Well,so much can be said here, but I don't want to waste my time typing it out , anyway 'Thank Goodness' he was not only a thorn in our side, but he was also bad for all muslims !

I'll believe the story. Hope true. 

Ding Dong the wicked witch is dead.

He'll just be replaced.   Just like the Pope is replaced.  Not over by a long shot

IS EVERYONE SITTING DOWN, I THINK YOU SHOULD.

This just in, and I know everyone here is going to be shocked, but Hamas condemned the killing of Bin Ladin calling him a holy warrior.

Yea, what a hero. The coward just like Charles Manson didn't participate himself, but had his minions do it. And on top of that it wasn't armed people he had attacked, it was an act of mass kidnapping and mass murder of unarmed people.

But Allah is all merciful?

Hey Hamas, your god is a fucking dick, and as as much a dick as the god of some Christians who threaten us with their childish tyrant.

ALLAH AND JESUS SITTING IN A TREE F-U-C-K-I-N-G, First come threats, then comes death, then comes minions in the baby carriage.

Sorry Hamas, you are not going to win the hearts of the west by claiming this bloodthersty dick as your own. Go fuck yourselves! If you don't want the west getting violent with you, don't get violent with the west.

Bin Ladin belongs in the human trash pile with Stalin, Hitler and the churches of the Dark Ages.

 This story is quickly becoming ever more fascinating to me. First, it's pretty obvious now that, for once, the CIA was absolutely correct - the Pakistan intelligence service (ISI), at the very least, was not forthcoming with information. Perhaps they were just embarrassed at their own lack of capabilities to locate bin Laden, perhaps they were knowingly harboring him. Given best estimates on the places bin Laden moved to and from, it looks very likely that he never strayed far from Northern Pakistan / Northern Afghanistan, which comes as a tremendous surprise to me because:

1) If it were me, I'd have moved well out of harm's way into a stronghold for my ideology. I thought for sure he'd have fled to Somalia.

2) He couldn't have remained in that region without cooperating with the Taliban. This completely overturns the general consensus that Al Qaeda & the Taliban did not get along very well.

This is going to mean pretty dramatic things for U.S. / Pakistan relations and puts Gillani under pretty damning light, given his insistence that bin Laden was not residing anywhere in his country. 

I'm still cranky that the operation was carried-out with no regard for possible consequences, but whatever. At least one megalomaniac has finally had his own hubris roll him up in a plastic bag.

For the effective guerrilla arm of Al Qaeda? It's pretty much over.

You can't just 'replace' someone with the years of field experience that bin Laden had. It took up to $20 billion U.S. dollars and 9 years for Reagan to build that monster, and there's no longer a Red Army to go cross gun barrels with to get the sort of hardening bin Laden got (one might argue that they can still go get field experience by engaging the Americans in Iraq, but it's not nearly the same sort of thing; there's no intensive training by a third party, there's no grotesque financing, and frankly, while I never cease to be amazed at how careless and unethical the American occupation is / has been, modern American combatants do not compare with old Soviet combatants in terms of general indiscretion and / or cruelty.

f by 'it' you mean 'the war on terror', yeah, of course it's not over. It'll never be over, or 'won'. It's a stupid concept, just like 'the war on drugs' or any other 'war' that identifies anything other than a concrete nation state as one of the belligerents. 

Good one, Cpt.

I still think it's all a Photoshop job and a hoax.

Hate to burst your bubble Brian but Rush was extremely sarcastic in his congratulations to Obama. The one thing you can count on with any news stories about Rush is that they hardly ever pick up on his sarcasm. His point was basically that Obama only got bin Laden because he continued Bush's policies so in his words he was congratulating Obama for not doing what he said he would do.

But just to make your day, I will congratulate Obama. He took a huge risk in service to the country, if this operation failed he would have looked really bad internationally and would have caught a lot of flack. I am grateful that Obama put the countries interest ahead of his personal political interest. And I doubt that killing bin Laden is going to be a substantial help to him at the polls. I think in this case he had a lot more to lose personally than he had to gain but he took the risk anyway.

As to 'conspiracy theories'... there is usually an element of truth in them, somewhere. Even people like Alex Jones stumbles upon a nugget of truth more often than not. I wonder what he is saying about this? I'll have a look see.

