Osama Bin Laden Dead

[lostfan]

lol

 

And I just read an article on him but I thought that was part of your signature.

 

I actually thought the joke was about how many basketball players have brought guns to arenas, which was a surprisingly interesting point when I thought about it.

 

Perfect storm for idiotic hilarity on my part.

^^was this intentional? If so, nicely done.

[Balta1701]

The AP just ran with a ridiculously detailed accounting of the raid, the decision, and even the equipment involved.

The Black Hawks were specially engineered to muffle the tail rotor and engine sound, two officials said. The added weight of the stealth technology meant cargo was calculated to the ounce, with weather factored in. The night of the mission, it was hotter than expected.

[LittleHurt05]

The AP just ran with a ridiculously detailed accounting of the raid, the decision, and even the equipment involved.

 

Thought this part was bad ass:

 

As three of the SEALs reached the top of the steps on the third floor, they saw bin Laden standing at the end of the hall. The Americans recognized him instantly, the officials said.

 

Bin Laden also saw them, dimly outlined in the dark house, and ducked into his room.

 

The three SEALs assumed he was going for a weapon, and one by one they rushed after him through the door, one official described.

 

Two women were in front of bin Laden, yelling and trying to protect him, two officials said. The first SEAL grabbed the two women and shoved them away, fearing they might be wearing suicide bomb vests, they said.

 

The SEAL behind him opened fire at bin Laden, putting one bullet in his chest, and one in his head.

 

It was over in a matter of seconds

[Controlled Chaos]

The AP just ran with a ridiculously detailed accounting of the raid, the decision, and even the equipment involved.

On one hand...America f*** yeah!!!!! Cool to see the plans and how it went down. On the other hand...who the hell are these "U.S. officials" Way too much info for a secret mission like that. Also,

The decision to launch on that particular moonless night in May came largely because too many American officials had been briefed on the plan. U.S. officials feared if it leaked to the press, bin Laden would disappear for another decade.

ya think?

[Balta1701]

On the other hand...who the hell are these "U.S. officials" Way too much info for a secret mission like that. Also, ya think?

Between having a major DOD operation happening, with a group that was specially flown in from their U.S. Base to make it happen, U.S. naval and ground forces involved, and U.S. diplomats spun up in case Pakistan realized we had declared war on them, there's a lot of people here.

[kapkomet]

Between having a major DOD operation happening, with a group that was specially flown in from their U.S. Base to make it happen, U.S. naval and ground forces involved, and U.S. diplomats spun up in case Pakistan realized we had declared war on them, there's a lot of people here.

 

 

About as many as a 9/11 inside job, probably.

[Balta1701]

Link

Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.

 

Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

 

...

The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.

[southsideirish71]

Pakistani's tip off bad guys.

 

[lostfan]

Pakistani's tip off bad guys.

lol and they wonder why we don't like telling them s***

[StrangeSox]

The CIA organised fake vaccination drives to get Bin Laden family DNA

 

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader's family, a Guardian investigation has found.

 

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

 

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

 

Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor's arrest has exacerbated these tensions. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor's safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.

 

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

 

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

 

The medical community is pretty pissed about the complete lack of ethics behind this:

 

I'm hoping it will be seen for what it was - a black day for medical ethics and a one-off crazy scheme to locate Bin Laden, which failed. Hopefully when the next round of polio vaccination comes along, the vast majority of Pakistani people will not hesitate to bring out their children - and will forgive and forget this piece of CIA stupidity.

[southsider2k5]

The CIA organised fake vaccination drives to get Bin Laden family DNA

 

 

 

The medical community is pretty pissed about the complete lack of ethics behind this:

 

I have to to say, that is pretty ingenious. I can hardly believe the CIA thought it up.

[StrangeSox]

I have to to say, that is pretty ingenious. I can hardly believe the CIA thought it up.

 

It's also really, really terrible to fake giving vaccines to people.

[Balta1701]

It's also really, really terrible to fake giving vaccines to people.

I'm a little unclear here...were the vaccines actually fake? I didn't get that from the article. You could give out legit vaccines and still use it as a chance to get a DNA sample...the program itself would be "Fake" in the sense that its goal was not vaccination.

[StrangeSox]

I'm a little unclear here...were the vaccines actually fake? I didn't get that from the article. You could give out legit vaccines and still use it as a chance to get a DNA sample...the program itself would be "Fake" in the sense that its goal was not vaccination.

