.

“This is a scandal even greater than Benghazi,” Klayman said. “There we lost four valued American lives; here we sacrificed 30 American soldiers. The big question is were these brave Americans sold out by the Afghani government as payment to the Taliban for the death of bin Laden?”

Klayman, Strange and others have questioned why so many special ops were on one aircraft that they claim was not equipped for such a dangerous mission. They also want to know why members of Team 6 weren’t looked after just months after the bin Laden operation.

Strange said, “There was no eye in the sky tracking [the Chinook]. Why not?”

Klayman said, “The tragedy of Extortion 17 is a tragedy for all Americans. When we do not protect our brave fighting men and women, we put their lives in harm’s way…”

It is unclear how many of the 22 SEALS who died that summer were part of the bin Laden operation in Pakistan. One source said there were at least a couple who were involved in both.

Chaffetz says he is looking into how the Pentagon handled the situation post-attack.

During a ceremony at Bagram Air Base for the 38 killed, the deceased Afghan soldiers were loaded onto planes with the bodies of the U.S. forces. An imam spoke an Islamic prayer that included language on U.S. soldiers burning in hell. The families later used translators to find out what the imam had said. Chaffetz called those series of events “inappropriate.”

“My son Michael died,” Strange said. “I want to know, who made these calls?”

He is confident Chaffetz, Fitzpatrick and Issa will find out: “I know they are going to get answers.”

A Pentagon spokesman declined to answer detailed questions but said “the operational planning and execution of this mission was consistent with previous missions” and “was thoroughly investigated … we share in the grief of all of the families who lost their loved ones. The loss of 38 U.S. and Afghan military personnel was a tragic loss during a difficult campaign.”

Read more via THE HILL... http://thehill.com/homenews/house/313039-congress-to-probe-lethal-seal-crash

http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/scandal-greater-than-benghazi-congress-to-probe-crash-that-killed-seal-team-6-members#sthash.f4N1R4G1.dpbs

Jolie Rouge

11-20-2013, 09:17 PM

AMERICA IS APOLOGIZING TO AFGHANISTAN!?

I (Karen Vaughn, mother of fallen Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn) am BEGGING you to share this utterly disgraceful move by our "leadership." HOW DARE THEY????????????

Watch: American Betrayal by Obama Administration:
SEAL Team VI Ramp Ceremony:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjYBr1zNFWE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjYBr1zNFWE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nByJ5WscRy4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nByJ5WscRy4

From Extortion 17 - Demand A Congressional Hearing:

Yesterday evening, reports appeared in both the New York Times and Khaama Press in Afghanistan that the final hurdle for the Bilateral Security Agreement had been cleared and that US President Barack Obama would sign a letter to be read at the loya jirga. The letter would note that the US has made mistakes in its war efforts in Afghanistan. Further, the letter would convey an apology along with a pledge to avoid repeating the mistakes in which innocent Afghan citizens suffered.

"The assurances will include a pledge that U.S. troops will enter Afghan homes only in exceptional circumstances to save lives, as well as what has become a standard U.S. expression of regret for Afghan suffering and the loss of innocent lives in the 12-year-old war."

Our troops are restrained by Obama's rules of engagement as it is. Time to bring them all home. All.

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/p480x480/598483_454924031281052_175361666_n.jpg

Jolie Rouge

11-30-2013, 06:01 PM

Did you know that there were helicopter gunships in place that saw where the RPG's that killed the seal team six members on Extortion17 and could have fired back did not do so because there might have been collateral damage in the form of innocent deaths?

Since when has a war been fought on those terms and won?

This photo is from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nByJ5WscRy4 at 27.48

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/1466067_767488509944293_563463319_n.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nByJ5WscRy4

Jolie Rouge

02-12-2014, 09:27 PM

Email shows effort to shield bin Laden photos
The document shows that Adm. William McRaven told military officers that photos of bin Laden's remains should have been sent to the CIA or already destroyed.
1 day ago |By Stephen Braun of Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A newly-released email shows that 11 days after the killing of terror leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, the U.S. military's top special operations officer ordered subordinates to destroy any photographs of the al-Qaida founder's corpse or turn them over to the CIA.

The email was obtained under a freedom of information request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. The document, released Monday by the group, shows that Adm. William McRaven, who heads the U.S. Special Operations Command, told military officers on May 13, 2011 that photos of bin Laden's remains should have been sent to the CIA or already destroyed. Bin Laden was killed by a special operations team in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.

McRaven's order to purge the bin Laden material came 10 days after The Associated Press asked for the photos and other documents under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Typically, when a freedom of information request is filed to a government agency under the Federal Records Act, the agency is obliged to preserve the material sought — even if the agency later denies the request.

On May 3, 2011, the AP asked Special Operations Command's Freedom of Information/Privacy Act Division office for "copies of all e-mails sent from and to the U.S. government account or accounts" of McRaven referencing bin Laden. McRaven was then vice admiral.

A May 4, 2011 response from the command's FOIA office to the AP acknowledged the bin Laden document request and said it had been assigned for processing. AP did not receive a copy of the McRaven email obtained by Judicial Watch.

The Department of Defense FOIA office told the AP in a Feb. 29, 2012 letter that it could find no McRaven emails "responsive to your request" for communications about the bin Laden material.

The Special Operations Command is required to comply with rules established by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that dictate how long records must be retained. Its July 2012 manual requires that records about military operations and planning are to be considered permanent and after 25 years, following a declassification review, transferred to the National Archives.

Last July, a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general first disclosed McRaven's secret order, but the reference was not contained in the inspector general's final report. The email that surfaced Monday was the first evidence showing the actual order.

In a heavily blacked-out email addressed to "gentlemen," McRaven told his unnamed subordinates: "One particular item that I want to emphasize is photos; particularly UBLs remains. At this point - all photos should have been turned over to the CIA; if you still have them destroy them immediately or get them" a blacked-out location. UBL refers to bin Laden.

