Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Osama bin Laden: better dead than tried

As to be expected there are many voices raising, from the downright silly that Osama bin Laden's rights were not read to him, to the "we killed him too soon, before we had a chance to get some intelligence out of him".  You are all wrong, ALL of you that do not approve what Obama's team did this Sunday.  And you, chavistas, even more so but this post is not for you, you are way too idiotic in your bad faith to understand what I am writing next.

With Osama we are not dealing with your average mass murderer, of the type that blasts his way through a campus and kills a dozen coeds.  This is another dimension altogether and any mooring points must be looked for in the the Gulag, Auschwitz, Cambodia's fields and the like.  And because Osama imbued his crimes under the crusading spirit of the jihad, if we may link these two words together,  he ranks into a category by himself, complicating even more whatever could be done about him were we to have captured him earlier.

By ordering Osama to be killed and disposed off President Obama did the right thing, the only thing that at this point could be done.  Let's not be fooled: the orders were not to capture Osama, they were to kill him unless the man would surrender peacefully which could have been an indication of wanting to deal with the US.  Had he wanted ever to deal with the West Osama has had plenty of opportunities to do so since September 11.  He did not, he put even more bombs.  He had to been killed because capturing him would have only made matters worse, infinitely worse.

Can you imagine what the trial of Osama would have been like?  The years to reach such a trial?  The innumerable bombs, kidnappings, riots and what not that would precede it to try to gain his freedom?  Simply put, it would have been such a fodder for further terrorism that it was better for the West to kill the psychopath once and for all and face the ensuing serenade.

The argument of intelligence is almost as quickly dispatched: what intelligence, what operative were left to an Osama in hiding inside a comfortable Pakistan compound since 2005 where he was too afraid to even have a land line and Internet.....  Al Qaeda became a franchise quickly after the allies entered Afghanistan.  Besides being a guiding light Osama had long ceased to be the main organizer.  True, had we gotten him and be willing to torture or hypnotize him or something we could have got some names and maybe avoid a bombing or two.  And how many reprisal bombings would have we avoided in exchange?

As for the body thrown at sea.  Bravo!  Or did people wanted to create a shrine to Osama in some remote cemetery where the family of the victims would try to go an piss on it while Al Qaeda would transform the joint in a pilgrim destination to the new Islamist saint?  And bravo also to Obama refusing to release the pictures of the dead body.  No conspiracy theory to look into here, just plain common sense.  Eventually they will be "leaked" some day, on purpose, when convenient.  But right now it would have served no worthwhile objective.

So yes, please, stop bitching about Osama's rights because the bitching you do for Osama reflects only the anti US inner you.  Democracies have also the right to defend themselves, and this was a war.  What were you doing to fight Al Qaeda on your own?  Where was your unambiguous condemnation of September 11?  Do you expect the West to always have to apologize for your own weakness?  Do you really, really thing that sitting down with Osama and talkign to him would have helped mend things?  Because if you truly think so then you are a nincompoop.

23 comments:

  1. England Calling11:47 PM

    Excellant post.

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  2. Anyone worried about Osama's rights needs their head testing...even if they believe he had nothing to do with 9/11 what about the other THOUSANDS of deaths in other countries...it is all on record! fuck's sake.

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  3. Anonymous12:19 AM

    Great, now the radical muslims have an idole.
    And I am sure you follow the news, Osama is dead since 2001. Dont let them fool you!

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  4. Anonymous12:42 AM

    Your righteous anger is cute, but misplaced. To begin with, you seem to assume much of what happened was on purpose. I'm pretty sure that the absence of pics and the quick sea burial had a lot more to do with the state of the body at the end of the day than anything else.

    After so many years looking for OBL, does anyone really believe the SEALs just shot him a couple of times and nothing else? Bunny and Clyde got buried in a bulletstorm and they didn't piss off the gringos as much as OBL did. They didn't bury him at sea because they were afraid Al Qaeda would make a shrine with it (who says they'd need a body for that?), they did it because the state of the body would have all Muslims up in arms, even those who hated OBL.

    Personally, my first reaction was that they had captured him alive, but made up the death and burial-at-sea so they wouldn't be worried by rescue attempts and could kill him for real whenever they were done with him. The first clue was that the whole "we identified him by his DNA" is utter BS. DNA testing takes weeks or even months, and if they sent the SEALS to invade a foreign country is because they had already identified him a while ago. But now I'm leaning for the SEALS-teabagged-the-sh*t-out-of-his-corpse theory.

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  5. kernel_panic12:53 AM

    100% agree

    I think that if you mess with someone else's human rights, you simply lose your own. Vayan a llorar pal valle :p

    Let's see if we can do that to the choros back home so they think it twice to kill you for a blackberry, even when you hand it peacefully...

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  6. Bravo, Daniel! Well said, and I agree completely.

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  7. From an American: Thank you, Daniel, for saying what I cannot, lest it sound too self-serving.

