Death of bin Laden
We now know the difference in which President was focused on ending the life of the man who charged his followers with multiple attacks against the United States.
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell showed several clips of President Bush ... one time he's swaggering, "remember that poster that used to be up in the Wild West Days? 'Wanted: Dead or Alive? was one comment. Another, in effect, I don't care that much about bin Laden. He's been sidetracked into a swamp ... nothing going on. Obama's statements during the campaign showed he wasn't kidding about zeroing in & prioritizing his goals to put Osama bin Laden @ the top of the list of "things to do."
O'Donnell did a great thing for those of us with short memories by replay key statements by George Bush over his eight year tenure. One that surprised me in March, 2002, which was REALLY early in the process of "hunting bin Laden," was essentially ... well, we marginalized him. Really, George?
It makes as much sense, NOW, to look @ the spate of Palestnians in the U.K. taking action & actually attacking & killing British citizens IN the U.K. with attacks sophisticated enough to have certainly been encouraged by some handler whispering softly in the leaders' ears: "Osama is close by. Trust me! He believes in your plan. Go forward now, & strike. He will be close enough for you to hear him clap!" or some other crap. The notion that Osama bin Laden was within spitting distance of a major Pakistani military academy & that there were thousands of Pakistani military nearby, whether retired or active, makes it ridiculous for anyone to buy that the network of past & present ISI officials did not know bin Laden was in their midst.
Killing bin Laden was, apparently, a riskier proposition than we originally thought. I've heard 60-80%/40-20% chances of success. And, I'm sorry to say, helicopters nearly jinxed the op again. Mechanical failure. Prop wash from a Blackhawk (it's own, perhaps), caused one to go down. Thankfully, two more Sea Knights or some other type heavy lift choppers with refueling capabilities were right behind. And it's obvious, as someone said last night on a national news: People who do not know of the Navy Seals are generally dead before they can make a personal comment on their effectiveness.
The Joint Special Operations Command must still report directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President, & that makes those people among the most skillful we have in a Special Operations Command that is composed of lots & lots of special operators. I think one part of that command, the Air Force's Special Operations Group, may be locate @ Kirtland AFB, in Albuquerque. We may not know it, but undoubtedly, if there is a part of New Mexico that resembles flying into the Abbotabad part of Pakistan, those guys were flying practice runs somewhere out there in the dark, empty landscapes of our state.
Killing bin Laden should include enough video to show the Islamic world that we treated his body with more care & proper ritual than he ever gave a damn about when he ordered the World Trade Center attacked. I'll never forget the hatred I felt inside when I saw people having to jump to avoid being burned alive. I was full of hate over anyone causing people to have to choose between jumping 110 stories, with such a violent end, v. burning alive. I nearly ground my back teeth down to a flat surface in about 20 minutes over that.
I was accused by one "friend" of being the "resident Taliban" of my former office when I also reminded email readers that we had to work harder @ solving the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. I was accused, I guess, of being a sympathizer for the Arabs. That felt fairly familiar, as on some issues like this, I seem to be in both camps, able to understand both sides perhaps better than others. To say that my thoughts on facilitating the Palestinian-Israeli crisis' end, with a settlement, or recognition of the Palestinian plight made me a sympathizer of what happened on September 11, was not only ridiculous, but insulting.
President Obam is perhaps the only American President who can now step forward, & show that he chose the option on killing bin Laden that offered the least possibility of harming innocent Pakistanis. We know now that bombing the target, the compound, wouldn't have allowed any: body recovery; DNA processing; any capture of an enormous amount of intelligence data; a certain confirmation that bin Laden was dead. Obama realized if things went bad, they would be really bad if innocent Pakistanis were killed. And it is obvious that he was responsible for insuring that the body of bin Laden was treated better than any Americans were on September 11.
We want President Obama to once again return to Egypt, where a new government may form, offering more freedom for it's people, to have shown that he took pains to avoid killing innocent Pakistanis, & ordered the body to be treated properly.
I hope the White House does it all: shows us the photo(s); shows us some of the video; shows us preparations for burial; shows us the carcass of that son of a bitch going over the side of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson. "Now, he sleeps w/the fishes, Luca Brazi said to your father," Marlon Brando apparently was told in one of his discussions with one of his killers. Frankly, I wouldn't care, personally, if that video leaked out, but I realize that's my inappropriateness. I am content w/not ever seeing that. I can think it, just not really move to make it so.