At the time the inspector general's report came out, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command referred questions back to the inspector general.

A CIA spokesman said at the time that "documents related to the raid were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the direction of the CIA director," then Leon Panetta. The CIA statement also said "records of a CIA operation such as the raid, which were created during the conduct of the operation by persons acting under the authority of the CIA director, are CIA records."

In a Jan. 31, 2014 letter to Judicial Watch in response to its request for all records relating to McRaven's "directive to purge," the Pentagon's office of general counsel said it had been able to locate only document — Raven's redacted email.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said Monday that the email "is a smoking gun, revealing both contempt for the rule of law and the American people's right to know."

http://news.msn.com/us/email-shows-effort-to-shield-bin-laden-photos?ocid=ansnews11

Jolie Rouge

03-22-2014, 07:13 PM

Readers tweeted out pictures of this morning’s edition of the New York Times in Pakistan, which displayed nothing in the space that many think should have contained a story on what Pakistan knew about Osama bin Laden.

Aysha Raja @aysharalam

This has been bothering me all morning. What is so offensive?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjTyk7gIAAAoZDX.jpg

12:50 AM - 22 Mar 2014

Aleem Maqbool @AleemMaqbool

What the front page of the New York Times looks like in Pakistan today

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjUmhNQIUAAsRKJ.jpg

4:37 AM - 22 Mar 2014

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjUMx3HCEAAeWhu.jpg

http://twitchy.com/2014/03/22/what-is-so-offensive-readers-notice-something-strange-about-this-mornings-nyt-in-pakistan-pics/

What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden
By CARLOTTA GALLMARCH 19, 2014

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/03/23/magazine/23pakistan1/23pakistan1-master675.jpg
Taliban recruits in 2008 in Quetta, Pakistan, where leading organizers of the Afghan insurgency are based.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, I went to live and report for The New York Times in Afghanistan. I would spend most of the next 12 years there, following the overthrow of the Taliban, feeling the excitement of the freedom and prosperity that was promised in its wake and then watching the gradual dissolution of that hope. A new Constitution and two rounds of elections did not improve the lives of ordinary Afghans; the Taliban regrouped and found increasing numbers of supporters for their guerrilla actions; by 2006, as they mounted an ambitious offensive to retake southern Afghanistan and unleashed more than a hundred suicide bombers, it was clear that a deadly and determined opponent was growing in strength, not losing it. As I toured the bomb sites and battlegrounds of the Taliban resurgence, Afghans kept telling me the same thing: The organizers of the insurgency were in Pakistan, specifically in the western district of Quetta. Police investigators were finding that many of the bombers, too, were coming from Pakistan.

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One of many madrasas in Quetta in 2008. Credit Alex Majoli/Magnum

In December 2006, I flew to Quetta, where I met with several Pakistani reporters and a photographer. Together we found families who were grappling with the realization that their sons had blown themselves up in Afghanistan. Some were not even sure whether to believe the news, relayed in anonymous phone calls or secondhand through someone in the community. All of them were scared to say how their sons died and who recruited them, fearing trouble from members of the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence service.

After our first day of reporting in Quetta, we noticed that an intelligence agent on a motorbike was following us, and everyone we interviewed was visited afterward by ISI agents. We visited a neighborhood called Pashtunabad, “town of the Pashtuns,” a close-knit community of narrow alleys inhabited largely by Afghan refugees who over the years spread up the hillside, building one-story houses from mud and straw. The people are working class: laborers, bus drivers and shopkeepers. The neighborhood is also home to several members of the Taliban, who live in larger houses behind high walls, often next to the mosques and madrasas they run.

The small, untidy entrance on the street to one of those madrasas, the Jamiya Islamiya, conceals the size of the establishment. Inside, a brick-and-concrete building three stories high surrounds a courtyard, and classrooms can accommodate 280 students. At least three of the suicide bombers we were tracing had been students here, and there were reports of more. Senior figures from Pakistani religious parties and provincial-government officials were frequent visitors, and Taliban members would often visit under the cover of darkness in fleets of S.U.V.s.

We requested an interview and were told that a female journalist would not be permitted inside, so I passed some questions to the Pakistani reporter with me, and he and the photographer went in. The deputy head of the madrasa denied that there was any militant training there or any forced recruitment for jihad. “We are educating the students in the Quran, and in the Quran it is written that it is every Muslim’s obligation to wage jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Quran. Then it is up to them to go to jihad.” He ended the conversation. Classes were breaking up, and I could hear a clamor rising as students burst out of their classrooms. Boys poured out of the gates onto the street. They looked spindly, in flapping clothes and prayer caps, as they darted off on their bikes and on foot, chasing one another down the street.

The reporter and the photographer joined me outside. They told me that words of praise were painted across the wall of the inner courtyard for the madrasa’s political patron, a Pakistani religious-party leader, and the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. This madrasa, like so many in Pakistan, was a source of the Taliban resurgence that President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders had long been warning about. In this nondescript madrasa in a poor neighborhood of Quetta, one of hundreds throughout the border region, the Taliban and Pakistan’s religious parties were working together to raise an army of militants.

“The madrasas are a cover, a camouflage,” a Pashtun legislator from the area told me. Behind the curtain, hidden in the shadows, lurked the ISI.

The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants. The linchpin in this two-pronged and at times apparently oppositional strategy is the ISI. It’s through that agency that Pakistan’s true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned — a fact that the United States was slow to appreciate, and later refused to face directly, for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation.

