Contributors

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

bin Laden Potpourri

I have several thoughts on the bin Laden story so I thought I would put them all into one post.

Pakistan-What up, bitch?

As I have been saying for several years on this blog, Pakistan is not our friend. Of course, this doesn't mean that we have to go off and attack them but this is a major embarrassment. Osama living in the lap of luxury for possibly 6 years? And right down the road from the military academy? I call bullshit.

If we want to seriously damage Al Qaeda, we need to get up Pakistan's ass with a fucking tweezers. No more aid, no more good times, no more pally-wally shit. It's clear that top Al Qaeda leaders are there. No doubt, this is where we will find Ayman al Zawahari who is now at the top of the most wanted list.

Treasure Chest!

More important than the killing of bin Laden is the intel that we gathered from the scene. We have Osama's hard drive and papers. Wow. This is an intelligence slam dunk. I wonder what information we will glean from it. This is the victory inside of the victory. Speaking of which...

"Obamateur" meme=Torpedoed.

Well, now what, ass hats? I guess my guy proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is all that. This was an extremely gutsy call. He could've just bombed the crap out of the base but opted for the high risk, high reward choice and succeeded brilliantly. Not only that, he managed to put the final pieces in place for this mission AND tour Alabama as well as visit the Cape.

He also showed he is a man of his word.

If We Have Actionable Intelligence About High-Value Terrorist Targets And President Musharraf Won't Act, We Will. (1 August 2007)

Done.

If the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out. Now, I think that's the right strategy; I think that's the right policy. We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority."(7 October 2008)

And done.

Of course, we are already hearing the cries that it was waterboarding that ultimately got bin Laden. Ah, the eight year old bullies who can never be wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to support this claim. Further, it was KSM duplicity (some time after being waterboarded) that led us to the name of the courier. After that, it was simply patience, dedication, and good intelligence work. I know you are trying desperately to find ways to be right and win the argument but you can't. Go peddle your masturbation snuff fantasies elsewhere.

Weird, dude.

Let's see...Hitler shot himself in his bunker on May 1, 1945....George Bush shot himself politically and declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on May 1, 2003....Osama bin Laden was shot and killed (on the orders of President Obama) on May 1, 2011...

Finally...













I'd say it's time that we let the adults handle the country for awhile...say another five years?

15 comments:

Don said...

Your adults are in charge now and we have sky high gas prices and grocery prices. You can stop calling people children - you put up a post a couple months ago saying we weren't broke simply because we can still borrow more money at really low rates. Obama wasn't the gutsy one here - the special forces team that got him were the gutsy ones.

In the comment section yesterday you told us that anyone who says they know for sure how we got the intelligence is a complete liar. Now today you are saying that it was KSM duplicity (some time after being waterboarded) that led us to the name of the courier. After that, it was simply patience, dedication, and good intelligence work.

Funny how you figured that out overnight by surfing the internet - and you're telling us YOUR assessment of the intelligence gathering is the only truthful version out there? Plus, can you assure us that no intelligence gathering method you have been complaining about for the last several years was used in this whole process?

Nice picture. Busy golfing and fundraising is more like it.

rld said...

You guys have been blaming everything that has been going on these days on conservatives and gwb and now something good happens and you decide to remind everyone that Obama is doing a really great job (all of a sudden).

You shove blame off of Obama and then credit him when something good happens. You think people aren't going to notice that?

blk said...

The excuse for using torture is always along the lines of an episode of 24: the terrorist planted a bomb that we have to find in the next 42 minutes or millions of people will die.

The way bin Laden was tracked down -- a relatively obscure tip, followed by literally years of slow corroboration, detailed research, careful observation and patient waiting -- is really how interrogation and intelligence gathering really works.

I've read several accounts of how the name of the courier was obtained. The shorter articles tend to conflate the extraction of the name with waterboarding. But the more detailed ones state that KSM's waterboarded stopped months before he gave up the courier's nom de guerre, and the name was obtained through standard interrogation techniques.

Torture, according to many experts I've read, doesn't really work. In all likelihood, this particular piece of information probably wasn't on the tip of KSM's tongue when he was being waterboarded. He was most likely concentrating on breathing and how much he hated his interrogators. Drowning isn't particularly conducive to assisting the quick recall of picayune details.