 

This is more accurate. The concern is:

 

I'd like to think that the scam to collect DNA from children living in Abbottabad through a fake vaccination campaign to discover whether any of them was related to Osama bin Laden was an piece of idiocy from somebody on the ground, which was not sanctioned in Washington. Who knows - but for an intelligence agency, it was not very intelligent.

 

Vaccines are some of the most effective health tools we have. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Save the Children, the GAVI Alliance and everybody else who successfully campaigned recently for more funding for vaccines have spent a lot of time and effort telling us that. But vaccines can only succeed if children are vaccinated. And that depends on the confidence their families have in the vaccines. Mounting a fake vaccination campaign could potentially undermine that critical faith. A number of well-respected global health bloggers have already pointed this out very eloquently - such as Tom Paulson at Humanosphere, who himself links to Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch and others. There is also a powerful and well-informed piece on PLoSBlogs.

 

Could we see a Kano situation unfold here? In that northern, Muslim region of Nigeria, there was a dramatic loss of confidence in the polio vaccine after rumours spread that it was part of a plot by the US to make Islamic children infertile. It took a huge effort to rebuild trust, aided by senior Muslim clerics and scholars who visited Kano to reassure people that the vaccine was entirely benign.

 

But they still moved the vaccination sites around, making it less likely that someone would actually get all three doses of the Hep B vaccine. The article isn't clear on whether the third was ever even offered.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

I have to to say, that is pretty ingenious. I can hardly believe the CIA thought it up.

 

They must have gotten the script from The Event

[Swingandalongonetoleft]

I'm a little unclear here...were the vaccines actually fake? I didn't get that from the article. You could give out legit vaccines and still use it as a chance to get a DNA sample...the program itself would be "Fake" in the sense that its goal was not vaccination.

 

Here is a little more.

 

In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived.

 

If it was Hep C they were vaccinating against, and it does come in three doses administered over a span of time- which weren't fully administered, then this is downright evil. I don't care if you're hunting a Satan-Hitler cyborg, you've used, misled, and manipulated people into thinking they were vaccinated, when (allegedly) they weren't. I sincerely hope this isn't true and full vaccinations were given out because if not, we're no better than the enemy.

[StrangeSox]

Here is a little more.

 

In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived.

 

If it was Hep C they were vaccinating against, and it does come in three doses administered over a span of time- which weren't fully administered, then this is downright evil. I don't care if you're hunting a Satan-Hitler cyborg, you've used, misled, and manipulated people into thinking they were vaccinated, when (allegedly) they weren't. I sincerely hope this isn't true and full vaccinations were given out because if not, we're no better than the enemy.

 

There's still a deeper issue of turning vaccinations into a political weapon and causing more people to be suspicious of them.

 

The CIA's Dangerous Vaccine Stunt

It was a clever ruse to score a terrorist DNA match. But the hidden costs are huge. Dr. Kent Sepkowitz on why disclosure of the CIA’s vaccine gambit could kill more people than bin Laden ever did.

 

And more here:

 

Around the world this will touch the very deepest sources of mistrust, fear, and hatred of the big, technological United States. We will (in this narrative) lie to people about basic questions of family health; we will prey on parents' concern for their children to lure them into situations where we can take samples of their tissues and fluids; we will say one thing and do another -- under white medical-technician jackets and a humanitarian guise. We will suggest that no aspect of our international presence is immune to penetration by spies.

[StrangeSox]

And more from Wired

 

This is awful. It plays, so precisely that it might have been scripted, into the most paranoid conspiracy theories about vaccines: that they are pointless, poisonous, covert shields for nefarious government agendas meant to do children harm.

 

That is not speculation. The polio campaign has already seen this happen, based on just those kind of suspicions — not in a single poor slum in New Delhi, but across much of sub-Saharan Africa.

 

In the fall of 2003, a group of imams in the northern Nigerian state of Kano — the area that happened to have the highest rate of ongoing polio transmission — began preaching against polio vaccination, contending that what purported to be a protective act was actually a covert campaign by Western powers to sterilize and kill Muslim children. The president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Sharia Law said to the BBC: “There were strong reasons to believe that the polio immunisation vaccine was contaminated with anti-fertility drugs, contaminated with certain virus that cause HIV/AIDS, contaminated with Simian virus that are likely to cause cancers.”