On our fifth and last day in Quetta, four plainclothes agents detained my photographer colleague at his hotel. They seized his computer and photo equipment and brought him to the parking lot of the hotel where I was staying. There they made him call and ask me to come down to talk to them. “I’m in trouble here,” he told me. It was after dark. I did not want to go down to the parking lot, but I told my colleague I would get help. I alerted my editor in New York and then tried to call Pakistani officials.

Before I could reach them, the agents broke through the door of my hotel room. The lintel splintered, and they burst in in a rush, snatching my laptop from my hands. There was an English-speaking officer wearing a smart new khaki-colored fleece. The other three, one of whom had the photographer in tow, were the muscle.

They went through my clothes and seized my notebooks and a cellphone. When one of the men grabbed my handbag, I protested. He punched me twice, hard, in the face and temple, and I fell back onto the coffee table, grabbing at the officer’s fleece to break my fall and smashing some cups when I landed. For a moment it was funny. I remember thinking it was just like a hotel-room bust-up in the movies.

Jolie Rouge

03-22-2014, 07:34 PM

Then I flew into a rage, berating them for barging into a woman’s bedroom and using physical violence. The officer told me that I was not permitted to visit the neighborhood of Pashtunabad and that it was forbidden to interview members of the Taliban. As they were leaving, I said the photographer had to stay with me. “He is Pakistani,” the officer said. “We can do with him whatever we want.” I knew they were capable of torture and murder, especially in Quetta, where the security services were a law unto themselves. The story they didn’t want out in the open was the government’s covert support for the militant groups that were propagating terrorism in Afghanistan and beyond.

Six months later, Pakistan blew up. In the spring of 2007 in Islamabad, female students from a madrasa attached to the Red Mosque were staging a sit-in to protest the demolition of several illegal mosques in the city. The Red Mosque stood at the center of Pakistan’s support for jihad in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. It was founded by a famed jihadi preacher, Maulana Muhammad Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1998, not long after he visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda blamed the killing on the Pakistani government at the time.

Abdullah’s sons inherited the mosque and continued its extremist teachings. The eldest, Maulana Abdul Aziz, delivered fiery Friday sermons excoriating Musharraf for his public stance on the fight against terrorism and his dealings with the American government. Despite an earlier reputation as a nonreligious bureaucrat, the younger brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, spoke of undergoing a conversion after his father’s death and a meeting with Bin Laden, and by 2007 he would not leave the Red Mosque compound for fear of arrest. He warned that ranks of suicide bombers would retaliate if the government moved against the student protesters.

With such leaders behind them, the students began staging vigilante actions in the streets. They were radical and obsessive, vowing to die rather than give up their protest. The government’s inaction only encouraged them. Several months after the protest began, a group of students made a midnight raid on a massage parlor and abducted several Chinese women.

Remonstrations from China, Pakistan’s most important regional ally, pushed Musharraf to take action. Pakistani Army rangers occupied a school across the street, and police officers and soldiers moved in to surround the mosque on July 3. Armed fighters appeared from the mosque, carrying rockets and assault rifles and taking up sandbagged positions on the mosque walls. Loudspeakers told the students that this was the time for bravery. A female student took over the microphone. “Allah, where is your help?” she asked in a quavering voice. “Destroy the enemies. Tear their hearts apart. Throw fireballs on them.”

Islamabad is a green, tranquil home for civil servants and diplomats, but for several days it resounded with gunfire and explosions. Crowds of worried parents arrived from all over the country to try to retrieve their children. The Red Mosque leaders tried to make the students stay. “They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” one father told me, and I realized then how premeditated this all was, how the girls were pawns in their plan to spark a revolution.

A week after the siege began, there was a ferocious battle. Elite Pakistani commandos rappelled from helicopters into the mosque and were raked with machine-gun fire. Perched in the mosque’s minarets and throughout its 75 rooms, the militants fought for 10 hours. They hurled grenades from bunkers and basements, and suicide bombers threw themselves at their attackers. The commandos found female students hiding in a bricked-up space beneath the stairs and led 50 women and girls to safety. Ghazi retreated to a basement in the compound. He died there as the last surviving fighters battled around him.

More than 100 people were killed in the siege, including 10 commandos. The ISI — despite having a long relationship with the mosque and its leaders, as well as two informers inside providing intelligence — played a strangely ineffective role. In a cabinet meeting after the siege, ministers questioned a senior ISI official about the intelligence service’s failure to prevent the militant action. “Who I meet in the evening and what I discuss is on your desk the next morning,” one minister told the official. “How come you did not know what was happening a hundred meters from the ISI headquarters?” The official sat in silence as ministers thumped their desks in a gesture of agreement.

“One hundred percent they knew what was happening,” a former cabinet minister who attended the meeting told me. The ISI allowed the militants to do what they wanted out of sympathy, he said. “The state is not as incompetent as people believe.”

The Pakistani military faced an immediate and vicious backlash. In the months that followed, there were strikes against convoys of soldiers in the northwest and a wave of suicide bombings against government, military and civilian targets throughout the country, including the army’s headquarters and the main ISI compound in Rawalpindi. After years of nurturing jihadists to fight its proxy wars, Pakistan was now experiencing the repercussions. “We could not control them,” a former senior intelligence official told a colleague and me six months after the Red Mosque siege.

Yet even as the militants were turning against their masters, Pakistan’s generals still sought to use them for their own purpose, most notoriously targeting Pakistan’s first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was preparing to fly home from nearly a decade in exile in the fall of 2007. Bhutto had forged a deal with Musharraf that would allow him to resign as army chief but run for another term as president, while clearing the way for her to serve as prime minister. Elections were scheduled for early 2008.

Bhutto had spoken out more than any other Pakistani politician about the dangers of militant extremism. She blamed foreign militants for annexing part of Pakistan’s territory and called for military operations into Waziristan. She declared suicide bombing un-Islamic and seemed to be challenging those who might target her. “I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman, they will burn in hell,” she said on the eve of her return.