Also, you really have to question the efficacy of waterboarding. According the NY Times KSM was waterboarded 183 times. By the tenth or twentieth time it would be obvious to KSM that he would survive the torture, and they weren't going to kill him. That's not to say that it isn't torture -- it causes extreme stress on the body, and can kill.

But we're constantly told that we do it to our own troops to train them to resist torture techniques, so it isn't "really" torture. However, it's still outlawed by international law and it's still torture by any reasonable definition. So what, really, is the point, other than to exact revenge on someone we think is bad?

And as far as the high price of gas and and food being Obama's fault? I think the fact that ExxonMobil's profits are up 69% during the quarter when gas prices jumped tells the real story. And remember, the same thing happened during the summer of 2008 when Bush was still president.

sw said...

is it mature to call half the country racist, as you do all the time markadelphia?

juris imprudent said...

The more you whine about 8 year old power trips, the more you act live a 5 year old - my dad can beat up your dad, my dad is the greatest! yada yada

Big brave President indeed - ordering in the troops from the WH. Sheesh.

Mark Ward said...

Don, we have high gas prices because we of the global market for oil being the way that it is...which is the subject of tomorrow's post. Can't wait to hear your comments on it!

Busy golfing and fundraising is more like it.

Wow. The cognitive dissonance here is staggering. The world you live in must be really fucking ignorant and awful, dude.

Just what exactly does he have to do to earn your respect? I suspect there is nothing he can do but ask yourself this: had the mission failed, would it have been all his fault? Or would you have blamed the troops for the failure?

Mark Ward said...

Apologies to blk whose post somehow ended up in spam but is now posted and very accurate indeed! We don't live in an ep of 24, people...ahem, I mean children.

Anonymous said...

iowahawk said it best:

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/05/american-pride-is-back.html

Mark Ward said...

Yeah, not so much, dude. If you have been reading this blog since the beginning, it's actually been the reverse. I supported the effort in AfPak and always have. I also initially supported Iraq but quickly realized that was another Tonkin lie. Way to massively lie about water boarding as well. Good grief!

brendan said...

I'm afraid I don't get the link either. Wilson rallied us into WWI, Roosevelt in WWII, Truman dropped an atomic bomb in Japan, Kennedy nearly started WWIII, Johnson got us into Vietnam for real, Clinton got us into the Balkans. If anything the GOP's isolationist tendencies deserve scrutiny.

Good post, Mark. It's been awhile. I'm glad to see that you still have a collection of red faced babies here throwing temper tantrums. There is nothing President Obama can do that will earn their respect.

juris imprudent said...

Just what exactly does he have to do to earn your respect?

How about him undoing some of the Bush executive excesses? How about keeping some of his campaign promises?

Is that asking too much?

And I am much more critical of your uncritical devotion than I am of the President himself. But you didn't catch that, did you?

Anonymous said...

Sounds like Leon Panetta has claimed waterboarding is part of the reason OBL was killed.

Well done Mr. President. I'm glad to see justice.

But it turns out out you are still an idiot Marxy.

rld said...

blk, the same thing did happen in 2008 - and bush and his oil cronies were to blame then, remember?

Who cares what you supported markadelphia. Others on the left did not support it and we all know that the voices on this blog don't matter, the made up perception in ones head of the other sides position is what you always talk about so you can build up that strawman and then tear his down. You'd rather rant about the right then discuss leftist policies.

Maybe people would be sold on Obama if some of you would actually write about his policies once in a while. This blog is nothing but talk about conservatives. Like I said before (and none of you disputed it), you've spent the last couple years putting any bad thing onto conservatives whether it was the economy, gas prices, falling dollar, deficits, etc. Now something good happens and you immediately start cheering about Obama and his policies. If you were consistent, you would talk about his policies and their results a little more often that when they headline the newscasts.

Larry said...

"We need to get up Pakistan's ass with a pair of tweezers"??(!)

Umm, no thanks. What a bizarre image. That must be a Minnesota custom, imported from the most in-bred back country portions of Scandinavia. Honestly, don't you think TSA-trained bomb-sniffing gerbils would work much better?

Larry said...

Busy killing bin Laden? Busy sleeping on it, it sounds like. Yeah, he had to decide to do it or not, but busy planning it? Snort. The military handled their end extremely well, but the Obama Administration handling of the aftermath has been about as organized as a soup sandwich.