My college roommate e-mailed, wanting to know why Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes. Conspiracy theorists will never let the matter of his death rest, he opined.
"Unshrinable," I replied.
This way, there's no place to attract the worst sort of attention.
Turns out I wasn't so far off, according to the Daily Beast. No country wanted his body. Muslim tradition requires whatever happens to happen within 24 hours.
Glenn Beck's unhappy.
Dan Wasserman's funny.
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Der Spiegel has a reporter in Abbottabad, who writes in A Visit to Bin Laden's Neighborhood how the explosions were uncharacteristic in the highly militarized garrison area known as Bilal Town, home to the Pakistani Army's elite military academy.
"I simply can't believe it," said Jehangir Khan, a resident of Bilal Town. "How could he hide in this highly secured city?" the businessman wondered.
The piece reports how the U.S. had been trying to learn the identity of the courier who led them to Bin Laden for four years, and that he was a confidant of Khalid Sheihk Mohammed, the Gitmo resident who claims authorship of the Sept. 11 plot. Two years ago, general whereabouts in Pakistan of the courier and his brother were determined.
A piece in Al Jazeera by two University of Arizona scholars asks pointedly whether the discovery of Bin Laden right under the nose of the Pakistani military might not be the proper occasion for reconsidering how many millions of dollars the U.S. sends to its allies over there.
Leila Hudson and Johann Chacko provide a useful shortcourse in the checkered relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, and describe the double-edged game played in by Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, as hunting with the hounds and running with the hares.
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I mentioned earlier that the Guardian has knocked down the bullet-ridden Bin Laden photo as a fake. Brian Hickey here in town thinks he's found a better likeness of the man buried at sea. Brilliant.
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John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro (N.C.) News-Record, asks his Facebook friends:
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CNN is reporting that U.S. forces recovered a vast amount of material from Bin Laden's compound after the firefight. Also, it was 30 to 35 minutes into the raid that the SEALs made it up to the third floor and shot Bin Laden to death.
According to the Air Force Times, the CIA has set up a task force to go through the materials. No word yet whether the cache contains pictures, computer documents, etc...
The network also quotes U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich,. as saying in a news conference that the Pakistani army has "a lot of explaining to do."
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When the USA! cheers began at the ballpark, Kyle Scott of the Crossing Broad blog, was dumbfounded.
I honestly had no idea why (thanks to AT&T barely working at the ballpark) and spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out whether Ike Davis or Daniel Murphy were Canadian. Neither of them are.
A few minutes later, a guy behind me filled me in and then it all made sense.
The blog does a nice job of noting how good Philadelphians looked to the sporting world last night when world news broke out in a local game.
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Bin Laden was not the first prize captured in that Pakistan city. Debka reminds that Umar Patek, the Indonesian man wanted for helping to mastermind the 2002 Bali bombing, was bagged in Abbottabad this January. Debka, which sometimes reads as if it were reported in the basement of Mossad, notes that the compound where Bin Ladin was killed was only 100 meters from the West Point of Pakistan.
These disclosures indicate that the Pakistani military and its intelligence must have known who was living in the exceptionally large, heavily guarded villa in their midst and in plain sight and kept the knowledge from the Americans.
Could the Pakistani intel possibly have been that dumb?
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Born fabulously rich, but thought to dwell in desert caves. Who was this soft-spoken mass murderer? Less than a month after 9-11, Robert D. McFadden, the New York Times rewrite ace, painted this portrait of the son of a Yemeni bricklayer.
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Maybe you've seen the photo on the Web today of bullet-ridden Bin Laden that some British papers published. Fake, says the Guardian.
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From the comments section of this blog post, titled Ding Dong, Bin Laden's Dead, comes this sparkling thought, which I first read on Glenn Reynolds Instapundit site. Remember when we were thought by al Qaida to be too consumed with our own consumption to play the long game?
I do think this should put to rest one of the enduring myths of our time — a myth which was partly responsible for 9/11, in fact. That's the idea that democracies can't stomach a long struggle.
This shows that even with severe domestic divisions, economic problems, etc., the United States could stay the course and nail this bastard. Maybe, just maybe, the next wanna-be warlord will take notice.
You can't scare us into submission with a devastating strike, and you can't wear us down, either
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Bill Tammeus wrote for the Kansas City Star's editorial page, and was preparing a special edition on Sept. 11, 2001, when he learned his nephew was on the first plane to plunge into the World Trade Center. He now writes the Faith Matters blog, and had this to say this today about the life and death of the man who personified ruinous religious fananticism. The piece is called Bin Laden's Death Does Not Put An End To Our Troubles:
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PolitiFact records a Promise Kept.