She also promised greater cooperation with Afghanistan and the United States in combating terrorism and even suggested in an interview that she would give Western officials access to the man behind Pakistan’s program of nuclear proliferation, A. Q. Khan.

President Karzai of Afghanistan warned Bhutto that his intelligence service had learned of threats against her life. Informers had told the Afghans of a meeting of army commanders — Musharraf and his 10 most-powerful generals — in which they discussed a militant plot to have Bhutto killed.

On Oct. 18, 2007, Bhutto flew into Karachi. I was one of a crowd of journalists traveling with her. She wore religious amulets and offered prayers as she stepped onto Pakistani soil. Hours later, as she rode in an open-top bus through streets of chanting supporters, two huge bombs exploded, tearing police vans, bodyguards and party followers into shreds. Bhutto survived the blast, but some 150 people died, and 400 were injured.

Bhutto claimed that Musharraf had threatened her directly, and Karzai again urged her to take more precautions, asking his intelligence service to arrange an armored vehicle for her equipped with jammers to block the signals of cellphones, which are often used to detonate bombs. In the meantime, Bhutto pressed on with her campaign, insisting on greeting crowds of supporters from the open top of her vehicle.

In late December, a group of militants, including two teenage boys trained and primed to commit suicide bombings, arrived at the Haqqania madrasa in the northwestern town of Akora Khattak. The madrasa is a notorious establishment, housing 3,000 students in large, whitewashed residence blocks. Ninety-five percent of the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan have passed through its classrooms, a spokesman for the madrasa proudly told me. Its most famous graduate is Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran Afghan mujahedeen commander whose network has become the main instrument for ISI-directed attacks in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

The two young visitors who stopped for a night at the madrasa were escorted the next day to Rawalpindi, where Bhutto would be speaking at a rally on Dec. 27. As her motorcade left the rally, it slowed so she could greet supporters in the street. One of the two teenagers fired a pistol at her and then detonated his vest of explosives. Bhutto was standing in the roof opening of an armored S.U.V. She ducked into the vehicle at the sound of the gunfire, but the explosion threw the S.U.V. forward, slamming the edge of the roof hatch into the back of her head with lethal force. Bhutto slumped down into the vehicle, mortally wounded, and fell into the lap of her confidante and constant chaperone, Naheed Khan.

As Bhutto had long warned, a conglomeration of opponents wanted her dead and were all linked in some way. They were the same forces behind the insurgency in Afghanistan: Taliban and Pakistani militant groups and Al Qaeda, as well as the Pakistani military establishment, which included the top generals, Musharraf and Kayani. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances of Bhutto’s death found that each group had a motive and merited investigation.

Jolie Rouge

03-22-2014, 07:35 PM

Pakistani prosecutors later indicted Musharraf on charges of being part of a wider conspiracy to remove Bhutto from the political scene. There was “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that he did not provide her with adequate security because he wanted to ensure her death in an inevitable assassination attempt, the chief state prosecutor in her murder trial, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, told me. (Musharraf denied the accusations.) A hard-working, hard-charging man, Ali succeeded in having Musharraf arrested and was pushing to speed up the trial when he was shot to death on his way to work in May 2013.

Ali had no doubts that the mastermind of the plot to kill Bhutto was Al Qaeda. “It was because she was pro-American, because she was a strong leader and a nationalist,” he told me. A Pakistani security official who interviewed some of the suspects in the Bhutto case and other militants detained in Pakistan’s prisons came to the same conclusion. The decision to assassinate Bhutto was made at a meeting of the top council of Al Qaeda, the official said.

It took more than three years before the depth of Pakistan’s relationship with Al Qaeda was thrust into the open and the world learned where Bin Laden had been hiding, just a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy. In May 2011, I drove with a Pakistani colleague down a road in Abbottabad until we were stopped by the Pakistani military. We left our car and walked down a side street, past several walled houses and then along a dirt path until there it was: Osama bin Laden’s house, a three-story concrete building, mostly concealed behind concrete walls as high as 18 feet, topped with rusting strands of barbed wire. This was where Bin Laden hid for nearly six years, and where, 30 hours earlier, Navy SEAL commandos shot him dead in a top-floor bedroom.

After a decade of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and tracking Bin Laden, I was fascinated to see where and how he hid. He had dispensed with the large entourage that surrounded him in Afghanistan. For nearly eight years, he relied on just two trusted Pakistanis, whom American investigators described as a courier and his brother.

People knew that the house was strange, and one local rumor had it that it was a place where wounded Taliban from Waziristan recuperated. I was told this by Musharraf’s former civilian intelligence chief, who had himself been accused of having a hand in hiding Bin Laden in Abbottabad. He denied any involvement, but he did not absolve local intelligence agents, who would have checked the house. All over the country, Pakistan’s various intelligence agencies — the ISI, the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence — keep safe houses for undercover operations. They use residential houses, often in quiet, secure neighborhoods, where they lodge people for interrogation or simply enforced seclusion. Detainees have been questioned by American interrogators in such places and sometimes held for months. Leaders of banned militant groups are often placed in protective custody in this way. Others, including Taliban leaders who took refuge in Pakistan after their fall in Afghanistan in 2001, lived under a looser arrangement, with their own guards but also known to their Pakistani handlers, former Pakistani officials told me. Because of Pakistan’s long practice of covertly supporting militant groups, police officers — who have been warned off or even demoted for getting in the way of ISI operations — have learned to leave such safe houses alone.

The split over how to handle militants is not just between the ISI and the local police; the intelligence service itself is compartmentalized. In 2007, a former senior intelligence official who worked on tracking members of Al Qaeda after Sept. 11 told me that while one part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down militants, another part continued to work with them.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say.

