Osama Bin Laden Killed

[merlin]

US President announced Osama Bin Laden was killed by the US in Pakistan.

 

[enysse]

Yes, I heard this morning, was surprised he was still alive and kicking.

 

[sestoppelman]

Navy SEALS rock!!
I was however surprised to hear that UBL was given a proper Muslim burial at sea. Why this is so is beyond me. I would have cut off his you know what, stuffed them in his mouth, covered him with pork and set him on fire before dumping his useless ass over the side for the sharks! So much for my political correctness.

 

[milford]

not sure, but this was done I believe to give no chance at a shrine or statue cropping up at the place he would be buried at ???

 

[sestoppelman]

I heard that too. No problem with the dunking, but I guess they went thru some of the Muslim burial rituals too, thats what bugs me. The guy was a mass murderer! I would have used his remains for target practice off the carrier deck.

 

[Bert the Turtle]

I think they used his live body for target practice!

I fully understand that burial at sea. Deny the Jihadis a new "holy site". I don't don't know all the thoughts that went into the decision process, but I would have thought that a president who just took 2 years to (almost) eliminate doubts as to where he was born would have been concerned that people would question the authenticity of this. A public display before the sea burial may have eliminated the questions that are sure to crop up. Also may have been a real goat rope and not worth the trouble. I imagine they took plenty of photos, videos, and tissue samples.

The other side of the coin is that if I had captured him alive, I would have said he was killed in the process and buried at sea so that nobody would be looking too closely into what I was doing with him. With all the hassle Guantanamo turned out to be, it is a lot easier all around if he is dead with no body to show for it, even if he really is in the bowels of a ship somewhere sipping tea and answering polite questions or however it is they get information out of these guys. One thing for sure is that the government doesn't intend anyone to ever see his body again.

I think the fact that no permission was sought from the Pakistani government sends a few very clear messages. First, we don't trust them. Second, we no longer ask permission.

 

[Code4]

Well there are four things the death of Bin Laden has left us.

1) The popularisation of radical elements within the Islamic religion.
2) The unfortunate grouping of Arab and Islamic communitys with al queda. ( Not all arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are radical ) no matter what some people may want to believe.
3) The increase in difficulty of flying into, out of and around the USA.

No matter what the reason, the internment of Bin Laden as per his religious requirements elevates the USA in my eyes to a higher moral level than their enemy. I was taught during my military service to respect the enemy dead though I was lucky enough not to have to test that teaching.

Have things changed ? IMO not one bit.

4) It has given more grist to internet forums and conspiracy theorists.

 

[sestoppelman]

Code4,
Agree with some of what you say. I dont think respecting UBL is on my to-do list, alive or dead. For what reason should we respect his burial customs? America haters will hate us no matter how we would have handled this.

While its true that most Muslims are not terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims! UBL was a Muslim terrorist who was responsible at least in part for the deaths of many people, Americans among them. That he is gone is a good thing. I shed no tears for him or his ilk.

The assault on our personal freedoms due to this crap is of course ridiculous. Especially these patdowns at airports which I hope not to partake off in June. I will use the Xray instead.

 

[Code4]

ses,

Having a few Muslim friends and acquaintances and I get frustrated that millions of good people get tarred because of this psychopath. His end was inevitable and as I alluded to it will give a lot of uninformed people a lot to discuss as to why and how it took so long.

I also believe that it is the sign of a stronger culture and society that we don't allow ourselves to drop to the same level as the enemy.

If that happens, then we have lost and we must constantly be on our guard against that evil influence.

 

[sestoppelman]

Code4,

We didnt win WW II by being nice did we? We firebombed the bloody hell out of the enemy until they had enough. Radical Muslims hate us because we are a free people and dont adhere to their twisted view of the world and their wackjob religion, made wackier by the extremists element among them. Remember after 9-11? Around the world Muslims were dancing in the streets with joy at what had been done. How soon we forget.

 

[Bert the Turtle]

We won WWII by destroying the enemy, being tougher than the Germans and meaner than the Japanese. We won the post-war peace by being decent. Even when we executed Tojo or high level Nazis it was done properly and with respect for the heavy responsibility we faced in judging, sentencing and carrying out the sentence.

When we bury Bin Laden according to his faith, rather than feeding him to pigs or any of the other creative and amusing things I have heard suggested today, it has nothing to do with respecting him. It has everything to do with respecting ourselves.

 

[sestoppelman]

I grant your points Bert. But we must keep in mind our current enemy has no honor. We are talking about the same people who think its OK to "honor kill" your children and rape women and saw the heads off innocents. No honor among these terrorists. Like I said not all Muslims are terr's but most terr's are in fact Muslim. I cannot help that.

 

[Bert the Turtle]

No argument from me, but I think there is a practical reason we buried him according to his custom. I'm in no way against killing him or any of them. I'm also glad to see that we didn't let the woman being used as a human shield slow things down: her blood is on his hands, not ours.

It is no different to me than killing a lion that is trying to kill me. As an animal, he has no honor, he does what he does. I'd kill him because he needs killing. But I'm not an animal. Whether I kill four legged animals or two legged animals, it still doesn't make me an animal unless I choose to let it. As a hunter, I am respectful to a dead animal even though I am the one who killed it.

