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

I feel like I've tried to make non-partisan arguments in the middle of a partisan debate. I feel a little like the sober guy at the bar or frat party.

 

Depends on if the cookies were homemade or store-bought.

 

Exactly - one day later the administration amends story. To me that is what has opened the flood gate to questions. It's now muddy.

Perhaps the amendment came as a result of administration coming to realization that there were living witnesses.

 

Homemade. With sprinkles.

 

Outstanding.

 

Bin Laden was the leader of Al Qaeda, which sure as shit didn't follow any Geneva Conventions on 9/11. Why should Geneva Conventions and rules of war apply to him?

 

And running to the defense of torture to rehabilitate Bush too.

Desperate times calls for desperate measures, I guess, when one is hellbound to demonize a President no matter what they do or don't do.

 

Since we're all about semantics here, how exactly do we validate that they are unarmed? No gun equals unarmed? Because there wouldn't be a chance the guy has a bomb strapped to him that he explodes as you approach him. Or the house booby trapped to blow up with a remote control detonator? There's no track record that would indicate these people would do something like that.....

Personally, I've beyond up to here with the philosophical bullshit being spewed here. You're in a foreign country, in what you know is a highly dangerous and volatile situation, wearing the target of a military uniform. You've got to make instant decisions that will mean whether you live or die.

It's war. War, as a great combatant once said, is all hell. And people die in that hell. And I find very unappealling to see people question from behind a keyboard the actions of people behind a gun in that situation. It's beyond cowardly.

 

I've said again and again and again and again that their actions were probably reasonable in the situation, at the time, for the reasons you said - they had every reason to believe he was armed and that their lives were in danger. The unarmed part is something discovered in hindsight. That shouldn't be how their actions are judged. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the guys in that room, at the time they were there, knowing what they knew.

Nothing "cowardly" about practicing journalism, though. Again, the military doesn't get a blank check.

 

I imagine part of the thought process behind the kill order was that even if bin Laden and all the others surrendered, the house could have been rigged to high heaven and any extra time, even 10 seconds, would have allowed any one of those suicide bombers to detonate it.

I mean, that and we wanted him dead.

 

We couldn't do that. The anti-illegal alien folks would protest. I don't think he had a green card.

 

Exactly. Can't imagine the families of soldiers who have been killed in this mess are worrying about bin laden's rights.