Osama Bin Laden is dead.

[sahiel]

Personally I found it very interesting that many of my friends in the State Dept. who are stationed throughout North Africa and the Middle East, whilst agreeing the world is a better place lacking OBL in it, believed that Mohamed Bouazizi's death has had/will continue to have a far far greater impact (and thus far it seems an incredibly positive one) on the region than anything resulting from OBLs death.

[Cogglamp]

Another unmentioned reason for not using cruise missles/b-2 bombers to blow the place up is to gather intelligence from the items at the compound.

Hopefully we'll find something of use to give us some leverage to use against Pakistan in hopes that we can make them clean up their act a bit. We certainly need Pakistan as an ally. I'll bet a nickel that we find something that we can point to that shows that ISI knew about OBL's whereabouts and possibly harboring Taliban/Al Qaeda personnel.

Edit: White House Press Secretary stating that OBL was unarmed but resisted. Not sure what the resistance was but I honestly don't think it matters.

[Melathys]

Care to elaborate? The point is quite valid, with no trial happening, us forces executed a man outside the law. Granted the man was a wanted terrorist, but is that still not outside the law?

as I said above, think of it like law enforcement. His death would easily fall under a standard use of force policy, and not outside of the law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force



The idea being to never be below the subject in the use of force model. If subject is being assaultive, you don't want the officer to be using cooperative controls. As such, if a subject is using deadly force, the officer should be at deadly force as well.

http://gunfighter1.typepad.com/warrior/ ... force.html

[Sabindeus]

Was pretty much waiting for a Brekkie post. Excellent read. Hopefully it will shed some insight and put an end to pointless bickering and theorizing.

Further discussion is encouraged. Further flame wars will result in this thread getting locked.

same here, thanks Brekke

[RedAces]

hey,

thanks Brekkie for this insight.

Bye, RedAces.

[Candiru]

I think its probably a good thing he was killed rather than captured. If he had been captured then I would expect many hostage takings with threats to get him released or hostages die. Since he is dead he might still attract attacks as a martyr, but without the ticking clock of a trial they won't be as bad as in a capture situation.

[Thalia]

Drudge just reported that the President is going to release some pics.

Personally I can't stand gore so I won't look at them, I believe he is dead so i don't need to see his brains lol.

But to all who don't flinch at that sort of stuff (I can't watch horror movies cuz I puke), heard it will be released soon.

[Skwigelf]

Drudge just reported that the President is going to release some pics.

Personally I can't stand gore so I won't look at them, I believe he is dead so i don't need to see his brains lol.

But to all who don't flinch at that sort of stuff (I can't watch horror movies cuz I puke), heard it will be released soon.

48 hours later?

Plenty of time to photoshop some realistic photos of a dead Osama!

[Amirya]

Personally, I wonder what the hell is wrong with people.

Clamoring for pictures of a bullet riddled corpse, but OMG A WOMAN IS BARING HER BREAST TO FEED A BABY!

I really just don't know what to say about that.

(I will be one of those avoiding the pictures if they're released, I don't need to see them.)

[Dorvan]

Personally, I wonder what the hell is wrong with people.

Clamoring for pictures of a bullet riddled corpse, but OMG A WOMAN IS BARING HER BREAST TO FEED A BABY!

I really just don't know what to say about that.

(I will be one of those avoiding the pictures if they're released, I don't need to see them.)

I have no need or desire to see those pictures, but I think it's important that it be done. There will be some nutjobs crying conspiracy no matter what, but better to give them as little ammunition as possible.

[Fridmarr]

Laterna and Red Aces, I get what you are saying, and I think it's fine theory, but it simply doesn't apply in this context.

Its a man right to be judged in a court of law. No matter how bad he is, he has to be judged and found guilty for any sentence to pass. If he's captured by US soldiers, he should be judged by US laws no? Are US soldiers allowed to use whatever laws please them when they are at war with another country

Care to elaborate? The point is quite valid, with no trial happening, us forces executed a man outside the law. Granted the man was a wanted terrorist, but is that still not outside the law?