 

The rumors caught like wildfire, and they were spread further by political operatives who saw an opportunity to disrupt a recent post-election power-sharing agreement between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Three majority Muslim states — Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara — suspended polio vaccination entirely. Vaccination acceptance in the rest of the country fell off so sharply that the national government was forced to act. It ordered tests of the vaccine by Nigeria’s health ministry and empaneled a special commission to visit the Indonesian labs where the vaccine administered in Nigeria was made. The WHO convened emergency meetings.

 

And polio began to spread. At the end of 2003, when the boycott began, there had been only 784 known polio cases in the entire world. By the end of 2004, there had been 793 new cases just in Nigeria. Polio leaking across Nigeria’s borders reinfected Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan and Togo. Nigerian strains appeared in Yemen, site of the largest port on the Red Sea, and in Saudi Arabia, imperiling the millions of pilgrims coming to the country on hajj. (Here’s a 2004 round-up of the consequences from the South African publication Science in Africa, and one that I wrote in 2005.)

 

The last holdouts in Kano did not fully accept polio vaccination until the end of 2004. By then, so many children had gone unprotected that when Nigeria experienced the random bad luck of a vaccine-virus reversion to wild type in 2006, it ripped through the country in weeks — and further fueled lingering suspicions that had never really gone away.

 

The accusations that polio vaccination was a Potemkin cover for anti-Islamic activities almost ruined the international eradication of polio when they were false. Now, on the basis of the CIA’s alleged appalling ruse in Pakistan, they may be made again. And they will be much more believable, because this time they might be be true.

[Swingandalongonetoleft]

Looks like the Ars article I linked to is the same as the Wired article.

[Jenksismyhero]

Pretty awesome read on how the whole operation went down.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08...a_fact_schmidle

 

[Texsox]

Thank you for posting the link. Great read.

Pretty awesome read on how the whole operation went down.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08...a_fact_schmidle

[southsider2k5]

Pretty awesome read on how the whole operation went down.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08...a_fact_schmidle

 

http://www.registan.net/index.php/2011/08/...mpaign=wordtwit

 

The Schmidle Muddle of the Osama Bin Laden Take Down

 

by Joshua Foust on 8/4/2011 · 6 comments

 

A special guest post by C. Christine Fair

 

On Monday, August 1, the New Yorker ran a piece by Nicholas Schmidle, a young freelance journalist, which proffered a breathtakingly detailed account of the Bin Laden Take-down in May of 2011. I have known Schmidle since the summer of 2006, when we met at my office at the United States Institute of Peace. He explained that he had a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs that would allow him to live in Pakistan and write about his experiences for two years.

 

Mr. Schmidle had one serious problem: he was not an accredited journalist, which meant the Pakistani government was disinclined to give him a journalism visa. He sought my advice. I explained to him that visa issues are not my bailiwick but I outlined some of the key issues he could consider if and when he sets out upon his newfound adventure. Though he didn’t know much about Pakistan, Mr. Schmidle struck me as a fast study.

 

In the end, Dr. Shireen Mazari (an outspoken, anti-American polemicist) agreed to host Mr. Schmidle at the think-tank she ran at the time. However, it was a bargain with the devil: he still was not a journalist and he got his visa at the behest of a dubious shill for Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

 

Over the next few years, I watched Mr. Schmidle’s reporting. He had an eye for the key issues and he covered many important stories that others overlooked. I met him episodically in Islamabad when I came to Pakistan. In January 2008, Mr. Schmidle published a piece in the New York Times Magazine called the “Next-Gen Taliban.” In that article, he ventured into Quetta to attend an opening ceremony for the campaign office of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which he described in anodyne terms as a “a hard-line Islamist party.”

 

Mr. Schmidle wrote that the men in attendance mostly spoke Pashto but “knowing Urdu, I could understand enough [of their Pashto] to realize that they weren’t rehashing the typical J.U.I. rhetoric.” That made the rest of the article immediately suspect. I knew Mr. Schmidle, and knew that his language skills in Urdu were functional at best and, even if he had superb Urdu skills (and he did not), this would not render Pashto comprehensible in the slightest. (It is not an Indo-Aryan language like Urdu and therefore has a grammar and syntax that is starkly different from Urdu.) While one may recognize some Urdu words, without grammar and syntax the content of the discussion would have been opaque to Mr. Schmidle. Indeed, Pakistanis who have spent their entire life in the country speaking Urdu cannot understand Pashto and would never make the absurd claim to do so. How could Mr. Schmidle understand, must less interpret, what was going on without knowledge of Pashto or a translator? It seemed to me that things were not as they were reported.

