http://foknewschannel.com/bin-laden-deadBin Laden DeadPosted on May 2, 2011
As the details come in, there are several important points (and, at the bottom of this, several unimportant ones) to remember:
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- There is no reason to assume Al-Qaeda dries up and blows away. It is in fact plausible to consider that since (as Al-Jazeera pointed out) Bin Laden was no longer even connected to actual terrorist operations, he may prove to be more valuable to terrorists as an inspirational martyr than he was as a perpetual target.
- It is fascinating that after a decade of breaking all of our traditions of spycraft and not torturing so we wouldn’t get bad intelligence and not starting wars that don’t have anything to do with the matter at hand, it only took two years, three months, and eleven days after reverting to the ordinary old hard slog of human intelligence, the target was eliminated. In fact, based on the skeletal timeline the President gave, the target was located only 19 months after the old rules were restored. Remember: the professionals always say spying and intelligence (military intelligence included) resembles not Ian Fleming’s James Bond, but John LeCarre’s George Smiley.
- Here’s one of those unimportant things. This was the President, via C-SPAN, captured by The New York Observer, during the jokes about bin Laden during The White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday Night. The proverbial 1000-word screencap:
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- An ugly, and ill-informed, version of the above has appeared in the laughable Washington Times. In point of fact,
Mr. Bush personally de-prioritized the hunt for Obama, said himself he didn’t worry about him. There will be a lot of Sour Grapes on the right – it sucks being them right now.
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