We can all hope that someone managed to cut a hole in the bag holding bin Laden's body ... just enough to put the scent out in the Indian Ocean for the sharks, or other fish that feed on carrion. I think it will be good for the American people, in particular, who watched with horror what happened on September 11, to see bin Laden's end. If others wail & moan, so be it. WE deserve to see those stages of this operation. There must be some reconcilliation with the horror of September 11 & the end game on May 2.
I do want to comment on the spontaneous crowd scenes near the White House, in Times Square, etc. I was @ first offended @ the chants of "USA, USA!" in celebration of bin Laden's death. I think a lot of us didn't "get that" in terms of how OUR parents acted on V-E Day or V-J Day. We of the Vietnam generation, of course, never had any event that capped off our involvement in the Vietnam War. Instead, we have those depressing images of Vietnamese allies being punched in the face by beefy CIA security personnel; or the long line of Vietnamese climbing ladders to the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, hoping to get a ride out of Saigon before "the end." Not too mention dozens of Vietnamese Hueys being flown to sea, then crash landed, in the choppy waters, or pushed off the side, to make room for more incoming choppers.
The Fall of Saigon represented for me one of the deepest, darkest depressions I ever endured at the end of that war. I was for it, then against it, then somewhere in the middle, trying, again, to find a way to negotiate a settlement that would not turn into a blood bath for our friends in Vietnam. People who don't seem to give a damn about things like that are quick (the Ultra Liberal Leftists) to demand an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan & Iraq. But, watch the film, "The Stoning of Soraya M" & then tell me you don't give a damn about an overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The women, folks. The women will be killed by the thousands by those Taliban assholes. And the killing won't be pretty. I DARE YOU to watch that film, if you want an overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice ... they're the ones who will have some karma coming due for ignoring Afghanistan for five years, allowing the Taliban to regroup & refresh themselves.
Obama had to do something to take us to a place where a withdrawal after all our sacrifice, HAD to be set up before being taken down.
The reaction of younger people to bin Laden's death was an indicator of how strongly many below the age of 25, even 20, have felt about the terror links to that man. I never felt frightened. Never. I recall standing in a half mile long line waiting to hear John Kerry speak, in Las Cruces, where everyone was moved through a gate and checked with metal detectors, thinking: I would rather have my liberty than stand in a security line for everything, from now on. This sucks!
But the world may have changed in many ways that I just didn't "get" in terms of how it all felt for younger people who have not only grown up in the shadow of the falling World Trade Center; Pentagon; Shanksville & other passengers on those planes. I don't travel enough to even barely grasp the changes in airport security. We've also seen our young people on the front line of STDs, and how death can come from the wrong choices with casual sex.
But in the end, it IS the men & women of the younger generation who know friends who have come back horribly mangled from wars in Afghanistan & Iraq. It was their friends who died. It was their friends who are insane after 3, 4, 5, 6 tours of these two war zones. I have PTSD & what I have came from 90 days of combat. Imagine what the men & women of the volunteer forces have with multiple combat tours!!!!!
In the end, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donny Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Condi Rice, etc., were responsible for sending our professional military, back again & again, to war zones, to worsen their PTSD. Families will never be the same. Children will not know Moms or Dads, or even, both. Men & women will drift into alcoholism and drug addiction. Single, double & triple amputees will stop being recognized as they are now in ten,fifteen, twenty years.
I was in Valley Forge General Hospital, the second half of my 1 year in Army hospitals due to my wounds & malaria. I SAW men putting on one, two, or three prosthetic limbs, every day. The advances in prosthetics & cosmetic surgery & pain management weren't there in my day. I showed my scars on my right arm to an occupational therapist recently, & she said it looked like they' d cut me open with a coke bottle.
That was the way it was then.
Those crowds of young people were shouting "USA! USA!" because the volunteer military is more jocular now; more physical; more about men & women working out together. Check out the dialogue in "Aliens" & the banter between men & women in science fiction future wars, or "Starship Troopers," & I suspect you'll "get" a little more inkling of what the modern military is like these days. It's like Worldwide Wrestling, in some ways. Or "Ultimate Fighting." Men & women mingle more in the military, and we're on the leading edge of actually having "Starship Troopers" be a reality for our military forces.
It made sense that there would be, in D.C., particularly, with so many military & intelligence personnel there, we'd see such a spontaneous demonstration of young folks, happy bin Laden was dead. D E A D.