The haul of handwritten notes, letters, computer files and other information collected from Bin Laden’s house during the raid suggested otherwise, however. It revealed regular correspondence between Bin Laden and a string of militant leaders who must have known he was living in Pakistan, including Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a pro-Kashmiri group that has also been active in Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar of the Taliban. Saeed and Omar are two of the ISI’s most important and loyal militant leaders. Both are protected by the agency. Both cooperate closely with it, restraining their followers from attacking the Pakistani state and coordinating with Pakistan’s greater strategic plans. Any correspondence the two men had with Bin Laden would probably have been known to their ISI handlers.

Bin Laden did not rely only on correspondence. He occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow militants, one Pakistani security official told me. “Osama was moving around,” he said, adding that he heard so from jihadi sources. “You cannot run a movement without contact with people.” Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.

Jolie Rouge

03-22-2014, 07:37 PM

What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden
By CARLOTTA GALLMARCH 19, 2014
continued ....

In 2009, Bin Laden reportedly traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas to meet with the militant leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Informally referred to as the “father of jihad,” Akhtar is considered one of the ISI’s most valuable assets. According to a Pakistani intelligence source, he was the commander accused of trying to kill Bhutto on her return in 2007, and he is credited with driving Mullah Omar out of Afghanistan on the back of a motorbike in 2001 and moving Bin Laden out of harm’s way just minutes before American missile strikes on his camp in 1998. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was detained several times in Pakistan. Yet he was never prosecuted and was quietly released each time by the ISI.

At his meeting with Bin Laden in August 2009, Akhtar is reported to have requested Al Qaeda’s help in mounting an attack on the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi. Intelligence officials learned about the meeting later that year from interrogations of men involved in the attack. Information on the meeting was compiled in a report seen by all of the civilian and military intelligence agencies, security officials at the Interior Ministry and American counterterrorism officials.

At the meeting, Bin Laden rejected Akhtar’s request for help and urged him and other militant groups not to fight Pakistan but to serve the greater cause — the jihad against America. He warned against fighting inside Pakistan because it would destroy their home base: “If you make a hole in the ship, the whole ship will go down,” he said.

He wanted Akhtar and the Taliban to accelerate the recruitment and training of fighters so they could trap United States forces in Afghanistan with a well-organized guerrilla war. Bin Laden said that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and the Indian Ocean region would be Al Qaeda’s main battlefields in the coming years, and that he needed more fighters from those areas. He even offered naval training for militants, saying that the United States would soon exit Afghanistan and that the next war would be waged on the seas.

Akhtar, in his mid-50s, remains at large in Pakistan. He is still active in jihadi circles and in running madrasas — an example of a militant commander whom the ISI has struggled to control yet is too valuable for them to lock up or eliminate.

In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad. But he had no proof and, under pressure, claimed in the Pakistani press that he’d been misunderstood. Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior American officials later told me that the information was consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.

America’s failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism is one of the primary reasons President Karzai has become so disillusioned with the United States. As American and NATO troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of this year, the Pakistani military and its Taliban proxy forces lie in wait, as much a threat as any that existed in 2001.

In January 2013, I visited the Haqqania madrasa to speak with senior clerics about the graduates they were dispatching to Afghanistan. They agreed to let me interview them and gave the usual patter about it being each person’s individual choice to wage jihad. But there was also continuing fanatical support for the Taliban. “Those who are against the Taliban, they are the liberals, and they only represent 5 percent of Afghans,” the spokesman for the madrasa told me. He and his fellow clerics were set on a military victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, he said, “it is a political fact that one day the Taliban will take power. The white flag of the Taliban will fly again over Kabul, inshallah.”

Pakistani security officials, political analysts, journalists and legislators warned of the same thing. The Pakistani military was still set on dominating Afghanistan and was still determined to use the Taliban to exert influence now that the United States was pulling out.

Kathy Gannon of The Associated Press reported in September that militants from Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, were massing in the tribal areas to join the Taliban and train for an anticipated offensive into Afghanistan this year. In Punjab, mainstream religious parties and banned militant groups were openly recruiting hundreds of students for jihad, and groups of young men were being dispatched to Syria to wage jihad there. “They are the same jihadi groups; they are not 100 percent under control,” a former Pakistani legislator told me. “But still the military protects them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/magazine/what-pakistan-knew-about-bin-laden.html?_r=1

Jolie Rouge

03-22-2014, 07:38 PM

What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden
By CARLOTTA GALLMARCH 19, 2014
continued ....

comments

It's mind boggling that Pakistani authorities claimed and expected us to believe they saw nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, when they actually set up everything. It seems India is well justified in being actively defensive against its sinister neighbor.

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"This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but to pull out now is, undeniably, to leave with the job only half-done."

Half-done, only 13 more years to finish the job I presume and another $trillion to spend.

"Unpopular" is a big understatement and doesn't even begin to describe our disillusion and frustration with this war and most of the others we've fought since Vietnam.

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Whoever says US government does not have a choice but to work with Pakistani government is naive. US does not take a single step without their greater interest in mind.

Why did you guys not have the same "No choice" option with Iran or Iraq? US invaded Iraq and made Iran come to the negotiation table. US always has choice. US Gov by choice is working with Pakistani Gov/Army since 2001. In fact US forcefully made Pakistan work with it after 9/11. And in all these years if they would have had any proof of Pakistan playing double games; I am sure they would not be so forgiving that "Oh, its all right we know Pakistan is the source of all the terrorism, so let us not trouble Pakistan because we want to work with them but let us spend trillions fighting with the Taliban anyway, while our soldiers die in vain and our economy goes down the drain."

