The Third Year of the Obama Administration: Facts, Opinions and Discussions

Perfectly said. I think it's also important to say that pragmatic =/= wrong or evil.

 

All of that is absolutely true as well. It was absolutely more easy to just shoot him than deal with all of that drama.

But we also did it because the guy deserved it and I have zero problem with that.

 

I do so love it when there are multiple legitimate reasons to kill bin Laden.

 

I am very conservative and give a lot of credit to the decisions Obama made. He is far from the only one responsible for the success but the final decision rested in his hands. Not only that, but his decision to send an extra helicopter was pivotal to the mission's success. His demeanor in the aftermath has been mostly commendable.

President Obama made the right decisions to make this possible.

As has been previously mentioned in this thread, however, those decisions were made possible because of the things the Bush Administration put into place... those same things that prompted the left to yell "war criminals!" In the days following this mission, Democrats need to ask themselves this question: are things that they once called war crimes under Bush now acceptable because their president did them?

Although I disagree with some people who have posted here with negative opinions of the mission, at least y'all are strong in your beliefs and are unwilling to compromise them no matter who is in charge. I respect that.

 

Those are all great points, and I won't dispute the fact that putting bin Laden on trial would be tricky business. I'm probably splitting hairs, but I believe that sending guys into a situation where there's a 90% chance they'll end up killing Osama is different from just straight up ordering them to do so. I don't have to believe that the latter happened (yet), so for the time being I'm going with the former choice.

 

Gotta respect that honesty.

 

I'm still waiting for JediSmuggler to chime in with his analysis. I wonder where he is? Can the dude abide on an internet where Barack Obama got bin Laden?

 

He may have gotten Bin Laden but he still hasn't done anything about the gays that sent that white powder.

 

Now I'm trying to imagine what a bin Laden trial would have been like, with his defense attorneys attempting to call up witnesses from Gitmo and have them walk a jury through an episode of enhanced interrogation that created evidence for bin Laden's case, all televised to a global audience.

Essentially, bin Laden is dead for the same reason that Gitmo is still open.

pragmatic =/= wrong or evil

Dude

 

WTF we can do pretty much the exact same thing by raising taxes on gasoline. IE, if you drive a hummer a lot, you pay a lot of taxes. If you drive a prius a little, you don't pay a lot of taxes.

 

I admire your posting style something fierce.

 

Bin Laden would never have been tried in a civilian court or for that matter, an open one. Media allowed in? Haha, no. He'd have been tried in a military court and probably spent the rest of his days in Leavenworth, or possibly sentenced to lethal injection; the military hasn't put someone to death in ages, but I'd be willing to suspect that Bin Laden would have been the first.

 

It was better for everyone that he was killed. It would have been an endless political nightmare to deal with him as a prisoner. I'm very pacifist, but even I find little objectionable about his death, however it came about. He masterminded multiple operations against the United States, and regardless of his recent status as a mere figurehead, still had all that baggage from what he did up to and including 9-11. He's dead. The means is irrelevant to me.

H-O-L-Y C-R-A-P!!!

I mean it. I'm utterly beyond shocked. So I'll type it again. H-O-L-Y C-R-A-P!!! I think the mods here should seriously check into the possibility that KW's account has been hacked. If it isn't hacked, then thank you for your honesty here, KW, and welcome to the sphere of humanity. An entire new horizon is now open.

At this point I truly feel like digging up oh, roughly 8 years of posts. I want to supply a long, detailed rebuttal post, but I am legitimately at a loss for words. Did I mention that I'm speechless? So forget everything else. Let's see, in a nutshell: 1)Context is everything. and 2)"pragmatic" doesn't mean good or evil. I don't want to toot my own horn, but today is the today that I really have won every single argument I've ever put forth in the forum, and it didn't even involve anyone reverting to "I'm elite, so if you don't understand, you never will..."

Not only is the bin Laden issue finally put to rest. But so is Gitmo, military tribunals, torture, military force, and who has the best onion chip dip recipe. And I think it's definitively been proven that George Bush was the greatest President ever! and it's due to the fact that people finally understand, and they always will.

 

Exactly my point, DarthBoba. Public trial? Impossible for reasons that should be obvious. Secret military tribunal? Also impossible because of the worldwide public outcry.

It's the bipolar disorder talking. I get like this during the hypomanic episodes.