It HAS BEEN THEIR FIGHT, FOLKS. They should be allowed to "celebrate" in the way the culture has driven them since, say, 1990 or so. Remember the end of the Soviet Empire? The Berlin Wall coming down. Those celebrations, & the celebrations of the bin Laden killing are close together in mood. We have to step out of the way.
For those whose loved ones died on September 11 -- I weep for you, & know you will remember that day every day for the rest of your lives, regardless of how much therapy you receive for YOUR PTSD. I thought about Vietnam EVERY DAY for 22 years, until my own therapy & work on Survivor Guilt was worked on.
I vote to have his photo shown of him before & after; of him with a huge hole over his left or right eye, whichever was hit; of the bullet (double tap) wound on his chest; of some discreet photo of his body being prepared for Islamic burial; the body bag sliding over the side. I vote for all of those. I'd also vote for some video of what happened. And if it were up to me, I'd also remind the kind of Islamist haters who villify our form of government, and treat their women like Soraya M., that their "hero" was gotten.
The Pakistani Military & ISI are liars if they want us to buy they didn't know bin Laden was "there."
They knew.
I hope Ayman al-Zawahiri is next. And that we tell the ISI: you have 48 hours to take him out yourselves. Otherwise, we will watch him, & watch you, help him try to disappear, & then we will take him out ourselves. YOU do it, or WE will. Stop fucking around with us!
I didn't originally support Obama. Dorothy & I were split. She did before I. I wanted true history to be made, & for Hillary to win. However, when he won & she lost; when it was obvious it was Obama v. McCain, I knelt down, & asked God to please, help me let go of those sentiments. He was as smart as Hillary & I needed to get behind what was happening. I need, dear God, I prayed, to let it go. To "let go & let God," we in 12 Step Programs say.
I've made many mistakes, but asking for God's help to support President Obama wasn't one of them.
I've grateful down to the souls of my feet that he's there, & want him to succeed, succeed, succeed. This hopefully will stop all the bull crap about "Barack HUSSEIN Obama," & "Obama, born in Kenya," or "Obama, the Maoist."
Race baiters: give it up. Get behind our President. I'll do everything I can to see him re-elected. I'm glad we got bin Laden.
It's been a long time coming. Don't ever foget those people who had to either burn to death, or jump to their deaths. Never, ever, forget those jumpers. We owe it to ourselves, & all the America haters, to show the photos. Ask to see the photos.
Jerry E.
May 4, 2011
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell showed several clips of President Bush ... one time he's swaggering, "remember that poster that used to be up in the Wild West Days? 'Wanted: Dead or Alive? was one comment. Another, in effect, I don't care that much about bin Laden. He's been sidetracked into a swamp ... nothing going on. Obama's statements during the campaign showed he wasn't kidding about zeroing in & prioritizing his goals to put Osama bin Laden @ the top of the list of "things to do."
O'Donnell did a great thing for those of us with short memories by replay key statements by George Bush over his eight year tenure. One that surprised me in March, 2002, which was REALLY early in the process of "hunting bin Laden," was essentially ... well, we marginalized him. Really, George?
It makes as much sense, NOW, to look @ the spate of Palestnians in the U.K. taking action & actually attacking & killing British citizens IN the U.K. with attacks sophisticated enough to have certainly been encouraged by some handler whispering softly in the leaders' ears: "Osama is close by. Trust me! He believes in your plan. Go forward now, & strike. He will be close enough for you to hear him clap!" or some other crap. The notion that Osama bin Laden was within spitting distance of a major Pakistani military academy & that there were thousands of Pakistani military nearby, whether retired or active, makes it ridiculous for anyone to buy that the network of past & present ISI officials did not know bin Laden was in their midst.
Killing bin Laden was, apparently, a riskier proposition than we originally thought. I've heard 60-80%/40-20% chances of success. And, I'm sorry to say, helicopters nearly jinxed the op again. Mechanical failure. Prop wash from a Blackhawk (it's own, perhaps), caused one to go down. Thankfully, two more Sea Knights or some other type heavy lift choppers with refueling capabilities were right behind. And it's obvious, as someone said last night on a national news: People who do not know of the Navy Seals are generally dead before they can make a personal comment on their effectiveness.
The Joint Special Operations Command must still report directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President, & that makes those people among the most skillful we have in a Special Operations Command that is composed of lots & lots of special operators. I think one part of that command, the Air Force's Special Operations Group, may be locate @ Kirtland AFB, in Albuquerque. We may not know it, but undoubtedly, if there is a part of New Mexico that resembles flying into the Abbotabad part of Pakistan, those guys were flying practice runs somewhere out there in the dark, empty landscapes of our state.