 

I had a similar feeling this week when I began perusing Mr. Schmidle’s account of the Bin Laden raid. The account was deeply detailed. He described how the commander of the team, whom he called James “sat on the floor, squeezed among ten other SEALs, Ahmed [the translator], and Cairo [the malimois]. (The names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.) James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower.”

 

Schmidle detailed “James’” apparel and personal effects: he was sporting “a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, [carrying] a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle.” He even inventoried the contents of this fellow’s pockets.

 

Mr. Schmidle then recalls, in riveting detail, the harrowing movements of the helicopters and how “the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered.” When the first helicopter encountered problems, Schmidle exposits how the pilot reoptimized his plans and aimed for “for an animal pen in the western section of the compound.” He next tells his readers how the SEALs in the ill-fated bird “braced themselves as the tail rotor swung around, scraping the security wall. The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried.”

 

He even describes how the translator Ahmed hollered in Pashto at the locals that a security operation was ongoing to allay their suspicions about the nature of the cacophony in the cantonment town. (This detail caught my eye as the majority of persons in Abbottabad, where the raid took place, speak Hindko rather than Pashto.) He account is replete with quotes and other minute details obtained from persons seemingly involved directly in the assault and presumably speaking to him in person.

 

The article was in fact so detailed that it left the unmistakable impression that Mr. Schmidle had interviewed at least a few of the SEALs involved in the raid. During an NPR interview, Steve Inskeep explains that indeed Schmidle had spent time with the SEALs who were on the mission to get Bin Laden. NPR subsequently issued a correction for reasons noted below.

 

If not Navy SEALS, then perhaps he met some Navy Otters?

 

All of this makes for a gripping read. Too gripping I thought to myself. As it turned out, there is one very serious problem with Mr. Schmidle’s account: Schmidle never met any of the SEALs involved, as reported (with great tact and restraint) by Paul Farhi on August 3.

 

Farhi reached the same conclusion as I had: “a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that [he had not interviewed the SEALS]; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.”

 

Surely a journalist or an editor with a commitment to informing—rather than amusing—a public would understand that disclosing this simple fact is critical to allowing readers to determine how much credibility they should put into this account. In the absence of such disclosure, we are left asking whether this was second or third-hand information? Who are the people that he spoke to and how credible is their information?

 

Such an egregious exercise of incaution raises a number of questions about the entire report.

 

Schmidle has demurred from tackling this serious issue of credibility, integrity and veracity directly. During a “live chat” with Mr. Schmidle on the New Yorker’s website yesterday, several persons including myself tried to ask Mr.Schmidle to explain this egregious oversight. (I posed the question four times throughout the course of the “live chat.” The moderator did not post a single one. (Earlier in the day, Schmidle and I exchanged emails wherein I expressed my dismay at his reportage.)

 

Many of us were following this in real time via twitter. I was not alone: others—including other journalists—tried to ask other tough questions but the moderator did not post them either. I also tried to post a comment to this effect along with other readers’ comments. That comment has not yet been posted.

 

Finally, after a volley of fatuous queries to which Schmidle responded with a peculiar degree of detail, the moderator finally let one person raise the issue that he neither met any of the SEALS involved nor indicated as much in his report.

 

Unfortunately for the credibility of this exercise, this person was Erin Simpson—a friend of Mr. Schmidle. Ms. Simpson had earlier defended him during a twitter exchange with me wherein she responded to my vexed queries that “he’s a good friend.” She further intimated that someone involved in the operation may have spoken to him because he is a “GO’s kid.” The latter point references the fact that his father, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert E. Schmidle Jr., is the deputy commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.

 

Schmidle answers Ms. Simpson in a familiar voice: “Hi Erin. Good question. I’ll just say that the 23 SEALs on the mission that evening were not the only ones who were listening to their radio communications.”

 

The response was risible and hardly addressed how he could have acquired such details of the operation through such means.

 

That the moderator passed on only softball questions and that this one question was posed by a “close friend,” raises more questions than the “live chat” could have answered.

 

What’s at Stake?

 

One may ask at first blush why a feel-good story about the Bin Laden raid is problematic or even merits sustained critique. From an American point of view, the story reads like the film script Schmidle may well aspire to write. It confirms all that we wanted to know about the raid and the bravado of our SEALS. The shooter, who finally killed Bin Laden, even managed to mutter “For God and Country” in the femtoseconds that his synapses took to pull the trigger, according to Schmidle.

 

However, there are implications that go well beyond Mr. Schmidle’s limits of journalism integrity and his own personal aggrandizement and professional aspirations.

