Jeez, I haven't commented since DKos apparently jumped the shark and joined the mainstream US press in whooping up the (apparent) assassination of OBL. Who knew so many Dems were so bloodthirsty.
Even if OBL was the most evil man in history (until we find a new one) the "narrative" is a mess (cf Carney's 3 May press briefing, excerpted below).
I'm sick of hearing how professional the SEALS were when they couldn't manage to capture OBL alive for interrogation (enhanced or otherwise).
Here are excerpts from Noam Chomsky's essay "My Reaction to Osama bin Laden's Death." I urge all to read the whole piece.
Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death:
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial...
There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world...
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
Emphasis added
Mitchel Cohen has 8 questions for Obama and I have yet to hear convincing answers from defenders of this operation (apart from ad hominem attacks, claims of "conspiracy theories," and repeating that OBL was evil etc etc). Here are the first 4:
1) Why would the U.S. government order the summary execution of an unarmed and frail individual – even an alleged terrorist, criminal, and former CIA "asset" like bin-Laden?
2) Why would they dump the body – and thus the proof of his identity and wounds -- into the ocean, preventing an autopsy? Is there something they are trying to hide?
3) Why would the rulers of the most powerful country on the face of the earth be afraid to capture and arrest Osama bin-Laden and put him on trial, as was done with the World War 2 Nazi Adolf Eichmann?
4) Why was bin-Laden not captured and at least questioned about further terrorist plans if he was the mastermind, as charged?
--Eight Questions for President Obama
Those who say, "Well it wasn't a planned execution and the SEALS just had to kill him" -- well, it doesn't say much for the elite team if they couldn't somehow manage to take him alive.
And for all the money we piss away on the Pentagon, they couldn't manage a live video feed to the Situation Room. Carney now claims that all those people in the famous photo were only watching Panetta on the screen:
Q Jay, could you talk about the Pete Souza photo that you guys put out that shows the President and others watching in the Situation Room? What were they seeing in the moment that that photo was taken?
MR. CARNEY: As John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism advisor, explained yesterday, 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. And they were looking at and listening to those updates. I can’t get more specific than that, but this was during the operation and during those tense moments that Mr. Brennan described yesterday and this morning on television.
Q I mean, why can’t you get more specific without revealing technology or anything?
MR. CARNEY: Well, I think it’s -- I think specifically we don’t talk about, with any great detail, how we get our real-time information for a variety of reasons. I mean, those meetings take place in the Situation Room for a reason. Those rooms there are for secure communication.
So I can’t get more specific than that. I think it’s been said, so I can say, that Leon Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was on a screen and communicating with those in the Situation Room and the President. So he was present in that room in that sense as well.
Q So they were looking at Leon Panetta?
MR. CARNEY: Well, again, they were receiving real-time, minute-by-minute updates on the operation taking place in Pakistan at that moment. But they were receiving a lot of information at once.
--White House 3 May Transcript
What a bloody embarrassment. More like the Keystone Kops than the Navy SEALS.
And that "Muslim respect" that led to the burial at sea? How about not using depleted uranium and unmanned predator drones against civilian populations?
From one of countless reports (rarely if ever discussed in the MSM, how odd):
In August of 2002, UMRC completed its preliminary analysis of the results from Nangarhar. Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium contamination. The specific results indicated an astoundingly high level of contamination; concentrations were 100 to 400 times greater than those of the Gulf War Veterans tested in 1999. A researcher reported. "We took both soil and biological samples, and found considerable presence in urine samples of radioactivity; the heavy concentration astonished us. They were beyond our wildest imagination."
In the fall of 2002, the UMRC field team went back to Afghanistan for a broader survey, and revealed a potentially larger exposure than initially anticipated. Approximately 30% of those interviewed in the affected areas displayed symptoms of radiation sickness. New born babies were among those displaying symptoms, with village elders reporting that over 25% of the infants were inexplicably ill.
How widespread and extensive is the exposure? A quote from the UMRC field report reads:
"The UMRC field team was shocked by the breadth of public health impacts coincident with the bombing. Without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium."
In Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, UMRC lab results indicated high concentrations of NON-DEPLETED URANIUM, with the concentrations being much higher than in DU victims from Iraq. Afghanistan was used as a testing ground for a new generation of "bunker buster" bombs containing high concentrations of other uranium alloys.
"A significant portion of the civilian population"? It appears that by going after a handful of terrorists in Afghanistan we have poisoned a huge number of innocent civilians, with a disproportionate number of them being children.
The military has found depleted uranium in the urine of some soldiers but contends it was not enough to make them seriously ill in most cases. Critics have asked for more sensitive, more expensive testing.
--Depleted Uranium Dust - Public Health Disaster For The People Of Iraq and Afghanistan
Oh, but the US killed the great terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, who was plotting more attacks, and dumped him at sea without questioning. That's all right then.