To return directly to the original element, to whit OBL...

It has been reported by Reuters that yes, in fact, amongst the rest of the "stuff" seized as part of the OBL raid, there is in fact a substantial amount of high quality porn.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/ ... RK20110513



(ooopps spooling iz bad)

Great article; I started but I'll have to finish it later.

Many people who voted for Obama (me) did so partly out of a maddening frustration with our national leadership on the war against Al Qaeda. Bush of course transformed this into a vague, un-winnable "war against terror" in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Somehow, we blinked as a nation and found ourselves with 150,000 troops in Iraq, another huge contingent in Afghanistan which was far more relevant to the 9/11 attacks, no signs whatsoever of a concerted effort to get bin Laden, and even our sort-of-relevant Afghanistan effort being neglected in favor of Iraq. Personally, I was banging my head against the wall with the maddening stupidity of what was going on around us. I know I wasn't alone.

So, along came Obama. The Iraq invasion was stupid, he had said back in 2003 or 2004, immediately distinguishing himself from Clinton and Edwards (and Kerry in 2004, who also voted for the Iraq war). He seemed smart. He didn't strike me as a batshit liberal lunatic. His statements reflected moderation and centrism. This guy, I thought, might be the one to pull us out of Iraq and spend a fraction of the money we're spewing out there on instead flooding enemy territory with spies to find and kill these bastards one at a time, which is what we should have been doing all along.

Now that he's doing exactly that, there are plenty of hard-left liberals who don't particularly like it, because they don't like the CIA in general. I respect their views. But I don't share them. The team of enemies who assaulted us on 9/11 was 19 guys with collared shirts, armed only with box-cutters. They got their marching orders and instructions from a bunch of cave-dwellers with walkie talkies. You can't defeat them with Normandy-like waves of troops, because they're not an army. The best we can do is find them, one at a time, and pick them off. Many Americans get that, I think, and Obama is proving to be one of them. That's why we elected him.

That's the approach I always favored. I kept saying, suppose we'd spent our trillion fuckin' dollars trying to catch and eliminate the people who actually attacked us?

That's one reason I voted for him. Not the only reason, but that was definitely one of them.

I've always thought of myself as a liberal, but my liberalism doesn't extend to turning the other cheek when somebody flies airplanes full of innocent people into buildings full of innocent people. Then it's time to track down the motherfuckers who did it and blow them away.

poutine wrote:



One of the major problems with the CIA was the diversion of funds from human intelligence to reliance on technology and military build up to keep the war profiteers draining the treasury as fast as they could. A much better defense would have been educating and training a large group of people who had the skills and capabilities of keeping watch on our friends and enemies and not necessarily as spies or undercover agents. We needed people who could track and evaluate what they were hearing and seeing. What's the good of being able to overhear billions of conversations and intercept billions of e-mail transmissions if you don't have the ability to screen , evaluate and piece together the puzzles. There were some people who understood that but unfortunately were not listened to for most of the last few decades.

Our previous FBI director, Louis Freeh, didn't even have an email account as the count-down to 9/11 began ticking away. Nor did he have a computer in his office, as of the year 2000. America's incredible racial diversity, not just of people of different races but people of different races who are patriotic Americans, has still not properly been exploited in my opinion, for covert operations. Maybe that's changed in the last few years, with the emphasis I've seen in the news on Arabic-speaking FBI and CIA agents.

Too soon? Eh, whatever, this is America!

Glenn Grennwald at Salon has a thought provoking article up, where he looks at comments on the bin Laden killing by an American prosecutor at Nuremburg, along with Chomsky's controversial statements.

Some of the interesting snippets:



Greenwald then goes on to discuss Chomsky's assertion that Bush's crimes were much worse that bin Laden's, and says that there is little point trying to weigh up whether the intentional targeting of civilians that killed several thousand is less or more worse than an illegal war that recklessly killed more than 100000 civilians. He does assert that he believes that Bush committed a crime, and says:

Greenwald is radicalized in his opinions and hatred of the Bush administration. I proudly voted against Bush both times I had the chance to, and yet Greenwald's arguments strike even me as being completely out in left field. So I take his characterizations of these issues with a grain of salt.

I've read a few books on Nuremberg. It's a personal life-long fascination of mine, as someone interested in law who had a grandfather who was a captain in the British army and faced live combat action against the Germans. The bottom line is that Greenwald here is trying to analogize the President of the United States, whose invasion of Iraq was ratified by a convincing majority of our Senate, to Nazis and Al Qaeda. That's ridiculous on its face. If President Bush is guilty of war crimes on those grounds, so is the United States Senate, and what the hell why not... so are the American people who elected all of them.

The invasion of Iraq was based on lies - does it matter by whom it was ratified? Does the fact that many people agreed with it make it any less repugnant? It was an act of aggression, unjustified, and certainly not an act of self defense by the US, the UK, Australia and whoever else was part of the Coalition of the Willing.

Justice for the 3000+ killed by bin Laden was served by his killing. Where does the justice for the many many more killed in Iraq come from?

Lies that a majority of Democrats failed to investigate, even when most of their voters were skeptical. This was a constitutional war that the entire United States supported through its elected officials. And we re-elected those officials, including Bush, in 2004.



The deaths of civilians as unwanted casualties of fighting war is not the equivalent of the targeted genocide against Jews.