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My heartfelt compliments to Carlotta Gall. None of what she says is a surprise to me, having read extensively from Pakistani newspps in English before Benazir Bhutto was murdered.
I wonder if she would agree with me that the chief cause for this dismal situation is that Bush/Cheney undertook to invade Iraq instead of sticking to Afghanistan and seeing through the action taken there.
Moreover, several times during the Bush administration I detected that ISI had lent itself to collaborating with Bush/Cheney claims that terrorist "plots" had been foiled. I don't think the US administration at the time was hoodwinked by ISI. Rather, I think there was mutual collaboration.

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As a Pakistani, I sadly agree with this article. Pakistani Army has not given up it's foolish dreams of "strategic depth" by using militant proxies to control Afghanistan. While the common man in Pakistan has no job, no healthcare, no education - the military continues to usurp 40% of the budget. If the American government has evidence against Pasha, please release it. It's about time to pressure ISI and the Army and show them the mirror.

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You can't buy friends! When are we going to learn that. All our money does is line the pockets of the elites and bankroll our enemies. ME leaders see the US as an easy mark. The list is long of our "friends" who embrace our money but help our enemies. Pakistan is just one of the names on that list.

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How could anyone be surprised to learn the Pakistani government knew where Bin Laden was? And the fact that they have somewhat clandenstinely facilitated and supported Al Qaeda and the Taliban is also not surprising.

And here is another thing that isn't surprising. That the U.S. administration, in response to questioning from the the Times, refused to acknowledge high ranking Pakistani officials were aware of Bin Laden's whereabouts. It has become common for senior members of our current administration to lie.

I would not be surprised either if we learned that Pakistan tipped us to Bin Laden's location in the end. Perhaps he was increasingly becoming a liability. Or perhaps our taking Bin Laden out helped advance some other Pakistan objective.

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A fine article by Carlotta Gall about the Pakistan-AQ linkages. One disagreement: She correctly notes that after US officials have sunk over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money and deployed over a 100,000 troops (and many many more highly paid contractors) over 13 years, Afghanistan remains "a weak state." As I noted in my book, "Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban," after this immense investment of blood and treasure, Afghanistan has one of the world's most corrupt government, and after a $100 million in wasted aid and development, the country continues to rank near the bottom of virtually every development index. While Gall concludes that the US should not pull out with "the job only half-done," she fails to explain how continuing the grotesquely dysfunctional US policies will successfully complete "the job." The US needs to bring its troops home from Afghanistan. As soldiers told me while I was embedded there, "the juice ain't worth the squeeze."
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Jolie Rouge

05-06-2014, 05:16 AM

Betrayed :Extortion 17 thirty fallen warriors murdered by Obama
Posted on 5 May, 2014 by AmyElizabeth

Before BENGHAZI, There was EXTORTION 17. The mission was doomed from the start.By publicly revealing the Navy SEAL’s role in the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden the Obama administration endangered the elite SEAL team charges a new book. This new book examines the SEALS and their role in the war against Islamic extremism and is claiming that the SEAL culture is being subjected to an assault being waged by a Pentagon that now must be politically correct.

Richard Miniter and Scott McEwen authored the new book titled, “Eyes on Target: Inside Stories from the Brotherhood of the U.S. Navy SEALs” and in it they draw on their close relationships with current and former SEALs. The book documents the heroic acts of the Navy SEALS in Afghanistan and in Benghazi and examines the culture of the Navy SEALs.

SEAL Team Six, the group that successfully took out Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is perhaps the best known SEAL team. However, this may also be the reason why many members of that SEAL team are now dead. Their identities became known around the world when Vice President Joe Biden publicly identified them just two days after the raid.

The book quotes Biden as saying, “Let me briefly acknowledge tonight’s distinguished honorees. Adm. Jim Stavridis is a – is the real deal; he can tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday.”

Miniter contends that Biden’s revelation of the team’s identities handed our enemies the intelligence they needed as far as who took out their leader. Fifteen members of Seal Team 6 were aboard a Chinook CH-47 helicopter, code-named Extortion 17, when it was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in early August 2011. The book reports that of the 38 men killed, 15 of those men were members of SEAL Team Six. Those who mourn the deaths of SEAL Team 6 personally blame the vice president’s loose lips for the disaster.

Said Miniter, “This helicopter shoot down, Extortion 17, is the largest loss of life among the Navy SEALs since World War II. The family members, wives, the widows and mothers and fathers of those SEALs think that it’s political. In the course of our interviews, we discovered a number of SEALs think so, too. They think that the shoot down of this helicopter was a revenge plot by al-Qaida, inspired by Vice President Biden’s comment.”

He said, “The SEALs feel increasingly politicized under the Obama administration. One of the things that we demonstrate is SEALs who have been prosecuted for crimes they didn’t commit, found innocent, but sort of forced into retirement. We’ve seen a record number of retirements from the Navy SEALs. This is something the media is ignoring, but it’s an important story because the SEALs, like our other special forces, are the tip of the spear. They’re the people who are actually out there killing and capturing terrorists.”

“Without them, we lose the war on terror. Without them, al-Qaida carries out attacks at America’s public schools, its offices and its shopping malls. Politicizing the SEALs is a dangerous game and, unfortunately, it’s one of the games President Obama is playing.”

These political games, according to Miniter, are rife throughout the entire military.

Miniter contends that the Obama administration’s social experimentation is directly driven by a political agenda and it is hurting all of the U.S. Armed Forces—in particular our elite units. These experiments are not voluntary but rather mandated.

Said Miniter,
“The Obama administration’s political appointees at the Department of Defense really want to make the SEALs and other special forces more like a college campus, with political correctness and speech codes. This is something that drives the SEALs nuts.”

Miniter continued:

“One of the reasons why the SEALs are so effective is that enlisted men can challenge their officers. In fact, SEALs have debates before missions, during missions and certainly after missions about what to do next. Those debates are open and honest because nothing is off the table. Any language can be used. Anybody can voice an opinion. It’s not simply a top-down operation. Because every man involved in a SEAL operation is thinking and contributing to the thinking of the operation, it’s much more likely to succeed and much more likely to adapt.”

