Osama Bin Laden Killed

I was watching the news this morning and saw Pakistani soldiers gathering the salvageable debris and carting it away. Of course, there's now speculation that they'll be selling it to China.

 

Dude, I wish I could have been there. I know who did it, and word on the street is that he exclaimed, "HOLY SHIT, it's BIN LADEN?" right before making the shot. Awesome.

 

If anyone's interested I wrote up my thoughts for my college paper here

tl;dr Osama was an evil guy, it's good to kill evil guys.

 

So, El Presidente is at Ground Zero today commemorating Bin Laden's death. Won't he have to come back in 4 months for the 10 year anniversary? That's a lot of time fucking up Manhattan traffic, Barack.

 

I am not sure if you are trolling or just stupid. I will assume the latter. If the former, fine well I bit.

For those already prone to anger over the role of the US in the Middle East a picture depicting* an example of US military involvement in the Middle East will be used as propaganda and effectively. This isn't a matter of converting a moderate Muslim from Boulder, Colorado to terrorism over a dead OBL but stoking the fire of those who are already borderline and hold fundamentalist views.

With regard your final point, as novel a concept as it may seem, those drawn to an organisation that promotes martyrdom as the highest achievement, an example of what they view as martyrdom will not be a disinsentive.

* In their view (this shouldn't need to be stated...)

 

I heard one knobjob claim that he was captured, not killed, and secretly sitting in Gitmo right now.

The more I think about it, that wouldn't be half bad. Rough him up a little bit, let W waterboard him and get any info he might have, and then dispatch him.

 

Dude, I gotta tell you - a few years ago there was a Muslim student on my campus who openly called for the killing of Canadian soldiers in Canada. I think he was suspended and hopefully expelled. Guys like him weren't exactly moderate to begin with. But passions were inflamed by gruesome videos and pictures being beamed from Iraq and Afghanistan, of civilians and women and children being killed or arrested or whatever else. After being exposed to all of this propaganda, seeing a photo of a dead Bin Laden wouldn't exactly make him any worse off than he already is. If you were trying to radicalize someone, you'd probably find a different picture than a dead Bin Laden to drum up sympathy for your cause; and I'm not sure there are many people who would be angered by a picture of his dead body but not angered by his death in the first place, who haven't already been angered by all of the footage available of the various wars and battles taking place in the Middle East over the last decade.

The people who would become enraged by a photo being released are probably the types who already identified with him, who didn't need very much encouragement to become radicalized in the first place and are almost certainly radicalized already. It needs to be said: there is nothing that can placate these people. Bin Laden dead? They're enraged. Pictures released? They're enraged. Bin Laden alive? Well, there's still Iraq and Afghanistan to be enraged about (see my above example). No Iraq or Afghanistan? There's Israel. No Israel? Salman Rushdie wrote a book, or some Danish cartoonist drew a few pictures, or, well, you get my point here.

I'm not arguing in favour of releasing the photos. I think it's rather prudent that the White House take the high ground and not release them officially (though they'll probably make their way out eventually). But to say that we risk angering people on the cusp of radicalization is to maintain this knife edge forever, worrying about every move we make, only to find some new offense that we hadn't thought of earlier that inflames people.

 

I don't overly disagree; I just think we are focusing on different subsections of Muslims. I am now caught inbetween the classic post of 'dude, I am not going to bother explaining myself to you' and they reality that anything else will just lead to endless diatribes where the minutest of points are debated.

I will take the cheap way out and leave it at saying anyone who genuinely believes the image of a dead Osama will not be used for active and affectual propaganda by radicals is probably basing the comment off opinion and little understanding of the issue.

 

So apparently the Associated Press has requested the release of the photos under the Freedom of Information Act. White House has 20 days to respond.

What's the chances that this will end up being a long drawn out court battle? Either way, I doubt the last word has been said on those photos.

 

The more I look at that picture, the more similar in design it appears to the tail end of a Comanche. Two completely different helos, of course, but the overall characteristics are strikingly similar. Not shocking, seeing as how they both are/were stealth.

 

Honestly, I would expect this either way.

If I were OBL, I would already have pre-recorded a video for this exact purpose, for release post-mortem, suggesting that it was all a conspiracy and I was really still alive. And then given it to several of my closest associates for later use.

 

Apparently, there were four-legged soldiers involved in this as well--and they're just as badass as their two-legged counterparts.

Link

 

I'm a huge fan of military tech, but not an expert. With that disclaimer in mind, stealth technology in aircraft has absolutely nothing to do with sound masking. Aircraft stealth is a combination of shape/angles, special paint coating, and electronics all combined for the purpose of masking the radar and/or infrared signatures as effectively as possible. Fixed-wing aircraft can rely on either flying supersonic and high, or subsonic and high. Helos can't rely mask their sound signature, so they would be flying very close (about 100 feet) to the ground, at the point where radar has difficulty distinguishing them from the surrounding terrain, and I imagine the train of thought is that enemy forces trying to track them over large distances by eyesight and ear are much less capable than a radar contact.

Naval stealth is a completely different matter, of course. In any case, stealth units are very expensive (the Army had to cancel their pet RAH-66 Comanche project dude to budget concerns), and as I understand it, 100% invisibility to radar and infrared is still impossible.

Hope my rambling helped.

 

I used to be in charge of my company's blog, and we have a Rocket Scientist that writes for us. I found this one interesting, he postulates how we might have found Bin Laden using spy satellites.

<a class="postlink" href="http://knovelblogs.com/2011/05/05/craig-the-rocket-scientist-is-not-an-official-spy/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://knovelblogs.com/2011/05/05/craig ... icial-spy/</a>

 

I was hoping for him to go Braveheart and yell out FREEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!

Or maybe something like this:

 

I figured that was the reason they refrained from showing the pics as well, but I just saw this on CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/04/bin.laden.compound/index.html?hpt=T1

Check out pics 7-9. I can only assume that these are other Muslim confidants of Bin Laden. Pretty gory. Why not release the Bin Laden pics if they're going to show others that were killed at the compound?