 

I don't think a secret trial would ultimately have proven all that damaging. I mean, the guy claimed responsibility for 9/11; he's the admitted leader of a terrorist group that's literally in everyone's sights because of their nature as a support organization for home-grown insurgencies, and he's directly responsible for every civilian killed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the last ten years-arguably longer than that, even, as Osama directly helped the Taliban win the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s. He had literally tens of thousands of deaths to his name; I doubt anyone would have cared what happened to him. I mean, look at now-we basically committed an act of war against Pakistan to kill him, and nobody cares.

 

People do care about the process. Secret military tribunals are fine for faceless underlings, but not for a Saddam Hussein and certainly not for a bin Laden.

Maybe if things had gone horribly wrong during the compound raid and the Seals had shown up only to find bin Laden lying face down on the ground, with his hands behind his head, surrounded by a team of female lawyers and some photojournalists, then maybe, sure, they would have been forced to opt for a secret tribunal over a public trial, consequences be damned. Fortunately, they didn't have to make that choice.

 

Exactly my point, DarthBoba. Public trial? Impossible for reasons that should be obvious. Secret military tribunal? Also impossible because of the worldwide public outcry.

(post quoted, but reply not limited)

So yes, everyone knows that this is true, which is why alternatives were explored, and are still being explored.

So then my question is how was this fantasy allowed to become such a policy-based criticism? Back, oh around, 2006-2008, this was one of the hot button issues that separated the two parties. Democratic candidates (Hillary Clinton, Dodd, Gravel, Biden..etc.. I don't know what Obama's views were back then, but then again, Obama was silent on most issues during the campaign) all promoted the idea that direct application of military force was somehow evil, and that terrorism had to be treated as a law enforcement issue. In fact, one of the first things the administration did in 2009 was purchase Thompson prison in Illinois with the sole purpose of housing terrorists like bin Laden so they could be forced to stand trial in federal court. All told, taxpayers have 164 million dollars sunk into a facility that was never used, and is still vacant. Obviously, the same reasons that apply now most certainly applied then.

EXAMPLE1

EXAMPLE2

Of course, we now know that Gitmo was never closed, because Gitmo serves a purpose. The current administration continues to use military tribunals, because of the limitations of civilian criminal courts. It's extremely unlikely that any terrorist will stand trial in federal court. All for the reasons that politicians are now re-examining, and which never went away. Of course, the answer is that realistically, differing methods have to be used based on the circumstances.

 

Probably at some point in the early days of the administration, a CIA operative gave Obama a tour of an interrogation facility, maybe let him try out the waterboarding station on a prisoner. From that moment on, Obama was hooked. Now he keeps a few suspected terrorists in the sub-basement of the White House to help him wind down after a typical 18 hour workday.

 

NYJ - WTF we can do pretty much the exact same thing by raising taxes on gasoline. IE, if you drive a hummer a lot, you pay a lot of taxes. If you drive a prius a little, you don't pay a lot of taxes.

The "brilliance" of a tax on mileage rather than gasoline, though, is that it doesn't matter what type of car someone drives. It equalizes the playing field. If someone drives a lot, they have to pay the tax no matter what. It isn't hard to figure out what is happening. "In this economy" (to be cliche), people are driving less and buying more fuel efficient cars. Even with gas prices so high, that still cuts into tax revenue from gasoline. This way, they get that revenue back. Side effective: further punishment for anyone who commutes from "the middle of nowhere" to "somewhere" to work.

44 - In addition to what you said, I would like to add this into the mix. "Cheney's Death Squads" sure proved to come in handy, didn't they?

 

Part of the problem with Obama's lack of acknowledgment for Bush's involvement is that he is so quick to point fingers at Bush for anything bad that happens during his presidency.

When talking about events surrounding bin Laden's death, Obama used the term "we" to refer to things that happened during Bush's administration, and "I" for things that happened during his administration. At the same time, he repeatedly has talked about how he "inherited" a bad economy, or a massive deficit, or some other problem.

He can't have it both ways either. If he wants to blame Bush-era policies for the economy, then he also needs to credit Bush-era policies for helping to get bin Laden. The intelligence involved was gathered over the last 4-5 years, and Obama's only been in office for about half of that time. It's always a slow process to gather, verify, and use intelligence, and the work that Obama's administration did was only possible because of the previous foundation laid by the Bush administration.

Kimball Kinnison

 

He did invite Bush to join him at the ceremony in New York yesterday. That's something.

 

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Maybe Dick Cheney should apologize about calling Obama weak on national security and accusing him of making America less safe.