I think the decision by Obama to send in a team of Navy Seals to raid the compound versus launching a missile attack will go down as the most important decision made by a president in the war on terror. I am convinced that Bush would have opted for the later. The Seals were able to grab with terabytes of data on hard drives and memory sticks. The emails will lead to other data such as IP addresses from where they were sent. It will probably take months or even years to run down all the leads that will be developed from this data. Symbolically, killing OBL was huge but as far as making America safer the data will ultimately be the most important catch that was made on May 1, 2011.

You have to hobble or break their communication system. If they were using a program to encode/decode messages, then that system is now open to compromise in the future. I am sure there will be a boatload of surveillance on any ISP that has come up hot. It is not that the ISP did anything wrong, but they can access the ISP's data looking for a certain data structure with a resulting trace.

If you know now that a couple of Internet Cafe's in Pakistan are being used, then sick Carnivore on the place for the rest of the life of the IP address set.

Also knowing which cafe's/sites are being used - the possibility of just good old fashioned machine bugging. Money and technology talks. What is to stop the CIA from setting up Internet Cafe's in terrorist rich areas and record all the keystrokes etc???????

The primary legal charges against German political leaders were not charges of genocide or crimes against humanity, but launching an unlawful war of aggression. While the other charges got more press, they were a legal novelty, and had no strong precedent in then-existing international law. Surprisingly, many who were not convicted of the charge that headed the indictment were convicted of the more novel crimes. However, many were convicted also of the crime against peace.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal declared: “The charges in the indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive war are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

An interesting geopolitical analysis of the situation in Pakistan following the shooting of Osama bin Laden. The Pioneer May 17, 2011 "The Pakistani street rages against the American infidel, but this stems from impotence. The country would be lost without American aid that keeps it afloat." by Premen Addy.


I had not previously been aware that the Saudi Embassy in Karachi has been the object of an attack by hand grenades and that today a Saudi Arabian diplomat was assassinated while on his way to work in Karachi.

I would like to see a major change in American attitudes toward Pakistan. I'm not optimistic though, based on our consistent foreign policy history of making short-term decisions without regard for the long-term consequences. Pakistan is a victim of that short-sightedness.

Instead of bribing Pakistan's top military officials with our $3 billion a year in aid and then looking the other way while hoping for the best, we need to enforce serious restrictions on where the money is spent, coupled with requirements for our access to Pakistan's infrastructure in order to monitor those restrictions. The latter is Pakistan's biggest objection, and thus far we have relented. We say we want monitoring access, they say that would be a violation of their sovereignty, so we back off and hand them our check. As related in that excellent New Yorker article linked above, this has resulted in Pakistan funneling our funds off to its nuclear program at the expense of its military. This, in turn, helps explain why the country is overrun by Arab terrorists who escape detection and have hijacked the country through their terror campaign. The people of Pakistan are suffering as a direct result of the combined incompetence of the US and Pakistani governments. It's no wonder they hate our guts. Frankly, what have we done to deserve their admiration? The foreign aid? All that's done is paid off the Manhattan and London penthouse suites of top Pakistani leaders, while buying them a top-notch nuclear missile defense system so they can continue their unwinnable pissing match with India.

What we need is simple: foreign aid with restrictions and monitoring. Will the Obama administration make this happen? I'm not counting on it.

It is not a violation of national sovereignty for a nation to cede some portion of it voluntarily in return for a benefit. Every international organization from the United Nations on down conditions membership on agreeing to respect international law promulgated by that organization. Pakistan is only the second-worst abuser of "no questions asked" foreign aid funding. Israel is the prime offender.

I'm not saying Israel shouldn't be an ally, or even our most important ally in the region, but for all we do for them, they could do a lot better by us. I find myself often offended when, in return for unprecedented largesse, they give us a poke in the eye.

The current Prime Minister of Pakistan himself, Zardari, is known among Indo-Pak social circles as "Mister Ten Percent." He got this reputation from supposedly skimming a cool 10 percent off of every transaction involving national security, such as foreign aid payments. I have various friends who know the kids of a few of these Pakistani dictators, including the Bhuttos (Zardari is Bhutto's widower), the Musharaffs, and Zia Al Haq. All of them lead lives of exquisite wealth and privilege, mostly in the United States.

All that money, funneled to Pakistani dictators and generals to fight Al Qaeda, and we had to send choppers in to kill the main target ourselves in a suburb of Islamabad. Our nation should be outraged.

Edit: Correction, Zardari is President of Pakistan. The Prime Minister is Gillani.

Associated Press - detailed report by anonymous officials

I hadn't seen this explanation before:

Panetta to employees: Keep a lid on it



http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/usnews/ci_18090213

Too bad we couldn't just back haul that helicopter instead of blowing it in place. Even ruined, it gives away lots of secrets. Don't underestimate the intelligence of folks in that area of the world. Afterall, they have nuclear weapons.

I did read somewhere that Pakistan has delivered the tail portion back to the United States. But you can bet that they analyzed the hell out of it first, if it contained any useful technology.

I am sure we paid a pretty penny for the salvage operation by the Pakistani Consolidated Wrecking Service. Which is owned by sheh so and so, which is a part of the xxx tribal grouping...on and on and on

Indian writers, such as the one I quoted somewhere above, believe that Chinese troops are already in the Pakistani part of Kashmir in the guise of advisers and specialists. That remains a potential flashpoint for full-scale war on the subcontinent. That's just a tragedy for one of the most beautiful places on earth.

What a quarrelsome lot we are!

We are not, you goddamn asshole!