Looks like he's dead.
Obama is expected to announce Osama's death in about 15 minutes ago.
Looks like he's dead.
Obama is expected to announce Osama's death in about 15 minutes ago.
Still waiting on linkable sources and actual details on the above (I'm going to laugh if it was a heart attack that got him), but in the mean time, here's this:
Source'Nuclear hellstorm' if bin Laden is caught or killed: Al-Qaida
Washington: Al-Qaida terrorists have threatened to unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" on the West if their leader and world's most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden is nabbed.
A senior Al-Qaida commander has claimed that the terror group has stashed away a nuclear bomb in Europe which will be detonated if bin Laden is ever caught or assassinated, according to new top secret files made public by whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
The documents are secret details of the background to the capture of each of the 780 people held at or have passed through the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, along with their medical condition and the information they have provided during interrogations.
The documents have been released to select European and US news outlets and reveal that the day 9/11 terror killings took place in United States, the core of Al-Qaida was concentrated in a single city of Karachi in Pakistan.
The intellectual author of September 11 attacks watched the horrifying scenes of the planes crashing into the twin towers of World Trade Centre beamed live on TV with key Al-Qaida commanders at a safe house in Karachi.
While in a nearby hospital, the accused mastermind of the bombing of USS' Cole off Yemen waters was recovering from a tonsillectomy, the alleged organiser of the 2002 Bali bombing was buying lab equipment for a biological weapons programme.
Within a day much of the Al-Qaida leadership disappeared back to Afghanistan to plan for a long war, the Washington Post reported quoting the fresh leaks on whereabouts of the international Al-Qaida terror brigade.
The cache of classified military documents portray the planning of the 9/11 terror attacks and whereabouts of its plotters including the world's most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on that fateful day.
The Guantanamo detainees are assessed "high or medium or low" in terms of their intelligence value and the threat they pose while in detention and the continued threat they might pose if released.
The leaks say that four days after September 11 attacks, bin Laden visited a guest house in Afghanistan's Kandahar province where he told his gathered Arab fighters to "defend Afghanistan against infidel invaders" and to "fight in the name of Allah".
The intelligence report says after the 9/11 attacks began a peripatetic three weeks for bin Laden and his deputy as they criss-crossed Afghanistan handing out assignments to followers, meetings with top Taliban leadership and delegating control of Al-Qaida to the group's 'shura' council, presumably because he feared being captured or killed as US forces closed in.
(edit: News peoples are saying a US bomb killed Osama last week. They were waiting for DNA test results to announce.)
*stabs Wraith*
First!
I saw this all over Facebook. I knew I could come to to find a source first lol (or sort of I guess)
You don't trust my reporting?
Fine then: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13256676
If it's true, that's fantastic news. Not really changing any strategic situation, of course, but it was long in coming.
Great, the Wicked Witch is dead? Now we can really, profoundly, officially, proclaim the wicked witch is dead, sing it high, sing it low yo ho ho, wake up you sleepy heads!?
Should we be shorting European stock markets, then?
Renal failure and dialysis in a cave can only deliver results so long.....
But anyway, get ready for a post-mortem circus of DNA, pictures from a morgue, undeniable "proof" that Bin Laden's dead body is Dead, and that it's his dead body.
Ding dong, mission accomplished, the wicked witch is dead?! Can we bring our troops home now? Finally, after all these years, if the head of the snake is dead, can we let others deal with the twitching body? Please?
Last edited by GGT; 05-02-2011 at 03:22 AM.
Killed in Islamabad, Pakistan as I understand it? Question is who, not how or why.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
According to the Guardian, the CIA and US SpecOps ran an operation to infiltrate a mansion in the capital of Pakistan and killed him, then retrieved the body for DNA tests. I'm very curious to know whether they ran this by the Pakistanis before doing it. I'm guessing not.
Yay! The conflicting reports are starting. Story I'm hearing is that it was a drone strike, and the body was retrieved after. As soon as Obama gets on with it and fills us in I assume it'll all be cleared up.
ABCNews is reporting from some Congressional sources it was a ground attack by SpecOps so they could retrieve the body.
So, what will change?
Isn't this only helpful for the "eye for an eye" crowd?
Let the conspiracy theories start.
Hope is the denial of reality
How would drone strikes mean they could do DNA tests on the body?
<Anecdote: my littlest boy has saved targets from his first county fair, when Bin Laden's face was the most desired target. People used to line up and PAY just to get the chance to shoot at his face.>
President Obama is smirking.
I think it will lead to a lot of retaliation, Rettib.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Wiggin, I have lean towards lollis answer. I don't think it will deter anyone. Won't someone else step in as leader of Al Qaeda?
It turns out this was a ground op, but to answer your question: drones aren't equipped with nuclear weapons. Remains are left. You can walk in after the drone has been through and bag 'em.
One of the potential benefits would be if multiple people stepped in as the leader. An internal power struggle would weaken them, and thus be good for us.
Targeted killings of the leadership of terrorist organizations have been effective in the past for two reasons. First, the leadership structure is often delicate and subject to disruptions; leaders are not interchangeable parts, and well-known leaders are more effective at both recruiting and management. Secondly, there is a deterrent effect on individuals, if not organizations. At the very least, the behavior of the leadership changes if counterterrorism operations routinely whittle away at the leadership - they go underground, make fewer (or no) public appearances, and shift their attacking behavior to take into account the likely response.
This happened to Hamas in Gaza - Israel knocked out large swaths of their military leadership in 2004, and it really changed their tack (and made them move more towards a political rather than military process).
On the flip side, it also causes the potential for retaliation. For example, when Imad Mughniyah was assassinated in Damascus, Hezbollah immediately began planning counterstrikes (though so far nothing has really worked) as revenge.
*shrugs* In the context of the Afghan war, I doubt this will have any serious effect, since the Taliban have little to do with Al Qaeda's command structure. But from a global terror perspective, it may have a modest but positive effect.
Usama Bin Landen Dead Fox News Confrims
A little too excited..