Obama announcement at 10:30 p.m. - Bin Laden Dead

The "Mom, he did it first" defense? You don't think for a moment that maybe we should aspire to better than that?

 

How could the head of Al-Qaeda not have important information?

The administration is trying to say that we captured a "treasure trove" of information at the compound on computers, etc.

So, there was a "treasure trove" of info there, but OBL was ignorant of all of it?

Wouldn't you want to ask him about the info obtained from this "treasure trove".

Maybe he knows the names of the people referred to by nick names. Maybe he knows when things planned will go down -- or where.

But, we'll never know now.

 

Worth it.

 

Doesn't the same go for how we treated KSM then? He didn't operate within rules. Were we bound to treat him within the bounds of rules?

 

To paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson -- a man who was more than a little familiar with evil people -- "There is danger that, if certain myopic posters do not temper their doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, they will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

 

So, are you conceding that he obviously had important information?

Then, how can you know it was worth it?

 

Well, the Dalai seems to have been okay with the action:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0504-dalai-lama-20110504,0,7229481.story

So they've got that going for them.

 

On their death bed.

 

Judge Richard Posner wrote a book by the same name about civil liberties during the war on terror.

I thought it was thoughtful, but I disagreed with most of it.

 

"GUNGA GALUNGA, MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!"

 

Given the information we had at the time, the downside of allowing to live is not worth the opportunity cost of potentially lost information.

 

What's the downside? I haven't heard the administration asked this or detail it.

I'm not saying we should have taken additional or unnecessary risks in order to capture him as opposed to kill him.

But, if you've got him, you need to say why killing him is better than capturing him.