Killing bin Laden should include enough video to show the Islamic world that we treated his body with more care & proper ritual than he ever gave a damn about when he ordered the World Trade Center attacked. I'll never forget the hatred I felt inside when I saw people having to jump to avoid being burned alive. I was full of hate over anyone causing people to have to choose between jumping 110 stories, with such a violent end, v. burning alive. I nearly ground my back teeth down to a flat surface in about 20 minutes over that.
I was accused by one "friend" of being the "resident Taliban" of my former office when I also reminded email readers that we had to work harder @ solving the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. I was accused, I guess, of being a sympathizer for the Arabs. That felt fairly familiar, as on some issues like this, I seem to be in both camps, able to understand both sides perhaps better than others. To say that my thoughts on facilitating the Palestinian-Israeli crisis' end, with a settlement, or recognition of the Palestinian plight made me a sympathizer of what happened on September 11, was not only ridiculous, but insulting.
President Obam is perhaps the only American President who can now step forward, & show that he chose the option on killing bin Laden that offered the least possibility of harming innocent Pakistanis. We know now that bombing the target, the compound, wouldn't have allowed any: body recovery; DNA processing; any capture of an enormous amount of intelligence data; a certain confirmation that bin Laden was dead. Obama realized if things went bad, they would be really bad if innocent Pakistanis were killed. And it is obvious that he was responsible for insuring that the body of bin Laden was treated better than any Americans were on September 11.
We want President Obama to once again return to Egypt, where a new government may form, offering more freedom for it's people, to have shown that he took pains to avoid killing innocent Pakistanis, & ordered the body to be treated properly.
I hope the White House does it all: shows us the photo(s); shows us some of the video; shows us preparations for burial; shows us the carcass of that son of a bitch going over the side of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson. "Now, he sleeps w/the fishes, Luca Brazi said to your father," Marlon Brando apparently was told in one of his discussions with one of his killers. Frankly, I wouldn't care, personally, if that video leaked out, but I realize that's my inappropriateness. I am content w/not ever seeing that. I can think it, just not really move to make it so.
We can all hope that someone managed to cut a hole in the bag holding bin Laden's body ... just enough to put the scent out in the Indian Ocean for the sharks, or other fish that feed on carrion. I think it will be good for the American people, in particular, who watched with horror what happened on September 11, to see bin Laden's end. If others wail & moan, so be it. WE deserve to see those stages of this operation. There must be some reconcilliation with the horror of September 11 & the end game on May 2.
I do want to comment on the spontaneous crowd scenes near the White House, in Times Square, etc. I was @ first offended @ the chants of "USA, USA!" in celebration of bin Laden's death. I think a lot of us didn't "get that" in terms of how OUR parents acted on V-E Day or V-J Day. We of the Vietnam generation, of course, never had any event that capped off our involvement in the Vietnam War. Instead, we have those depressing images of Vietnamese allies being punched in the face by beefy CIA security personnel; or the long line of Vietnamese climbing ladders to the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, hoping to get a ride out of Saigon before "the end." Not too mention dozens of Vietnamese Hueys being flown to sea, then crash landed, in the choppy waters, or pushed off the side, to make room for more incoming choppers.
The Fall of Saigon represented for me one of the deepest, darkest depressions I ever endured at the end of that war. I was for it, then against it, then somewhere in the middle, trying, again, to find a way to negotiate a settlement that would not turn into a blood bath for our friends in Vietnam. People who don't seem to give a damn about things like that are quick (the Ultra Liberal Leftists) to demand an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan & Iraq. But, watch the film, "The Stoning of Soraya M" & then tell me you don't give a damn about an overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The women, folks. The women will be killed by the thousands by those Taliban assholes. And the killing won't be pretty. I DARE YOU to watch that film, if you want an overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice ... they're the ones who will have some karma coming due for ignoring Afghanistan for five years, allowing the Taliban to regroup & refresh themselves.
Obama had to do something to take us to a place where a withdrawal after all our sacrifice, HAD to be set up before being taken down.
The reaction of younger people to bin Laden's death was an indicator of how strongly many below the age of 25, even 20, have felt about the terror links to that man. I never felt frightened. Never. I recall standing in a half mile long line waiting to hear John Kerry speak, in Las Cruces, where everyone was moved through a gate and checked with metal detectors, thinking: I would rather have my liberty than stand in a security line for everything, from now on. This sucks!