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  8. i am going to have to make a rule that unless you put at least a number to your anonymous (say, anonymous 666), your comment will be erased mercilessly.

    first anonymous. on what do you base your allegation? from the web page of those who think man never made it to the moon?

    second anonymous

    your suppositions do not detract from mine. you just give other reasons to basically reach the same conclusion. it does not matter how osama died, he was better death than alive. i, for one, have no doubt that the order was to kill him. in i do not know how many years we will know for sure, unless our intrepid eva golinger uses the FOIA....

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  9. Roy, I don't care if it sounds self serving- if we let ourselves cower it only encourages these bullies all the more.

    Agreed Daniel and this is one of my pet peeves.

    Well said.

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  10. Anonymous4:31 AM

    Thank you.

    Lazarus

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  11. Anonymous4:45 AM

    So he's dead, his contacts via computer and information in his hard drives live on... with his future dreams of more death.

    So, who's on the list? This may complicate things.

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  12. Daniel, you could not have said it better; excellent post. Thank you for you being open and level headed.

    Osama bin Laden got an easy way out: a couple of bullets, probably killing him instantly. He was not captured, tortured, he did not have to answer for his crimes in a court room. In the end what would have happened? Death penalty? Life in prison?
    He would never have spoken the truth anyway!
    He is gone. Thank God!
    Whoever does not believe bin Laden is dead, so what? Proof can be fixed with photo editors and does nothing for the doubting amongst us. I read the body language of the US representatives while they were watching footage of the attack on bin Laden's compound and the shootings. That is good enough for me.
    May the Muslims realize that they have not lost a hero - they have lost a tyrant.
    Nica

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  13. 1979 Boat People7:19 AM

    Yep...Osama is better dead LIKE Che than tried.

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  14. Just for reference, DNA testing can take as little as an hour depending on the number of markers that you wish to compare to validate the identity. It can take some weeks because there is usually a queue of requests, but for Osama they just moved the to the the top of the list if they did not have a kit available on the nearest base.

    Now if you want to sequence the whole DNA (like for cloning), this takes more time, but now with modern techniques it still can be done in as little as a week.

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  15. The reason he was buried at sea is as American as urm uh Oklahoma!



    It's a shame that he won't keep
    But it's summer and we're runnin' out a' ice

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  16. Anonymous1:09 PM

    I couldn't expect less from my fav blogger, awesome mon cher

    salut

    correfoc

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  17. VenFanInAfrica1:13 PM

    Well said! one correction, "and this was a war" should read "and this is a war"
    As for the anonymous conspiracy theorists, they will always be there, ocassionally there is an ounce of truth in their pound of BS, but int his case I don't believe so.
    Regards

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  18. Anonymous2:51 PM

    If the CIA finally gets a cigar to explode on Castro's face, I hope all of you will agree that justice was done, and won't criticise very much when US citizens celebrate in Miami.

    Anonymous 3213

    (btw, why isn't the Google identity working on your blog?)

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  19. I am 100% with you in this one Daniel. There was no other way.
    Some people forget Bin Laden was the one who put the rules of the game on the table. He started by killing 3000 innocents at once, and then more all over the world. His game was about killing people, and the west responded by killing him. It seems fair to me.
    In fact, from my deepest and darkest feelings, one bullet for every one of his victims is what I think would have been really fair.

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  20. The US had the right to arrest Bin Laden, and if he resisted, kill him. If, however, he had been found sleeping, it would be criminal and wrong to simply execute him.

    Recent scholarship on The Reign of Terror establishes that the category "Enemy of Mankind" was first used to justify the execution of the King and Queen, whose crimes, it was said, were known to all. Robespierre had little difficulty expanding the category to include most victims of the guillotine.

    For example:
    http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6933689.html

    The historical evidence is that when we start dispensing with trials for exceptionally terrible people, we don't stop, and the category just keeps expanding.

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  21. Boludo Tejano11:13 PM

    Good essay, Daniel. There is a certain distance between your take and that of some of the libs in the USA.

    Living under Thugo focuses the mind.

    Those Chavistas who don't like Bin Laden being taken out- how would they living in a world under Sharia law, which was Bin Laden's goal?

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  22. Boludo Tejano11:57 PM

    Jeff House
    The US had the right to arrest Bin Laden, and if he resisted, kill him. If, however, he had been found sleeping, it would be criminal and wrong to simply execute him.

    And your take on Colombia's killing Raul Reyes in his sleep- or killing him shortly after he was awakened from sleeping?

    In WW2 the US targeted Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, shooting down his plane, whose location was known from decrypting messages. That is what you do to enemy combatants. Kill them.

    Ditto Bin Laden.

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  23. Jeff House,

    And what if Bin Laden had been day-dreaming? And what if he had being watering the daisies? Or shagging?

    Boludo,

    Don't ask those questions to Chavistas. I mean: I am shocked to see how hypocritical even their "intellectuals" are. The Mullah regime in Iran murdered many thousand of real socialists, social democrats and so on and nothing about that.


    I just hope Bin Laden's haplogroup is R1b, although chances are he was J1. I hope he is not J2.

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