From Alex Jones;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8pgcbbjD4c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z678cpylUIc&feature=related

I knew that was too good to be true. I trusted a goddamn ticker at the bottom of a screen "Rush congratulates Obama." On MSNBC.

Only later to see clips of what you are now saying.

FUCK RUSH

BUT thank you Beyond. Yea, he took a monster risk. But I can tell you this wimp(me) is damned fucking proud of our Navy Seals too!. Bin Ladin needs to see an optometrist. He's going to need both eyes for all that pussy he's getting now. I don't think those virgins will like a terrorist with a glass eye.

Don't fuck with a Navy Seal!

This is weird dude, you and I are having a "USA!" moment together. Wanna get married now?

No, you would be trying to watch MSNBC and I would be trying to watch Fox Business, I think that qualifies as irreconcilable differences. 

Well, there will never be absolute certainty on this. Eventually, any evidence comes down to somewhere, such as whatever lab did the testing and the DNA from his family. The most you will ever get is some probability. Since the claim currently is that it was family DNA that was used, the 99.99% number is suspect to me. The body could have been a brother of his.

Just for grins though, let's work this through.

There is a body (well, we think there is but let's run with that much). Eventually, there will be photographs. They don't even have to be photoshopped. As I say, we might get a pic of his brother and how would any of us know? I also expect that we will get a pic of a shrouded object being dropped off the side of an aircraft carrier in an undisclosed location. Whopie!

Even if all of that works out, we don't really know how he died. Perhaps we found him dead in a cave somewhere. But needing the PR boost, we decided to come up with a better story. And what might that be? Oh yah, there is the FBI guy who have been telling stories about the mansion. That plus saying that we wanted to be really careful that we were going to really get him works out fine enough.

The real danger to coming up with a story like this would be if he was still alive somewhere.

Remember that we have already toyed with the idea of him being dead before and he would just wait a few months to issue a new video tape. That has happened often enough to make it a dangerous thing to toy with.

What if (and this is just conjecture) he waited until August of 2012 to come out and talk about how the presidential election seems to be going? Do you think that that would help Obama or hurt him?

Of course that would be really stupid for him to do as it could result in a swing towards the neocons once again. But remember that he pulled the 9/11 attack early in the Bush 43 presidency. Given the cloud that he was under from the 2000 election, he may not have ever amounted to more than a one term do nothing if he hadn't been thrown a bone by the act of war.

If Osama is still alive, I could see him pulling that shit.

Photographs are certainly not going to prove anything, especially if he was shot seriously in the head.

Perhaps a series of action shots of the final moments, better a video, but still fakeable.

Far less convincing than DNA evidence, but that requires a degree of trust.

It would be a big risk to make such confident claims, if he really was still alive somewhere. All he would have to do is release a tape with him making clear references to events since his 'death' to totally discredit Obama and the US - you think he wouldn't do it?

Sheesh. You're gullible enough to be a theist.

It's okay, you can come out of the closet now.

 Ok,now don't get me wrong,I'm glad that OBL is dead,but was it worth it ? 'Matt' who is the organizer for 'Peace Action Network' said this   " 10 yrs., over 6000 US Soldiers are dead. Trillions of USA Dollars wasted, Hundreds of Thousands of Civilians killed,along with Thousands who are imprisoned.Torture has become a part of our Foreign Policy. And we are supposed to celebrate the killing of ONE person ?  I'm not that happy or excited about this, am I alone here in feeling SAD ? "

Hello Sandycane! Thanks for your opinion.

I also thought in that issue. An experimented war man like OBL won'e be unarmed at home. Although it was very well protected with devices, defenses, cameras and those stuffs, the way the CIA claims he was killed it's too easy. Like in a movie.

I think it would be more satisfying to the US people and even more to the New York people to see OBL executed in public as US did with Hussein. On the other hand, talking in war terms, to see OBL killed by the US would have been a shame to Al-Qaeda.

I'm still having my doubts as you do

hussein was almost universally considered a bad muslim, and there was virtually no chance of him being taken seriously as a martyr, despite all his quran-waving during his trial.

bin laden, on the other hand, was considered a holy man and a spiritual leader, thus the attempt to try to nip the martyr cult in the bud.  it's customary for many muslims to turn the tombs of holy men into places of pilgrimage (e.g., the tomb of husayn, the son of the caliph ali, and the tomb of khomeini).  it's just good sense not to allow bin laden that distinction.

because they're not necessarily christians.  the US gov't and all its agencies have no official religious affiliation, and are staffed by people of all religions, or no religion.  i think our gov't was trying to be "the bigger man" by granting bin laden a level of respect in death that he repeatedly denied his victims.