 

First, many Muslims across the world fundamentally doubt the events of the Bin Laden raid. Some believe Bin Laden is still alive. Others believe he died long ago. Others believe that the events of May 2 were staged to allow the Obama administration to make an exit from Afghanistan. As Mr. Schmidle’s is the first (and so far only) account of the drama, these problems cast a pale of doubt upon the events that transpired that evening.

 

Second is the simple fact of Mr. Schmidle parentage. His father, as noted above, is the deputy commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. Given the conspiratorial propensities of many within and beyond the Muslim world, Schmidle’s ties to this organization by virtue of his father would recast any serious inaccuracy in his report as a U.S. military psychological operation to deliberately misinform the world about the operation.

 

The reasons for this are at least two-fold. First is the charge of U.S. Cyber Command itself, which in it the lexicon of the U.S. Department of Defense is “pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergy that does not currently exist and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the information security environment.” While the organization appears dedicated to protecting cyber infrastructure, others may interpret its role as using cyberspace to spread disinformation. Second, cynics may justifiably wonder what influence if any his father had in the article. Schmidle explains this to Farhi “’He knew I was working on it,’ the younger Schmidle says, ‘but we both decided it was best not to discuss it in advance. We wanted to maintain distinct lines of operation.’” I have no reason to not believe this. However, given that questions that now hover about his report will other readers be so inclined?

 

Finally, whether or not the shooter actually said “For God and For Country” is another important question that affects the way in which the United States and is citizenry are seen across the world. The conflict with Bin Laden has been waged in lamentably civilizational terms focusing upon the clash of Islam and the presumably non-Islamic west. Since 9/11, countries with Muslim minorities have been gripped by Islamophobia with some states outlying headscarves and minarets and others seeking to restrict the erection of new mosques. Anti-immigration concerns in Europe are thinly disguised efforts to deter future Muslims from migrating. Success in the war of terrorism seems to be equated with success in turning back the spread of Islam. Several states in the United States have even introduced ludicrous and shameful bills to outlaw Sharia.

 

How would a proclamation that Bin Laden was killed “for God and for country” be read in a place like Pakistan where the war on terror has been largely seen as a war on Islam and Muslims? If this was in fact uttered, as an American, I am saddened that eliminating the world’s most notorious killer was done “for God” first and country second. If it wasn’t uttered, such a gratuitous detail hardly helps the United States make its case that it opposes terrorists not Muslims.

 

A Story Too Good to Check?

 

Whether Americans and our allies like it or not, Pakistan and Pakistan’s populations are critical to U.S. interests. This will be true for the foreseeable future. Journalists have an important function: informing our publics. Journalists’ reportage shapes how Americans see their country abroad and understand the countries with which the United States engages. It shapes our support for war, for foreign aid, for particular bilateral relations. The U.S. experience with the Iraq war illustrates the extreme limits of how a supine and incompetent press became the vehicle to mobilize an angry public for an ill-conceived and unjustifiable war of choice. The United States will long pay the price for strategic error.

 

Journalists have an equally important, if less appreciated, role in shaping how the outside world sees us. With the internet, the entire world reads our press, watches our television and hears our radio broadcasts. Media hype and hysteria, xenophobia, Islamophobia and more quotidian issues of inaccuracy and incaution with handling sensitive pieces of information are for the whole world to see and to judge us.

 

With stakes this high, should not the standards of journalistic integrity be even higher? I should think yes. The New Yorker should immediately right this wrong by publishing an editor’s note disclosing the simple fact that he never interviewed the SEALS in involved in the raid.

[Texsox]

Thank you SS.

[The Sir]

Frankly, I don't give a f*** if the Arabs/Muslims (who often practice Holocaust denial) want come up with crazy conspiracy theories and tell themselves that their asshole leader still lives. He doesn't; US Navy SEALs infiltrated his hideout and shot him in the face. Nicholas Schmiddle writing an unverified, dishonest story for a magazine does not change that fact and it never will.

 

And so what if he said "For God and Country"? I hope he did! He sure didn't shoot him for Allah and Communism. Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, we are at war with Islamic terror. Me and my Soldiers are not training to fight against right wing militias in Montana, as much as Biden and Pelosi would like to think we are. We are training for the mountains of Afghanistan. Radical Islam is the enemy right now, and these politically correct attempts to avoid that fact are cowardly and dangerous.

[StrangeSox]

lol yes we are on a holy war, we must smash the evil nonbelievers.