Local man apparently live-tweeted Osama mansion raid

This fellow, a consultant in Abbottabad, appears to have reported events from the attack on Osama bin Laden's compound on Twitter, without being aware of their significance: "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it."

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Bulone

@phisrow : I’m not sure of the timing, may be because it’s been so long and US thought it should wrap this mission up and save face as well as money. Obviously calling off the mission and declaring it as a failure isn’t an option;that would embarrass US to no end.
Anonymous

Burial at sea is not that strange if you think about it. They did the same thing to Megatron in Transformers 1.
LuvMyDeafBlindDog

Read his tweets… there was one, right in the middle of the tweets showing here, which says:
ReallyVirtual Sohaib Athar
@ahmedbilal @kursed Sadly. We should start learning how to spread believable stories and recreate a reality that suits us.
Anonymous

Amazing that you started the whole thing on twitter.
Suzanne Williams
chgoliz

Finding a country willing to take OBL’s remains would have been difficult.

Don’t want to enable a terrorist shrine.

Under Islamic tradition, ABC’s Zunaira Zaki reports, the body would be washed by Muslim men and buried as soon as possible, usually by the next prayer (Muslims pray five times a day), although there may be delays under certain circumstances (for autopsies, for example).
- Niklas
  
  Don’t tell the terrorists about this invention called a “boat”. Oh, darn itâ€¦
  - Lobster
    
    Yes, because finding a boat is exactly as easy as finding a car, or, y’know, walking.
    - Niklas
      
      If it is easy to find boats that explains why NATO has been able to curb all the pirates in the region.
Anonymous

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&aq=0&sll=30.375321,69.345116&sspn=12.193118,16.940918&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&t=h&ll=34.174199,73.258713&spn=0.001684,0.0025&z=19
Anonymous

The ghost of Osama Bin Laden has now also started making tweets.

https://twitter.com/#!/GhostOsama
Lobster

Bet he wishes he’d gone to meet the neighbors. Could’ve been $25 million richer.
Major Variola (ret)

1. That three-story is now a historical
monument on par with Lincoln’s cabin.

2. Just to make it clear to Pakistan that
we invaded them within a short drive of their Capital, we left helicopter remains.

3. Now that UBL is gone, the US should leave AfPak, say the Afs and the Paks.
Gives Bushbama an excuse to save face too.

Can you run a DNA “id” (SNP) test that fast?

UBL isn’t Steve Jobs. The Organization can do fine without him.
- chgoliz
  
  Can you run a DNA “id” (SNP) test that fast?
  
  Normally it takes at least a week or two, but I’m guessing they told the lab to put a rush on it.
  
  I wonder how many relatives they have DNA samples from, since neither his mtDNA or yDNA would prove the most recent family connection. Sharing large segments with one immediate family member wouldn’t necessarily be enough to prove his remains weren’t actually from a different family member. For example, you can’t tell from looking at DNA test results alone which is the parent and which is the offspring (unless it’s a female and a male and their mtDNA don’t match).
Major Variola (ret)

The real tipoff: a mansion with NO telephone or internet.

The sat dish was camoflage, cause everyone has one.
EvilSpirit

2. Just to make it clear to Pakistan that we invaded them within a short drive of their Capital, we left helicopter remains.

Yeah, we also called them on the phone and told them.
- Major Variola (ret)
  
  Always better to ask for forgiveness after
  than permission before.
cory

Not clear how close he actually was to the compound, but if choppers circled over him 3-4 times, pretty close.
jackwilliambell

Dude! Enjoy the deluge! You don’t have a choice at this point, so might as well make the best of it…

I mean really — for just a day or two this guy gets the world’s eye turned on him in a sideways glance. Not only going is he going to get boinged (and slashdotted and instalaunched), but he also gets the world press a’calling and maybe even (if this really turns out to be his lucky day) a nice friendly visit from the Pakastani authorities. I jest at the last, of course, but I fear it might happen.

Sucks to be him. And half of us would like to to happen to ourselves. But think about what it’s like to live in the full glare of that all-consuming eye? It really sucks to be Catherine Middleton.
- wigg1es
  
  I’d trade places with that Middleton chick in a heartbeat. Sucks? Since when does having absolutely no real responsibility, all the while enjoying the multimillion dollar fortune of your new family suck?
  
  It’s a little different for this guy because he seems to be an average Joe. But he’s also in Pakistan. Can’t be too hard to unplug and let a little time slide by out there. After all, OBL managed to do it for a decade or so.
  - penguinchris
    
    I think the point about it sucking to be Catherine Middleton is that now the spotlight is off her, right after her big day, and while die-hard royal princess fans will still be paying attention, the rest of the world won’t be. Her massive publicity is basically over until something significant happens with her (a scandal or whatever), because of Bin Laden.
  - emmdeeaych
    
    um, troll… her family is wealthier than his. Far far wealthier.
Anonymous

Managed to find this guy shortly before the official announcement, was quite interesting.