This is the sort of communication that can be seen in the book and movie “Lone Survivor,” explained Miniter.

He continued, lamenting that “The political correctness is really poisoning the SEALs and the military.” “The military should not be a social laboratory for politicians or activists to play out experiments. It’s a serious matter. You don’t want to distract the lifeguard, or people will die.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGdOz98DQY&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGdOz98DQY&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PFVJoZdjZFw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PFVJoZdjZFw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uB0eCMJAWnw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uB0eCMJAWnw

http://gopthedailydose.com/2014/05/05/betrayed-extortion-17-thirty-fallen-warriors-murdered-obama/

Jolie Rouge

08-02-2014, 08:39 PM

On The DAY BEFORE 9/11/01 Bill Clinton Admitted He Could Have Killed Bin Laden,
But Chose Not to...
August 1, 2014
by Jason DeWitt

A mere 10 hours before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bill Clinton acknowledged that he could’ve have ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden – but chose not to.

In a newly released video, Clinton can be heard speaking to Australian business leaders on September 10, 2011: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/31/clinton-on-sept-10-2001-could-have-killed-bin-laden-but-didnt/

“I’m just saying, you know, if I were Usama bin Laden - he’s a very smart guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him - and I nearly got him once. … And I could have killed him…

… but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=meYT_Jzy3eU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=meYT_Jzy3eU

Clinton-defenders leaped to his defense, saying that “you can’t blame him for passing on Bin Laden since this was before 9/11″. But that is utterly absurd. As Mike Miller of IJR recounts for us, the Al Queda leader had many prior known attacks on the United States prior to 9/11, and our government had a special task force to kill him — that Clinton repeatedly undermined: http://www.ijreview.com/2014/08/163474-bill-clinton-couldve-killed-bin-laden-911but-didnt/

Usama bin Laden was wanted for other terrorist attacks against the United States, including involvement in the August 7th, 1998 U.S. embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in East Africa, which were carried out by al Qaeda and killed 224 civilians.

•“The CIA had ‘no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action’ mission against bin Laden before the September 11 terrorist attack, a Clinton administration official told The Washington Post in 2004. ‘The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement.’ ” (Daily Mail)

•“In the end, the 9/11 panel found that there were several missed opportunities to go after bin Laden and Al Qaeda, including a point in which the Central Intelligence Agency had tracked bin Laden to a hunting camp in Afghanistan in 1999.”

And the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit at the time, Michael Scheuer, has been saying for years that there were more than 10 instances where they had bin Laden in their cross hairs and Clinton wouldn’t allow them to kill him.

In fact, Scheuer says the instance Clinton is referring to here actually took place at 3 a.m. while bin Laden was in an empty mosque. He could’ve been taken out without collateral damage. There was no need to blow up the whole town of Khandahar.

Team Clinton is in full red alert right now, as their media allies at Politico and the networks try to spin this so it doesn’t hurt Hillary.

What we are wondering however is, why is this just surfacing now, and did Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett have some hand in its release?

http://toprightnews.com/?p=4869

Jolie Rouge

05-11-2015, 06:57 PM

BUSTED! Obama Just Got Caught In a Big Lie About Bin Laden Raid

http://www.youngcons.com/new-report-claims-obama-lied-about-osama-bin-laden-raid/

EXPLOSIVE New Report Reveals Obama LIED To The Country About the Bin Laden Raid
 Lindsey Bruce - 05/10/2015

A bombshell report has just been released exposing Barack Obama’s lies about the Bin Laden Raid. The 10,000 word report, which was written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seymour Hersh is sure to cause conflict. Hersh is an American investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters.

In the report Hersh writes:

“The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. “

He goes on to say,

The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.”

He continues:

“The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions…”

Hersh then drops a bomb about a Pakistani intelligence officer and what he exposed,

“This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.”

A U.S. source who worked in intelligence and had knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad told Hersh:

‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said.

He added that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not like it.’

The FULL REPORT exposes more lies told by an administration that prides themselves on “transparency”. The families of those killed on 9/11 deserve to know the truth. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

http://xtribune.com/2015/05/explosive-new-report-reveals-obama-lied-to-the-country-about-the-bin-laden-raid/

Jolie Rouge

05-11-2015, 07:02 PM

Report: Bin Laden Already Dead
Published December 26, 2001
·

Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader.

"The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead," the source said.

Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief.

About 30 close associates of bin Laden in Al Qaeda, including his most trusted and personal bodyguards, his family members and some "Taliban friends," attended the funeral rites. A volley of bullets was also fired to pay final tribute to the "great leader."

The Taliban source who claims to have seen bin Laden's face before burial said "he looked pale ... but calm, relaxed and confident."

Asked whether bin Laden had any feelings of remorse before death, the source vehemently said "no." Instead, he said, bin Laden was proud that he succeeded in his mission of igniting awareness amongst Muslims about hegemonistic designs and conspiracies of "pagans" against Islam. Bin Laden, he said, held the view that the sacrifice of a few hundred people in Afghanistan was nothing, as those who laid their lives in creating an atmosphere of resistance will be adequately rewarded by Almighty Allah.

When asked where bin Laden was buried, the source said, "I am sure that like other places in Tora Bora, that particular place too must have vanished."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2001/12/26/report-bin-laden-already-dead/

I have heard this rumor for YEARS ... would explain why the Administration ordered NO autopsy; NO photos; and ordered a burial at sea. After the Seal Team Six was revealed ... most of the witnesses where gone too.

Jolie Rouge

09-05-2015, 11:00 AM

Michael Savage on Navy SEAL Team 6: “They were Killed. They were Assassinated. They were Executed.”
Posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2014 at 2:30 AM.

