Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Well, accomplished-er, anyway.

I'm just waiting for somebody to write a piece of humor that somehow brings together Obama's long-form birth certificate, the Royal wedding, the Washington budget crisis, and the capture of Osama bin Laden.

We were watching CNN, and were just so annoyed at John King's blatant attempts at creating long-lasting clips. At one point he even did the dramatic "Bin Laden, is dead. Bin Laden, is dead." Ugh. He also jumped at the opportunity to be the very first person on the broadcast to actually announce that he was dead and not captured. I couldn't wait to turn the TV off.

Yeah - not too happy at the gloating headlines in the US press. I mean, I think it is good that he has finally been taken down, but you can guarantee some of the headlines will just inflame Al Qaida.

Really looking forward to my flight to Vegas in a fortnight...not! Security is going to be stupidly annoying :-(

Sweet... does that mean we can finally end these pointless wars, then?

Pointless? Being at war is its own reward!

In all seriousness, though, both the Bush and Obama administrations continually downplayed OBL's importance in the day-to-day leadership of Al Qaida, so it's disingenuous to say this is that big of a deal from a military objective standpoint. Obviously he was the symbolic leader, and it's certainly good to finish what we started, but I think they've been setting the stage for a continued "war on terror" regardless of the status of OBL himself.

Right now I'd settle for some of my human rights back.

Apparently Fox News ran their reports with the banner mistake "Obama bin Laden"

"mistake"

Hey, Keith Olbermann apparently made the same mistake yesterday on the tweeting machine. I know Fox News has done it many more times, but I won't say it's a difficult one to make.

Meanwhile, this pretty much sums up how I feel about where we are now that public enemy #1 is gone.

Right on.

So OBL is dead. BFD. GWB did more harm to the country than OBL could ever have done.

tanstaafl.

I'm quite interested in what intelligence about AQ they found at the compound. We'll never know, at least not for many many years, but I'm guessing that was the real prize.

http://www.itworld.com/hardware/161511/reports-computers-seized-bin-laden-compound

Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by one side story in this whole thing. The reporting on the OBL operation has quoted from various Wikileaks documents which use names that could well be the courier in question. Likewise, the city, Abbottabad, is mentioned in several of these documents. If OBL was more plugged in, the release of the Wikileaks documents should have been an OMG HEAD FOR THE HILLS!! sort of moment. The fact that OBL was still there tells you that one of these must be true:

- OBL's Internet-savvy operatives, who might have sorted it out, probably had no idea what city OBL was living in. Maybe they didn't even have the right name(s) for the courier. Organizational compartmentalization could well have done OBL in.

- OBL didn't actually have Internet-savvy operatives, so had no idea we were onto him.

- OBL's decision loop was too slow, due to the way he did the whole courier thing, to be able to act on the intelligence in Wikileaks in time. In other words, if we hadn't acted when we did, he might soon have had the OMG moment and gotten outta there.

- OBL may have known but may have deluded himself into believing that, after ten years, the U.S. wasn't going to go after him, particularly when he had parked himself right in the backyard of so much of Pakistan's military establishment.

My guess is that there's some measure of truth in each of these theories, but we'll never really know.

Those are some good questions, and I've been frankly quite impressed by the rate of information flow about this operation. My guess is we'll know a lot more about how connected he was and if he was aware of the leaks sooner rather than later. Maybe not the whole story, of course.

Meanwhile, nobody listens to nerds. (Yeah, there were probably 1,000 papers placing him somewhere else, but, still.

Side-theory: whether or not OBL's people understood the significance of the Gitmo Wikileaks documents, you're guaranteed that U.S. intelligence had a gigantic collective OMG/WTF moment. That date was April 24, which is very shortly before we're told Obama signed the order for the OBL operation.

Whether or not it's true, you can bet this will figure prominently in one of the three Hollywood movies that's under rapid development at the moment.

EDIT: Hey, wow, the Guardian has the same idea.

Meanwhile the US continues the policies that give rise to enemies like this. I agree. BFD: OBL won the "war on terror" years ago with the passing of the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq.

Aye.