Also, while poking about Twitter from ideas he had given me, I found a cryptic tweet (which has; along with the user who posted it, been deleted) which gave lat/long of where it all was supposed to have gone down. Ties in quite well with what ReallyVirtual and another tweeter was saying.

http://goo.gl/maps/GZFq – 34Â°10â€²14â€³N 73Â°14â€²16â€³E
Major Variola (ret)

Reading the guys blog now. The most important point: this guy has a modern
sense of humor. He’s a regular, smart, guy. He has self-insight.

This is encouraging. One hears so little about the modern tech-literate Pakis,
and one may not have worked with any.
wigg1es

Multi-BILLION* I mean…
lakelady

heh dude’s got a great attitude

ReallyVirtual Sohaib Athar
@
@ahmedbilal I need to find a large rock first, before the cameras arrive, lol
1 hour ago
bat21

Speaking of epic tweets
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/the-presidents-1337-tweet
Mister44

This is why oppressive govs. will continue to falter and fail, and something like the Nazis will never come to power again. It is impossible to squelch the truth. They win the hearts and minds through propaganda, fear, and direct control. You can not silence the opposition.
- Jack
  
  Huzzuh, wuzzuh? Youâ€™re doing it wrong! What do you refer to.
Anonymous

Interesting how he said he is “hiding in the mountains”. Apparently Bin Laden thought it was a good hiding spot too.
RevelryByNight

This is my nightmare. I live in horror that I’ll be cavalier and snarky on twitter about some event of global significance and be remembered for eternity as “that snarky asshole on Twitter.”
Cowicide

So what does everyone think about the report that his body was buried at sea?

If this is true and they already disposed of his body in this manner… all I can say is… WTF???
- Jack Daniel
  
  The buried at sea thing did NOT work out for us with Megatron…
- teapot
  
  If this is true and they already disposed of his body in this manner… all I can say is… WTF???
  
  Yeah… what is really random is that before I heard this someone had asked me what they were going to do with his corpse and I said “probably stick it at the bottom of the ocean with some nuclear waste so no one ever finds it”.
  
  When you think about it, they want to dispose with him as low-key as possible to avoid inflaming people who dug that old coot, and in a way where his remains or his last resting place cannot become a place of pilgrimage. Done and done if you ask me… …unless Branson got word of everything before us and this is his real reason for creating Virgin Oceanic!?
- emmdeeaych
  
  I think the best way to make today September 12th is to not create another shrine to September 11th. this is what moving on looks like.
- wigg1es
  
  Indeed… Just woke up and saw the notification from CNN. Definitely strange, if not more than a bit suspicious. I’m definitely not a conspiracy theorist, but this doesn’t strike me as very normal.
teapot

OK, so according to this page:

The home is in Abbottabad, a town about 35 miles (60 km) north of Islamabad.

The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbotabad’s center, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.

So fellow Boingers…. where is it?
Abner

I collected a good bunch of @reallyvirtual ‘s tweets here: http://bloga.tw/kp4pVz
- starfish and coffee
  
  cheers, this guy is great
Anonymous

I think I found it!:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&aq=0&sll=30.375321,69.345116&sspn=12.193118,16.940918&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&t=h&ll=34.16864,73.208588&spn=0.005184,0.004715&z=18
teapot

Video on Pakistani TV shows likely Bin Laden compound:
http://www.reposter.net/2011/05/osama-bin-ladens-compound-on-pakistani-tv/
Bulone

I find it suspicious that US disposed OB’s body almost immediately after being killed. The reason is that, this guy has been running in disguise for so long and how could anyone be so sure if he actually is OB. Also, AFAIK, there’s no footage of his dead body. I’m quite skeptical about the whole thing. I hope this wasn’t a sham US use to save its face from failing mission.
- phisrow
  
  Depending on how he died, the body may or may not be all that revealing(aside from running the DNA tests, which they apparently did). He wasn’t the world’s most unusual looking guy to start with and an entry or exit wound where his face used to be would be pretty anonymizing.
  
  None of that precludes them making it up, of course; but we’ve been killing small groups of people in the region for some years now(many with high explosives, which offer any easy account for why you can’t produce a body). Any one of them could have offered a similar context for falsification. If willing to fake it, why now rather than at some other time?
- Anonymous
  
  I seriously doubt the US would falsely claim they had killed Osama. If they did try to pull a sham, all Osama would have to do is release another video tape calling the US out on it.