The other, more practical point is that times of war require sometimes that people do things that they would otherwise find unacceptable, for example killing the woman being used as a human shield. By making sure that after the fighting is over, we behave with decency and respect, even for someone like OBL, we help ensure that our soldiers who do this type of work are able to psychologically do their jobs. It is critically important to have distinct boundaries around the combat so that when it is time for war, it is time for war, and when it is time for peace, it is time for peace. If we blur the distinction between the two, we may find that not only have we become barbarians after the shooting stops, but we have become soft when the fight is on. I do not want to see that happen.

If you watch interviews with WWII veterans, they all say the same thing: they were just doing their job. It sounds today like some sort of modesty. It isn't. Their job was to destroy things and kill people, and for the people in bombers, many of those people were women and children. If after the war they went around desecrating bodies, they would simply be people who killed women and children. But they weren't, they were decent human beings, soldiers and airmen who had a job to do. Few of them wanted the job, but they did it. They had lives to go back to and it would be spectacularly unfair to them if they had to go back to their lives as animals. By our servicemen treating the enemy dead, especially the worst of them, with decency, our servicemen are able to compartmentalize their jobs from who they are as human beings. Letting them show mercy and compassion for the defeated enemy not only lets them come home and go back to their families, something they have truly earned, it also, and perhaps more importantly for the nation, allows them to behave without mercy or compassion when the enemy is still a threat.

 

[sestoppelman]

Bert, I agree completely with all you said. But it doesnt change my mind when it comes to UBL and his like. I have more respect for the lowliest of animals than for any terrorist anywhere, anytime.

 

[Bert the Turtle]

We are agreed. Animals do what they do. These terrorists choose their evil.

I am glad to see the reward is a bullet in the head. Too bad we can't buy those SEALs a beer or three, but since Al Queda and their ilk would likely try to burn down their kid's schools while in session, I imagine we will never get to know who did the deed. Maybe if we just all buy the next serviceman we see a beer, it will do.

 

[sestoppelman]

Amen.

 

[NUys]

Osama bin laden DEAD!!!! and in other news, Chuck Norris returns from holiday in Pakistan.

 

[fhm3006]

:crazylol:

 

[enysse]

I liked Bert the Turtle's comments...they show a lot of class and respect.

I think for the people of the world, we buried him alright.

For the terrorist and future terrorist out there....I would have liked a video of Osama Bin Laden being feed to the pigs.....for private viewings when they do more interigation interviews with the enemy. Nothing you want on public display....but a nice little video for the enemy.

 

[ILCAPO]

I have to comment here. There are Muslims who are good people. But this idea that Islam is a "peaceful" religion and that it's only a relative handful of radicals who are the problem is all part of a propaganda campaign. The fact of the matter is, poll after poll around the world has shown that huge numbers of Muslims believe that violence, including suicide bombings, are at least sometimes acceptable, IF it results in the advancement of Islam as the world religion.

I have a copy of the Koran, which I bought while serving in Iraq. I'm reading it... still not done, because I have to put it down and get away from it at times it's so disturbing. The take away I have from this is exactly what some of the Christian Iraqi (Assyrian) translators I worked with were telling me about the religion, its nature and how it came about. The more I read, the more I see exactly what they were talking about. And I have come to this conclusion.

Mohammed, far from being a man of peace, was a warrior. He has far more in common with the likes of Ghengis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Alexander the Great, Napolean....name your conqueror, than Jesus Christ. Read the Koran, and you can see a bipolar mind emerging. One moment Christians and Jews are "people of the book" and the next, with no reason given, they're enemies. It basically came down to, what "mood" was he in when that part was written.

The story line from the Assyrians was this... and I see it the more I read. His first wife, who everyone agrees was much older than him, was actually Christian, and NOT pagan as the Muslims claim. And she used to read to him from the bible. As I've read the Koran, I see this makes perfect sense, because he name drops characters from the bible, but without ever explaining who they are, as if one would already know. And while the Koran is mainly a set of instructions through which Mohammed tells people how to live, he'll make references to biblical stories, only in this case placing himself in the middle of the action. We've all heard how after his wife died he went up on the mountain to mourn, and that's when God spoke to him. Moses anyone? This happens a lot.

What also really concerns me is how he says Allah says this, and Allah demands that. But then he slips, in quite a number of cases in fact, and says "WE COMMAND YOU." He's placing himself in up as Allah.

There's lot of justification for violence, lying, etc., and one of my favorites. "You may beat your wife" if she's offended you, but not too badly.

Anyway, I could go on. But the point is, there's a huge number "several hundreds of millions" of Muslims around the world who have no problem with the concept of "jihad" as a violent struggle with non-Muslims. At this very moment there are conflicts going on in at least 16 countries in which it is Muslim extremists carrying out violence against non-Muslims -- these range from Indonesia, to Thailand, across Southwest Asian through Africa and the Middle East. And in all of them, it's the Muslims attacking non-Muslims for domination.

And any time some "offense" arises, like the Danish Cartoonist who drew a tasteless cartoon of Mohammed or someone writes a book or a filmmaker creates a documentary which is less than flattering to Islam, what do we see? Millions of Muslims around the world rise up in anger, burn the offenders in efigee and demand their heads.

What's amazing is they don't seem to see the irony in what they're doing. "You say Islam is a violent religion? HOW DARE YOU! THAT IS BLASPHEMY! DEATH TO THE INFIDEL!"

Like I said, most don't in any way see the irony in their violent response to being called violent. That single fact is what stuck in my mind most as I spent nearly a year in a Muslim country. There's nothing fringe about this mentality. It's pretty commonplace among them.