Yes and no. IMO his ultimate goal was for Saudi to be ruled by strict Sharia - which is not the case right now in his opinion. This is religiously motivated, and I highly doubt that he was seeking democratic rule. But his pursuit of America and its allies was purely political. It had nothing to do with their religion or race, it purely had to do with their relationship with the Saudi Royal family. He perceived that relationship to be a political obstacle to his political goals of ridding KSA of Al Saud.
It's impossible to say what caused what though is my problem with any review. If I torture you for a few days and then we sit down and have a normal interrogation and you reveal things you didn't under torture, does that mean the torture didn't work? Or did the torture work in that fear of returning to that has led you to reevaluate your silence in a more rational setting? I don't know. I don't think we'll ever be able to render a fair evaluation of the techniques used because we will never have all the facts. As time passes, things will be lost and the details will be changed, pumped up, etc. Just like Vietnam, many people who think they have rendered fair evaluations are only doing so on the details that are left and readily available to them.
None of it makes sense. The politico article references "Officials" as the sources. Now, perhaps it's the case of folks just being dumb and running their mouths, but the storyline that emerged reeks of embellishment to stoke some patriotic pride. If it walks like a duck...
Yeah, I take it back. I don't want to argue the "logic" or "sense" of someone's particular flavor of faith and it's oddities. Apologies for the doomed-to-be-unproductive sidebar.
If I have time later I will look up some links but that info is pretty wide spread. OBL's own videos frequently reference the crusades and he calls the Western forces "Crusaders". Also just from looking at the Wikipedia entry for Al Qaeda it says this: [rquoter]Al-Qaeda ideologues envision a complete break from the foreign influences in Muslim countries, and the creation of a new Islamic caliphate. Reported beliefs include that a Christian-Jewish alliance is conspiring to destroy Islam,[12] which is largely embodied in the U.S.-Israel alliance, and that the killing of bystanders and civilians is religiously justified in jihad.[/rquoter] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_qaeda OBL did clearly see the conflict with the West in global terms and not just as a country to conflict between the Saudi Arabia and the US. The rhetoric of Al Qaeda was designed to rally disparate causes where Muslims where involved form the Balkans to the Philipines as one overall war between Islam and the West.
Who's to say there was a two sided firefight in the first place? The US went in to kill and planted a story to make it seem more plausible. But make no mistake about it - they didnt want the burden of having a "live" OBL on their hands... that's asking for trouble. They made the right move.
I'm going to agree with Ronny here. I think the Seal team broke into a compound with armed terrorists with the intention of killing them. They may have offered a quick moment to surrender, but the guns were firing pretty shortly if my guess is right. At that point it was no longer a matter of determining who had a gun and who didn't. It was only about making sure anyone who wasn't lying face down on the ground got a bullet.
Probably right, and it's probably fair to argue that Pakistan was aware of the hideout and may have even sheltered OBL to a certain extent. However, wanting to avoid a very nasty international incident, the order was made to avoid any involvement of Pakistan in the operation, with an implied after-the-fact threat of "don't make us spill the beans on your collusion with Al Queda".
We know it's the same story - it's been out since yesterday and posted 4x in this thread already. The same sources confirmthat the info wasn't from illegal torture, but rather from standard interrogation, which could have taken place at a secret prison or a non-secret one - the venue is utterly irrelevant. Can you stop being wrong about things today? Because you're like 0-3, really.
I don't know dude, ask an Islamic scholar. It's not like I agree with it. I'm just telling you what I know from my on experience. If you want to get technical, if you followed every Judaic tenent, then you would be a Jew because one of the tenents is to worship the "Judaic" God. Disagreeing with actual portions of the Quran (not just interpretation) is, by extension, denying Allah (through your scholar, your disciples, your Prophet, etc), so you're out. The only way you call someone an infidel is if they claim to be one. Calling someone an infidel is a HUMONGOUS breach of rules in Islam. Yes I know it's messed up. Maybe start a thread. I'm sure there are other interpretations of these rules as well. You do realize that most Islamic scholars denounce OBL's assignment of infidelity to others right?
What about it? Years ago the Bush Administration indeed stopped using illegal torture after Goldsmith and others resigned because of it. They didn't torture up until January 2009.
Regardless of the outcome, I'm not going to lose any amount of sleep on the moral dilemma of shooting a psychotic mass murderer vs. taking him into custody, reading him his rights, and giving him a fair trial. At some point, you lose all benefit of the doubt that you're not supposed to be killed on sight due to your extremely dangerous and violent history. I'd say the 3000 people mark is fairly well past that point. Unless we busted into his house and he was laying face down on the ground with his hands behind his head, I'd say putting some lead in his computer was the right call.
Establishing the Islamic caliphate though does not entail attacking the west, it entails retrieving control of the middle east and north africa (essentially kicking the west out). Agree with you no doubt that Al Qaeda's marketing focused very much on creating an us vs them mentality. I'll look it up too, thanks for the info. I would have a hard time believing it, but could be interesting.
Agreed. Considering where he was, there's no way people in the Pakistani military didn't know. As Jan Brewer would say, believing that is "a bridge too far." I think they did what you said, and I give Obama a lot of credit for that. He got the info and he ordered the hit and basically told Pakistan to keep their head down and shut their mouth after the fact or the whole world could hear all about how Pakistan harbored Osama bin Laden. It already looks bad on them though. You have a city full of military personnel and you want us to believe that OBL built a million dollar compound and nobody noticed it going up?
