Bergen on new books about Obama vs. Osama

I Pix 2011 05 10 Article-0-0Be04A2E00000578-490 634X525

Peter Bergen, CNN's man on terror and author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad, reviews pseudonymous SEAL Mark Owen's No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden and Richard Miniter's "Leading from Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him." In summary:

Owen's eyewitness account of the bin Laden raid has the ring of truth in ways that another recently published book that also focuses on the operation does not…
Miniter's account of the intelligence that led to bin Laden and the decision-making surrounding the operation that killed him is a pile of poppycock served up with heaps of hogwash.

"Sense and nonsense about Obama and Osama" (CNN)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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EH

“The ring of truth.” Gag.
bigyup

that photo is priceless. no matter how many times i’ve looked at it, i still have to stop for a minute and take it in. awesome.
- spacedoggy
  
  yeah, the guy on the right, you can only see his arm and the beige tie, is the director of the CIA, reddit got wind of this and cross referenced that and other pictures to find a full picture, and ID, LOL. CIA are intelligence noobs compared to the reddit community!
  - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
    
    Not the Director – that was Leon Panetta at the time. But it was a more impressive feat, considering that the real guy wasn’t a well known public official:
    
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43637044/ns/us_news-security/t/meet-john-cias-bin-laden-hunter-in-chief/#.UD63yNYiZ8E
    
    The face I’m fascinated by is Denis McDonough.
    
    Because he looks so much like Malcolm Tucker.
    
    http://fuckyeahmalcolmtucker.tumblr.com/
    - spacedoggy
      
      LOL, has he ‘got a knob the size of a bookies biro’?
      
      http://lh3.ggpht.com/_k0ovfY0NP70/S5aH15ddhjI/AAAAAAAAA9U/y2yfuG4LxNs/s800/72536222.jpg
http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

This thing always left a pretty band taste in my mouth. I think it would have sent out a much more powerful message about what America was supposed to represent (to say nothing of being more in harmony with international law) if they’d captured and tried him. They brought the Nazis to trial (well, the ones they didn’t re-employ at any rate), but what happened here? After more people get killed in the trumped up Iraq war than ever died on 9 11, after the torture, and the slow transformation of America into a privatized surveillance state, what was the shinning moment of justice at the end of it all? A summary execution unveiled to the public in what seemed to me to be a deliberate fog of disinformation, followed a dumping of the body in the ocean for fairly nebulous reasons. Yes we can!
- EH
  
  If war is diplomacy by other means, murder is justice by the same token. There was never going to be a trial, it was always going to end like this. The culture of those who would bring a trial about does not tolerate it for characters such as bin Laden. You think traffic officers are powermad when they force you to get out of your car to sign a ticket, try spending time with anti-terrorist military.
  - abstract_reg
    
    Could there have possibly been a trial? Is their a jury in the world that has not been effected by Bin Laden? I’m not arguing that we should just kill all evil doers, or even that this was right, but a fair trial of Osama Bin Laden is impossible.
    - EH
      
      None of us knows what people are capable of, all we know is that the attempt was not made. Your “impossible” is based entirely on assumptions.
    - Bobsyeruncle
      
      Anyone remember Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the number 2 man? He was thought to be the actual mastermind of 9/11 and he’s still free. However, with the death of Osama Bin Laden, the military can claim “mission accomplished” and try to bring closure to the “war on terror”. I’d like to know at some point how Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were really involved, but “closure” seems more important to me, somehow.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      My response to “difficult to give a fair trial” wouldn’t be “extrajudicial killing.”
      - abstract_reg
        
        Calling it “extrajudicial killing” might not be exactly fair. This is war after all. It was just killing. Why should Bin Laden get better treatment than the people fighting for him?
        If the Allies had gotten to Hitler’s bunker during a battle would it have been murder to kill him? (I think this avoids Godwin’s Law.)
        All that being said I would prefer that no killings ever happened. But at the same time that feels like such a naive think to want.
- toyg
  
  > What happened here?
  
  Milosevic at The Hague happened.
  
  Trials are risky businesses; political trials are *very* risky business. Staging a political trial of a charismatic and popular figure (OBL was *very* popular in the Middle-East), with worldwide by-the-minute media coverage? You might as well shoot yourself in the head.
  
  In the best scenario, putting Bin Laden on trial would have created a martyr, for the joy of middle-eastern media; in the worst, he’d have spilt the beans on whatever skeleton in the closet he’d managed to find on “western powers” — after all, he was quite chum with the CIA at one point.
  
  Dealing with Osama was a lose-lose scenario which could have been avoided only if he had been apprehended in the very first year (or better, the first month) of the Afghan campaign. After a year, he was a hero for the Islamic masses oppressed by the United Satans of America.
  