But the world may have changed in many ways that I just didn't "get" in terms of how it all felt for younger people who have not only grown up in the shadow of the falling World Trade Center; Pentagon; Shanksville & other passengers on those planes. I don't travel enough to even barely grasp the changes in airport security. We've also seen our young people on the front line of STDs, and how death can come from the wrong choices with casual sex.
But in the end, it IS the men & women of the younger generation who know friends who have come back horribly mangled from wars in Afghanistan & Iraq. It was their friends who died. It was their friends who are insane after 3, 4, 5, 6 tours of these two war zones. I have PTSD & what I have came from 90 days of combat. Imagine what the men & women of the volunteer forces have with multiple combat tours!!!!!
In the end, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donny Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Condi Rice, etc., were responsible for sending our professional military, back again & again, to war zones, to worsen their PTSD. Families will never be the same. Children will not know Moms or Dads, or even, both. Men & women will drift into alcoholism and drug addiction. Single, double & triple amputees will stop being recognized as they are now in ten,fifteen, twenty years.
I was in Valley Forge General Hospital, the second half of my 1 year in Army hospitals due to my wounds & malaria. I SAW men putting on one, two, or three prosthetic limbs, every day. The advances in prosthetics & cosmetic surgery & pain management weren't there in my day. I showed my scars on my right arm to an occupational therapist recently, & she said it looked like they' d cut me open with a coke bottle.
That was the way it was then.
Those crowds of young people were shouting "USA! USA!" because the volunteer military is more jocular now; more physical; more about men & women working out together. Check out the dialogue in "Aliens" & the banter between men & women in science fiction future wars, or "Starship Troopers," & I suspect you'll "get" a little more inkling of what the modern military is like these days. It's like Worldwide Wrestling, in some ways. Or "Ultimate Fighting." Men & women mingle more in the military, and we're on the leading edge of actually having "Starship Troopers" be a reality for our military forces.
It made sense that there would be, in D.C., particularly, with so many military & intelligence personnel there, we'd see such a spontaneous demonstration of young folks, happy bin Laden was dead. D E A D.
It HAS BEEN THEIR FIGHT, FOLKS. They should be allowed to "celebrate" in the way the culture has driven them since, say, 1990 or so. Remember the end of the Soviet Empire? The Berlin Wall coming down. Those celebrations, & the celebrations of the bin Laden killing are close together in mood. We have to step out of the way.
For those whose loved ones died on September 11 -- I weep for you, & know you will remember that day every day for the rest of your lives, regardless of how much therapy you receive for YOUR PTSD. I thought about Vietnam EVERY DAY for 22 years, until my own therapy & work on Survivor Guilt was worked on.
I vote to have his photo shown of him before & after; of him with a huge hole over his left or right eye, whichever was hit; of the bullet (double tap) wound on his chest; of some discreet photo of his body being prepared for Islamic burial; the body bag sliding over the side. I vote for all of those. I'd also vote for some video of what happened. And if it were up to me, I'd also remind the kind of Islamist haters who villify our form of government, and treat their women like Soraya M., that their "hero" was gotten.
The Pakistani Military & ISI are liars if they want us to buy they didn't know bin Laden was "there."
They knew.
I hope Ayman al-Zawahiri is next. And that we tell the ISI: you have 48 hours to take him out yourselves. Otherwise, we will watch him, & watch you, help him try to disappear, & then we will take him out ourselves. YOU do it, or WE will. Stop fucking around with us!
I didn't originally support Obama. Dorothy & I were split. She did before I. I wanted true history to be made, & for Hillary to win. However, when he won & she lost; when it was obvious it was Obama v. McCain, I knelt down, & asked God to please, help me let go of those sentiments. He was as smart as Hillary & I needed to get behind what was happening. I need, dear God, I prayed, to let it go. To "let go & let God," we in 12 Step Programs say.
I've made many mistakes, but asking for God's help to support President Obama wasn't one of them.
I've grateful down to the souls of my feet that he's there, & want him to succeed, succeed, succeed. This hopefully will stop all the bull crap about "Barack HUSSEIN Obama," & "Obama, born in Kenya," or "Obama, the Maoist."
Race baiters: give it up. Get behind our President. I'll do everything I can to see him re-elected. I'm glad we got bin Laden.
It's been a long time coming. Don't ever foget those people who had to either burn to death, or jump to their deaths. Never, ever, forget those jumpers. We owe it to ourselves, & all the America haters, to show the photos. Ask to see the photos.
Jerry E.
May 4, 2011
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