GutsyCall.com? Or NoBrainer.com?: 2007 Raid On Militant Gathering Hoped To Kill Bin Ladin, But He Wasn't There

Bush gave the same order when he had intelligence that UBL might be present at a jihadi convention in Tora Bora. (The same Tora Bora UBL had previously fled from. The way Holy Warriors do.)

But he wasn't.

But: Yes, the call was made.

But just as the half dozen B-2 Stealth bombers were halfway on the 3,000-mile flight to their target, commanders ordered them to return to their secret base in the Indian Ocean, because of doubts about the intelligence on Bin Laden and concerns about civilian casualties from the bombs.

A smaller, more precise raid was carried out by commandos and attack helicopters, killing several dozen militants in the episode, which has not been previously disclosed.

But the founder and formative figure of Al Qaeda was not there.

Why wasn't he there? Well, our latest intelligence (which could be wrong) is that UBL didn't leave his Abbottabad bedroom for... five years.

Like Holy Warriors do.

Osama Bin Laden spent the last five years living in the room of his mansion where he was shot and killed by U.S. forces, according to Pakistan security officials.

The claims were made by the terrorist leader's wife, who apparently told interrogators that she and her husband had not left the same room for the past half a decade.

There's a lot more at that article, the latest stuff (which may or may not be true) being reported about the raid.

According to the Daily Mail, SEALs were told to assume that UBL wore a suicide vest if he wore any clothes at all; so unless he were caught stark naked, the order was to kill him, for the sake of troops' safety.

Even if he had been naked, he still presumably would have had to drop to his knees with hands behind back shouting "I surrender! I surrender!" to have any chance of actually being captured -- it seems the SEALs' orders were to assume anything inconsistent with clear and complete surrender was to be regarded as resistance and therefore to be met with lethal force.

I don't know that -- I'm guessing it's something like that based on the apparent mission parameters of, supposedly, "kill or capture," but with a strong bias (wink, wink) to the "kill" part.

I'm not sure that's a bad Rule of Engagement. I guess you can make it clear to the troops that they are to kill unless there is clear evidence of absolute, absolute safety in a capture; but then, if you're biasing that far to "kill," why even put troops in the position of having to take a quarter-second to make that judgment? Why not just Man Up and say, "Kill him, don't even think about it."

The answer, of course, is that Obama has to play these legalistic games for his bleeding-heart bien pensant liberal base.

After all, if he issues a Kill On Sight order, he risks an indictment from Eric F'n' Holder.

As usual, the indecisiveness/tentativeness of our supposed leaders becomes the vague, possibly-prosecutable muddle that the actual soldiers on the ground have to guess about, putting their own lives in greater danger than necessary.

But all that's important is that our so-called "leaders" are semantically protected from the legal prosecutions. If our soldiers and CIA agents wind up be prosecuted based on the deliberately-murky "rules" set up by their superiors -- then by all means, put them in jail, just to prove "we're better than that."

Even though we're not. Since our leaders refuse to make that "we're better than that" policy official and clearly encoded. They want to just let our troops grope through the ambiguities, on pain of imprisonment if they err.

Oh: Since I'm using the term bien pensant lately I decided I should probably look it up. I sort of knew what it meant, but not completely.

It means "Someone who accepts and or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought."

At least that's the meaning I intend. The Sheep who think they're mavericks by all baaing the same criticially unexamined idea.

posted by Ace at 02:23 PM

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