These comments would make sense if this was a criminal action, but it clearly was not. Sure Bin Laden committed many crimes, and could have been arrested, but he was also an enemy combatant, and a strategic one at that. By all laws of the US and Geneva Conventions, his killing was lawful. We were fully within our rights to just launch a bomb at his hideout and be done with it. He was a leader and commander of a group that has been engaging the US in armed conflict for two decades, domestically and abroad. The fact that he committed crimes doesn't mean he's suddenly not a lawful target, like any other enemy militant is. Just like our military leaders are also lawful targets for the opposition.

[Lightbeard]

.

Bye, RedAces.

This confuses me to no end

[Brekkie]

Lightbeard,
U Mad bro?

Signed Brekkie

[Brekkie]

One of the bigger questions it seems people have regarding this event is: "Will this make any difference to counter-terrorism operations? Or did we effectively just kill some dude that didn't really control anything?"

I think by any reasonable analysis, the answer is Yes, it Will make a difference.

One of the advantages al-Qa'ida has always enjoyed is that tactical victories matter far less in this conflict than symbolic ones. Thus, terrorism operations can technically be complete tactical failures and yet still be a success for the organization.

The reason is that al-Qa'ida functions like a network, rather than a chain of command. It sustains itself on its own legend. The acts of one terrorist can inspire any random kid on the block to want to become legendary like him, and then if that kid goes out and achieves some limited tactical success of his own it will spawn his own legend and build up renowned in communities in which he operates and then outward to communities far from him.
The key element of this system is that it is self-sustaining as long as the basic legend of OBL as an invulnerable hero figure remains intact. Knights of the Round Table may rise and fall, meet individually with success or failure without troubling the overall legend at all, but as long as there is a King Arthur to inspire young boys to become new knights there will continue to be a Camelot.

People like to talk about how al-Qa'ida is just a brand-name composed of lots of completely unrelated, unconnected cells, and that thus there is no true "leader" to kill. This is relatively correct information, but bad analysis.
al-Qa'ida has an advantage over the U.S. military in that it is a network, not a chain of command. But that is an important term; network. They are not lots of individuals, they are connected very intimately over a wide dispersion by lines of communication, supply, unified doctrine, and mutual inspiration. They are only a group of individuals in the same way that an internet community like maintankadin is a group of individuals. Dispersion and compartmentalization does not mean that an organization is not capable of unified action, or that there is not a lynchpin to the organization that holds it together. They may not have a "leader" in the traditional sense of the word, but a network can have a nexus. OBL was that nexus.

al-Qa'ida's organization as a network is an advantage because they communicate laterally, rather than vertically. Innovation at the lowest level can be quickly communicated and coordinated across the entire organization because information does not have to go up and then back down an entire chain of command. But this can also be a weakness if you snip a key convergence in the network. The separate pieces of the network will no longer converge through the nexus the way they used to be able to, and it is unclear how well they will able to provide unified resistance going forward without it. A lateral network lacks the resilience to loss of a key link in it's chain that a vertical chain of command has. A chain of command can survive loss of a link easily, because the vertical structure just compresses.



tl;dr
Yes, OBL's death makes a big difference.
Yes, he may not have personally oversaw very much individual action by al-Qa'ida nowadays but he occupied a key link in their chain of organization that is now disrupted.
And Yes, simply the shattering of his legend of invincibility will have a massive impact on counter-terrorism.

[Brekkie]

We also have a saying in the military; Perception is Reality.

People, both collectively and as individuals, are not very brave. They will tend to go along with whichever faction seems to be winning. We've seen this over and over in our operations in Afghanistan.
After this, the establishment of a stable Afghan state and the final destruction of al-Qa'ida and the Taliban as fighting forces will seem just that much more inevitable, and it will be just that bit harder for al-Qa'ida to make their case to a local populace that they are the right side to back. Self-confidence in your own success has a momentum of it's own that can turn the act into the reality quite easily in war.