September 11 anniversary HERE
Apparently, four years ago two couriers who served bin laden were identified. Two years ago, one of these was recognized, and surveilled. This eventually led to the compound. Perseverance. And the rest is history. and a movie.
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| celebrating death |
More Here: /burning a book-building a mosque-and-the planes of 9 11
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
IMAGES of Osama bin Laden’s mangled face will not be beamed around the world. But it’s worth considering, as we think about the death of bin Laden, how his face looked in life. It was not the face of a rabid or fulminating zealot. It was not even an angry face. On the contrary, in nearly every photograph, bin Laden bears a benign expression. There is softness to his demeanor. He was reportedly soft-spoken (if intense) with colleagues and reasonably kind, if distant, with his wives and children.
Yet he was the author of some of the greatest cruelties and crimes of the past two decades. Inspired and encouraged by him, al-Qaida murdered thousands of innocent Americans in cold blood. The memory of human beings hurling themselves to their deaths out of windows in the World Trade Center rather than die in the inferno is etched in our psyches. It was al-Qaida, possibly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed personally, who kidnapped, bound, and beheaded Daniel Pearl. It was al-Qaida, bin Laden’s creation, that used a child with Down syndrome as an unwitting suicide bomber in an attack on an Iraqi polling place in 2005.
Perhaps running short on handicapped children to booby-trap, al-Qaida used mentally impaired women to sow death and mayhem in Iraq in 2008. The AP reported: “Two mentally retarded women strapped with remote-control explosives — and possibly used as unwitting homicide bombers — brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at least 91 people...”
When mentally impaired women were not available, al-Qaida had other tactics. According to C. Christine Fair of Georgetown University, who authored a U.N. report on terrorism, al-Qaida terrorists in Iraq would rape women and then hand them off to Samira Jassim, known as the Mother of Believers. Until her arrest in 2009, her job was to convince the shattered victims that the only way to redeem their honor was to die in a suicide mission. Paul Kix in the Daily Beast reports that 28 women did so.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt ignited decades of debate when she coined the expression “the banality of evil,” in reference to the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. He wasn’t extraordinary at all, she wrote, just a clerk doing his superior’s bidding without question.But what of Hitler himself? There, if anywhere, was a face that personified evil, contorted as it so often was by rage. But his secretary remembered him as thoughtful and kind — he was solicitous about her health, for example. It took years for her to come to terms with his fathomless evil — and her own complicity.
None of the great monsters of the past hundred years — Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot — thought of themselves as evil. On the contrary, even when exhorting their followers to the worst extremes of human degradation, they did so in the name of a higher good. Hitler was purging the world of a dire threat, untermenschen (Jews, Gypsies, the mentally impaired, homosexuals, and Slavs), in order to usher in a golden age, the “thousand-year Reich.” Even in the very last moments of his life, Hitler pointed to his war against the Jews as his greatest achievement. He was proud of the Holocaust.
The communists allowed as how in order to make an omelet, you had to break some eggs. In order to build the perfect society with universal prosperity and complete equality, some harsh measures would be necessary in the short term. But it was for a greater good. The brave dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, noted mordantly that he had seen many broken eggs, but no one had ever tasted the omelet. One of Stalin’s henchmen recorded, “Our great goal was the universal triumph of communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible ... to destroy hundreds of thousands or even millions of people ... and to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism.’” One hundred million people in the 20th century were sacrificed to that particular ideal.
Robert Heinlein said that “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” Some are. Certainly those who commit tremendous crimes nearly always do so armed with elaborate self-justifications.
The unifying theme for the great killers is to dehumanize their victims first. Stalin targeted “kulaks,” and “counterrevolutionaries.” Hitler despised “Jewish vermin.” Pol Pot loathed and derided “cosmopolitans.” The soft-spoken bin Laden, his quiet style notwithstanding, denied the humanity of his victims with the word “infidel.”You cannot reliably detect evil in a face. But the attempt to dehumanize is always the precursor of dark crimes.Mona Charen writes in Washington, D.C. on politics and national issues.
The story from AP: excerpt
"WASHINGTON (AP) — Helicopters descended out of darkness on the most important counterterrorism mission in U.S. history. It was an operation so secret, only a select few U.S. officials knew what was about to happen. The location was a fortified compound in an affluent Pakistani town called Abbottabad, two hours outside Islamabad. The target was Osama bin Laden...
Intelligence officials discovered the compound in August while monitoring an al-Qaida courier. The CIA had been hunting that courier for years, ever since detainees told interrogators that the courier was so trusted by bin Laden that he might very well be living with the al-Qaida leader.
Nestled in an affluent neighborhood, the compound was surrounded by walls as high as 18 feet, topped with barbed wire. Two security gates guarded the only way in. A third-floor terrace was shielded by a seven-foot privacy wall. No phone lines or Internet cables ran to the property. The residents burned their garbage rather than put it out for collection. Intelligence officials believed the million-dollar compound was built five years ago to protect a major terrorist figure. The question was, who?
The CIA asked itself again and again who might be living behind those walls. Each time, they concluded it was almost certainly bin Laden.
President Barack Obama described the operation in broad strokes Sunday night. Details were provided in interviews with counterterrorism and intelligence authorities, senior administration officials and other U.S. officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation.
By mid-February, intelligence from multiple sources was clear enough that Obama wanted to “pursue an aggressive course of action,” a senior administration official said. Over the next two and a half months, Obama led five meetings of the National Security Council focused solely on whether bin Laden was in that compound and, if so, how to get him, the official said.
Normally, the U.S. shares its counterterrorism intelligence widely with trusted allies in Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. And the U.S. normally does not carry out ground operations inside Pakistan without collaboration with Pakistani intelligence. But this mission was too important and too secretive.
On April 29, Obama approved an operation to kill bin Laden. It was a mission that required surgical accuracy, even more precision than could be delivered by the government’s sophisticated Predator drones. To execute it, Obama tapped a small contingent of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team Six and put them under the command of CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose analysts monitored the compound from afar...
The military operation took mere minutes.
U.S. helicopters ferrying elite counter-terrorism troops into the compound identified by the CIA as bin Laden’s hideout – and back out again in less than 40 minutes.
Details of exactly how the raid unfolded remain murky. But the al-Qaida courier, his brother and one of bin Laden’s sons were killed. No Americans were injured. Senior administration officials will only say that bin Laden “resisted.” And then the man behind the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil died from an American bullet to his head.
“I heard a thundering sound, followed by heavy firing. Then firing suddenly stopped. Then more thundering, then a big blast,” said Mohammad Haroon Rasheed, a resident of Abbottobad, Pakistan, after the choppers had swooped in and then out again. It was mid-afternoon in Virginia when Panetta and his team received word that bin Laden was dead. Cheers and applause broke out across the conference room.
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