  Getting rid of him in the murkiest, cruellest and most dishonourable way was probably the only chance to bring down his status a bit (short of catching him having sex with a goat, which is kinda hard to set up): now the story is that he was a loser couch-potato who was too busy watching dvd in his bunker, surrounded by wimpy women (!), to realize the White Devils were onto him. A real jihadist would never be found caught with his metaphorical pants down, right? And so on.
  - http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch
    
    I appreciate the argument. But I feel that if there was a huge will to make Bin Laden an incendiary martyr figure, then this should have happened just as much by virtue of his execution as his trial. If anything, a murky execution on foreign soil should have feed more into Anti-American sentiment, and into the idea of Bin Laden as a heroic figure fighting a tyrannical and lawless western regime. This is one of the reasons why I found the dumping of the body in the ocean explanation unconvincing – if there had been a will to create a Bin Laden shrine it could have been done anywhere, where he had been born, where he had died, without any need for a body- and such an open mecca for sympathizers would have been an intelligence gathering boon. I suspect that the truth was that Al Qaeda was an increasing waning phenomenon, and Bin Laden an increasingly marginal and insignificant figure, and the reaction to his trial would have been no less muted than to his execution. 9 11 was such a horrible thing, and the consequences of it so horrible and pervasive and ongoing, that it would have been a more meaningful gesture to meet the challenges of bringing the whole thing into the daylight of due process and the courts, but in the end, the death of Bin Laden was as morally murky and amenable to conspiratorial speculation as everything else in the War on Terror.
  - http://twitter.com/Theranthrope Theranthrope
    
    The victory condition was not to kill Bin- Laden, but to destroy him. To straight up kill him wasn’t enough, as he would become a martyr. Even putting him on trial, been found guilty, and executed, would have allowed him to give a final “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”-type message, which would immortalize him in the eyes of his followers. The goal was not to take his life, per se, but to shatter his image by making him look weak, frail, flawed, and ultimately …human.
    
    The whole operation was very Nietzsche or Sun Tzu.
    - billstewart
      
      Nah. The goal was to make Obama look good back in the US. Especially since Bush had failed to catch him, largely because he diverted the military to fight his Iraq war.
      - http://twitter.com/beep54orama B E Pratt
        
        Please note that as early as 2002 (?!) Bush dismissed Osama as a target. He even repeated that idea in 2004. W., literally, could not have cared less about bin Laden. So just what the hell the Afghan war was supposed to have been about is something of a mystery.
        http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/05/02/162774/bush-bin-laden/
- http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek
  
  They brought the Nazis to trial
  
  well, not counting the several million that we killed outright.
  - Snig
    
    There were likely at least a handful of innocent bystanders in the Axis countries who may also have been harmed in WWII.
    - http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek
      
      indeed. starting a war is a dangerous business; it tends to get your people killed.
- v_vsn
  
  I always thought this too. Ever since the outset, of 9/11. However, considering how things transpired, and as someone directly affected by 9/11, I have to admit there was an involuntary air of relief-and-relaxtion-of-anxiety when I heard the news that bin Laden had been taken out. It’s irrational, it’s primitive, it’s juvenile, but it did have a strange kind of closure.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Hearing about someone being executed without trial makes me feel exactly the opposite of relief and relaxation.
http://twitter.com/chrisjimson chris jimson

“It took the president almost two years of dithering to order the bin Laden operation, which was “reduced in scope, or otherwise delayed, often by the president himself.”

What is this except sour grapes? Minter is complaining that bin Laden wasn’t killed or captured *fast enough* by Obama, after George W. Bush could not get him in 7 years?

What bothers me most is that scores of people will take this book to be gospel truth, and repeat his un-sourced unconfirmed “facts” to everyone who will listen; for years I’ve been hearing the tale of how Clinton *could have* gotten bin Laden from the Sudanese in the 90′s and didn’t, despite the 9/11 commission finding no evidence of it.

Remember conservatives: if you think Obama deserves little or no credit for the killing of bin Laden, would he also get no blame if the operation had been a complete failure? I think we all know how you guys would have reacted if US soldiers had been killed or captured in Pakistan.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  The Republicans also have no qualms now about dragging some sleazy vets out every election cycle to form a bogus organization.
  - http://twitter.com/Theranthrope Theranthrope
    
    Strategically, the Republican party has to at least make the attempt at “dead agenting” the President on this issue, as it shows that the GOP is plainly: “All hat; no cattle” on national-security matters.
- Preston Sturges
  
  Complaining about “dithering” is a Cheney trademark.
  
  As compared to classic Fascist themes like “action for the sake of action.”
  - GoatLordMessiah
    
    “action for the sake of action”
    I thought that was one of Michael Bay’s mottoes.
- Snig
  
  When Carter ordered the failed Iranian hostage rescue, he was given full blame for its failure. Something I did not know: The second planned but unexecuted rescue attempt after the first one failed was called “Project Honey Badger”
- http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek
  
  would he also get no blame if the operation had been a complete failure?
  
  of course! you don’t see them blaming Bush for Afghanistan, do you?
- Petzl
  
  Another of Miniter’s suppositions is that “Secretary Clinton had to talk the President into the raid.”
  
  This Fox News proxy is brilliant. He can’t deny that Obama killed Bin Laden (maybe he should?) so he denies him the credit. Or tries to sully him as indecisive. You really can’t believe or even anticipate what Republicans will say before they say it. It’s like the “legitimate rape” comment. It takes a mind so twisted, only twisted minds can be on their wavelength.
Preston Sturges

Yeah the Al Qaeda wing of the GOP is still pissed off.
Preston Sturges

See the GOP is pissed off because the Dems are going to highlight national security at their convention, and the GOP is going to whine up a storm.
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs cleek

how’d Ray Romano get in there?
u89djt

Is that a mugshot of Animal on Hilary’s laptop keyboard?
jameslogo157

Topic is nice o talk ( obama V/s Osama ) !!!!!!!!
http://twitter.com/Pen_Bird Phlip

Don’t tell me; let me guess. Miniter’s bogus account supports the Far Right Echo Chamber noise that waterboarding brown people (not Obama carefully not tipping off the Pakistanis), lead to the assassination.