OK, not disagreeing with you BobSpence1 but I don't think that absent a body, there will never be more than probabilities to work with here. This is after all, in the field of conspiracy theories and those never really go away. I think that the best that we as skeptics are going to do is probably show strong arguments and see where they lead compared to the conspiracy theory arguments.

For the bin Laden death, the best one that I have right now is the one that we both posted more or less on top of each other. Specifically, that he has been supposedly dead a few times already only to find video tapes of him talking about stuff that happened much later.

Given that history and a possible timing for a return to existence somewhere around when the presidential election here is getting hot, that would be a huge risk for Obama. Even Obama's largest detractors have to admit that it is unlikely that he could possibly be that stupid.

Really though, consider some of the old theories that have been fully debunked that just will no go away.

Holocaust denial: We have proof of manufacture of astronomically unnecessary quantities of cyanide in a form that is only useful in enclosed spaces. We have shipping records that place the material in the camps. We have direct testimony from the men who did the job. Yet for some people, that is not enough.

The Moon landing as hoax: This should be good. For all that NASA had a mantra of “Failure is not an Option”, they had plenty of failures. Which is fully to be expected considering that they were on a steep learning curve with the technology. If the original intention was to fake the thing, then why tell everyone what went wrong at each step? Certainly the Soviets did not feel so compelled.

From the four inch flight (redstone rocket that died just as it was lifting off) to Apollo 13 (umm, we had already been to the Moon twice by that point), at what point was the plan abandoned and the deception begun? If the NASA detractors are not prepared to state clearly that NASA stopped trying at some specific point and describe the events and motives of the mission planners to do so, then they are really hard to take seriously.

If it had been my decision we might have chopped his body into parts and mailed them to his top guys. Fuck pc make these mofo's fear us as they try to make us fear them, fire with fire, and I think the US could make a bigger better fire if we weren't so worried about hurting the feelings of people who fukin hate us anyway.

Islam can't be reasoned with and coddling has no effect other than to embolden it.

    I'm trying to take a break from posting but your suggestion reminded me of an episode regarding war torn Lebanon and the take no shit strategy of the former KGB.   This is an account as related by a British operative who was in Lebanon protecting a dignitary.  Taken from the book series Combat and Survival, p 1561.....

   "Due to the political status of the VIP we were protecting, there was a good possibility that we, too would come under a kamikaze attack.  Because our team was all British, there was a possibility that even we could be kidnapped and held hostage.  After three Russian diplomats had been abducted in the city some months previously, the KGB forced the terrorists to release the men within 24 hours.   This was achieved quite simply but in a most horrific manner: the leader's four sons had been kidnapped, one of them was killed, the head severed and delivered to his father.  Pinned to the head was a note to the effect that if the men were not released within a stipulated time, the remaining three heads would follow.   Before this incident had taken place, we had already decided that if one of our mates was to be captured, decisive action would be need to force their release.

  The former Soviet Union operated under it's own definition of pragmatism.   The American expression "git'er done" pales in significance when compared to how far the Soviets themselves were willing to go to "get the job done."

"All is fair in love and war"

If that's what it takes and it gets the job done I don't see a problem especially when you are dealing with someone who wants you dead.

Some stragtegies like this can actually cause less death and suffering. Reminds me of the goofy question about pushing the fat guy in front of a train to save more people at the expense of his life and his blood on your hands.

Here's a hypothetical, If by pressing one button you could kill every al-queda fanatic on the planet would you press it?

Though probably morally wrong in some philisophical mushy bullshit sense I would do a jig on that mofo as I know given such an option for infidels they would do likewise.

  I possess no insights into the inner workings of Lebanon, Pakistan, etc as you do.  I was simply referring to a method of brutal  negotiation that was once employed by members of the Soviet Intelligence community. It achieved a short term goal.  They got their diplomats back.  End of discussion.

  Even now the Israeli government is famous for acts of retaliation.  It's a process they've never abandoned and I assume they never will.  Apparently they don't seem to care whether their acts of violence increase or decrease recruitment among their enemies.