Arrivederci Osama
As this incident unfolds, I have become compelled to add a note. Watching Americans at ground zero behaving like VE Day I wonder whether the whoopie-making was more relief than joy. They don’t realize that this Great Satan was but one head of a multi-headed snake, as any terrorist organization should be. After 10 years they still have not caught his 2IC who is the real brains. 9/11 was not bin Laden’s idea - he just funded it. Still, the Americans are in the midst of an economic meltdown of their own making so they need some good news.
Plopping his mortal remains over the gunwhale is not going to change his zealots’ perception of him. Nor is releasing photos of him watching TV in his cardie and Stokies - that simply makes him a man of the people. Heresy of heresies - he may even have been a moderating influence on the organization. Now, there may be a whole bunch real crazies out there determined to do the job properly.
The ‘intelligence haul’ - the ‘greatest ever’. I’m sure, but Al Qeada will reorganize itself. It has already proven itself perfectly adept at operating in small cells. bin Laden, unless he slipped up, would have made sure that in the event of his being killed, there was nothing critical to be found.
He probably slipped up because he relied too much on the protection of the Pakistanis. I saw an American who was extolling the virtues of waterboarding torture to extract the information that shopped Osama. Please. After the world’s only superpower has spent a decade looking for an old man.
It was inevitable that someone would drop the dime on him sooner or later and it wasn’t ‘good intelligence gathering’. There was a massive reward but that wasn’t the reason I suspect. bin Laden’s death has simply confirmed the long held suspicion that the Pakistanis are in bed with al Qeada and that he was always tipped off about some impending raid on his followers or himself. To be fair, the two chairs that the Pakistanis are standing on are slipping further apart. They need the US but there is widespread hatred of it.
To their credit, the bungling, meddlesome CIA did allocate some importance to this piece of intel amongst the white noise of thousands of other ’sightings’.
As far as the SEAL operation is concerned, once the operation had been hidden from the Pakistanis, it was standard stuff. The house had been under surveillance for months so it’s layout and occupants had been logged and there was little resistance from the one guy with a gun against more than twenty trained soldiers. Even then they managed to lose a chopper.
Wait for the OSAMABUSTER badge to appear on US apparel - and the ‘real story’ behind the op. Don’t forget the dozens of ‘factual’ books and the film of the book of the trailer etc. There will be more authors and journalists around the compound than Pakistanis.