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Fresh detail from Marc Ambinder in the National Journal on the secret force that closed the deal. Lots of background on JSOC, DevGru, and SEAL Team Six:
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Anyone else bothered by those USA! USA! chants that are most welcome at World Cups and other international competitions, but maybe in bad taste when it comes to military operations? You can still applaud what happened yesterday in Pakistan and still recoil at the Orkish hooting. David Sirota, son of Huntingdon Valley, puts it this way in Salon today:
... somber relief was not the dominant emotion presented to America when bin Laden's death was announced. Instead, the Washington press corps -- helped by a wild-eyed throng outside the White House -- insisted that unbridled euphoria is the appropriate response. And in this we see bin Laden's more enduring victory -- a victory that will unfortunately last far beyond his passing.
For decades, we have held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. When we've seen video footage of foreigners cheering terrorist attacks against America, we have ignored their insistence that they are celebrating merely because we have occupied their nations and killed their people. Instead, we have been rightly disgusted -- not only because they are lauding the death of our innocents, but because, more fundamentally, they are celebrating death itself. That latter part had been anathema to a nation built on the presumption that life is an "unalienable right."
Of course the "innocents" part is what's different here. But I still don't like it. Same problem with that moment in Baghdad when soldiers wrapped an American flag around the fallen Saddam statue's head. A few second later, some well-schooled guy replaced that with an Iraqi flag. Bad form.
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Quote of the second: "Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day. @JeffJarvis
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The original plan was to bomb the man, according to Politico's Playbook. But the president rejected that, opting to let loose the SEALS. The piece talks about the deluxe, $1 million, walled compound whose inhabitants always burned the trash, had neither phones nor Internet connection, and then reports on the administration's "holy cow! moment.
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The FBI makes it official. Eight new letters written in red under the world's most-wanted mug.
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So what's the political impact of getting Bin Laden? Writing in The Fix, the Washington Post's political blog, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake argue that this moment is major for President Obama, in particular, it's major in the eyes of those who don't spend too much time looking at politics. They explain:
Remember that moments matter in campaigns, particularly when they are as unpredictable and unexpected as this one. The vote for president is ultimately a vote for the person best equipped to represent and lead the country.
And it's in times like this one, when the average person is paying attention, that minds tend to get made up about who is up to task — and who isn't.
(Think back: Is there anyone who doubts that then-Sen. Barack Obama's steady and sober approach to the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 sealed the election for him?)
By way of comparison, see: McCain suspending campaign
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The nation's editorial cartoonists have been busy.
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Lawrence Wright, in the New Yorker's News Desk blog, handicaps what's next for al Qaida, in the wake of Bin Laden's death and revolution in the Arab world. His post bears a headline from the great Steam song that's used in the final moments of Game 7s across sportsdom. Wright, author of the most-excellent "The Looming Tower," writes:
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Did the U.S. find Bin Laden based on information about an al Qaida courier who was ratted out by detainees at Guantanamo? Slate explores, in a piece by John Dickerson on President Obama's action plan.
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Just tuned in al Jazeera's coverage for a live report from Gaza, where Hamas was condemning the killing of Bin Laden, more evidence why this network should be easier for Americans to watch.
The firefight was "a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood," according to the Hamas statement.
Always a different perspective. Always provocative. Good to know. Watch live here.
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For one citizen journalist, the raid in Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden was a neighborhood story.
He calls himself @ReallyVirtual on Twitter, and about 1 a.m. in Abbottabad he began tweeting to the world about "a rare event," a chopper flying over head. He describes himself as an IT consultant who'd relocated to the hills.
The man who live-blogged the catch of the century.
"Go away helicopter," Sohaib Athar wrote next, "Before I take out my giant swatter. :-/"
Then he reported "a huge window-shaking bang" and wrote, "I hope it's not the start of something nasty :-S"
An hour later, the news broke that a U.S. operation had ended in the death of the Al Qaida leader. And the IT consultant was much in demand. He writes that he was 2-3 km away from the compound where Bin Laden was living.
(You can read his Twitter feeds, but don't go to his Web site. There's malware on it, which he, himself, acknowledges.)
His photo of the city an hour's drive from Islamabad shows a pretty peaceful place.
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Somewhere, Spike Jones sits on a whoopie cushion: a musical celebration of Bin Laden's death.
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How did the nation's newspapers play the catch of the century?
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Dexter Filkins, writing in The New Yorker's blog this morning, examines the double game and what Pakistan knew about Bin Laden:
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How do you reconcile being a peaceable fellow and celebrating the killing of a man? I went to bed thinking about this. I consider myself a sensitive guy, and yet my toes were dancing as I imagined that final scene in that Pakistan compound. I thought about my friend from high school, Jeff Hardy, a gentle bear who was cooking for Cantor Fitzgerald the morning of September 11th. Left a wife and two boys. I guess my sense of justice is straight outta the Old Testament.
NPR this morning posted a quote from Mark Twain that puts it more civilly than I ever would:
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