Michael Savage has no intention of abandoning his passion for uncovering the full story behind the deaths of 22 members of Navy SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan shortly after it was leaked that their unit killed Osama bin Laden.

The subject came up for a second time in the show when a regular listener said she liked the fact that he covered subjects no one else on talk-radio seemed to be talking about.

“They were killed. They were assassinated. They were executed. Or it was done because there’s a moron working inside the Defense Department who did it to them,” Savage said.

“Either way, somebody should go to prison for this.”

Savage called the August 2011 Taliban shootdown of the CH-47D Chinook helicopter that killed all 38 passengers “one of the greatest military scandals in American history.”

“How could we lose more men in one mission than in the entire history of the Navy SEALS, and no one has been held accountable for it?” he asked.

Savage had further questions:

“Who put them in an old slow-flying helicopter in a combat zone?”

“Why didn’t they break them up into fast-strike helicopters?”

“Who made this decision in the Defense Department?

“Who made it in the Obama administration?”

“These are questions, man, and I want them answered, and I want a hearing; and you want to hear equality, you want to hear fairness? How about fairness to the families whose hearts are broken by somebody in the Obama administration who killed those Navy SEALs? Would that be equality?”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said last month that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing early this year to investigate the disaster.

Savage noted on his show Thursday that he dedicated his novel “A Time for War” to the SEALs to try “to awaken America.”

In July, as WND reported, the father of one of the SEALs told Savage in a radio interview he believed the U.S. government sent his son and his colleagues to their deaths.

After Vice President Joe Biden revealed that SEAL Team 6 carried out the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Strange said the members of his son’s team gave startling indications to their families they were about to meet their demise.

Charles Strange, the father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, told Savage that in June 2011, on at least three separate occasions his son grabbed him by the bicep and announced that he had prepared his will.

The bewildered father finally was able to find out what it all meant.

Michael Strange, his father recalled, said: “Something’s going on with the team. Somebody’s leaking things out. Something’s going on.”

Savage, reacting with emotion, asked: “Your son knew he was being sent to his death?”

“They knew,” Strange replied. “They knew something was up. Every one of them.”

Other families of the victims have reported similar experiences with their sons the last time they saw them, Strange said.

Strange said documents related to the crash that he obtained show that, among other anomalies, the rescue team was held back.

“This was all planned,” he said. “I have it in the paperwork.”

Strange affirmed that there was no chase helicopter or any other kind of support for the team.

“So, you’re saying they planned to execute your son and the others on purpose?” Savage asked.

“One hundred percent, sir,” Strange replied.

Investigation

Prompted by the concerns expressed by family members, Chaffetz said his subcommittee on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is investigating the crash.

As WND reported in May, Strange recalled to the National Press Club in Washington his experience with President Obama at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware Aug. 9, 2011, when the remains of 30 U.S. troops were brought home from Afghanistan.

He leaned over to whisper into Obama’s ear to ask if there would be a congressional investigation into the death of his son.

President Obama whispered back, “We will look very, very, very deep into this.”

But Strange said he hadn’t heard a word since that encounter.

The families have filed a lawsuit against Obama, Vice President Biden, the Taliban, the governments of Afghanistan and Iran, because the Islamic regime promises to pay $10,000 for every dead U.S. service member.

Among their many suspicions, the families question the sudden replacement of seven Afghan commandos on board the helicopter just before takeoff. The seven who died in the attack are not the seven listed in the flight manifest. The families say that to this day, they don’t know the identities of the dead Afghans.

Strange noted that the chopper’s black box was never recovered and doubts the explanation that it was washed away in a flash flood.

http://www.teapartycrusaders.com/u-s-politics/michael-savage-navy-seal-team-6-killed-assassinated-executed/

Please Visit our Facebook Affiliate: https://www.facebook.com/OBAMAAGAINSTCHRISTIANS

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http://www.teapartycrusaders.com/international-news/michael-savage-navy-seal-team

Jolie Rouge

09-08-2015, 06:07 PM

Snowden Claims Osama bin Laden Is Still Alive

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai

In an interview to the Moscow Tribune, Snowden said Osama was living in the Bahamas, on the payroll of the CIA.

Snowden told the newspaper,
“I have documents showing that Bin Laden is still on the CIA’s payroll. He is still receiving more than $100,000 a month, which are being transferred through some front businesses and organizations, directly to his Nassau bank account. I am not certain where he is now, but in 2013, he was living quietly in his villa with five of his wives and many children.“

“Snowden is at present a fugitive. He flee US after leaking documents about the NSA’s surveillance programs.“

India.com reports: http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/osama-bin-laden-is-alive-staying-in-bahamas-claims-edward-snowden_1664959.html

The report also said that Snowden previously too made some unreported allegations about Osama Bin Laden

Snowden goes on to say that CIA had orchestrated fake death of the former leader of al Qaeda.

He claims that Osama was transported with his family in an unrevealed location in the Bahamas.

The report further quotes him as follows – “Osama bin Laden was one of the CIA’s most efficient operatives for a long time. What kind of message would it send their other operatives if they were to let the SEALs kill him? They organized his fake death with the collaboration of the Pakistani Secret services, and he simply abandoned his cover. Since everyone believes he is dead, nobody’s looking for him, so it was pretty easy to disappear. Without the beard and the military jacket, nobody recognizes him.”

Not only this, Snowden categorically states that he will talk about the documents which prove Laden is alive in book which is likely to be released in September.

However, Snowden’s claims have not been substantiated or confirmed by any other source.

The US government has filed espionage charges against Snowden for revealing classified NSA documents to journalists.

http://yournewswire.com/snowden-claims-osama-bin-laden-is-still-alive/

Would explain so many questions ....