Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

So we are supposed to believe that:

1) There are super secret helicopters that allowed the US Seals to fly over Pakistan to Abbotabad (which is nearer to India than to Afghanistan) without the Pakistani military which is always paranoid about Indian aircraft/drones knowing about it.

2) Despite one of the Helicopters CRASHING & BURNING and some guy Tweeting about it, there was no police, no military response in Abbotabad, a Garrison City where you literally cannot throw a rock and not hit a Military person

3) The US Seals faced no resistance while entering the compound, and OBL had no guards on the perimeter

4) No single image of OBL's body is in the public domain

5) the Seals flew out to Abbotabad, were on the scene for an hour, flew back (about ~3 hours) of elapsed time - never once were the Pakistani's any wiser? No military, no police no official response?

These are only some of the major flaws but if you think about this for sometime the whole thing totally strains belief.

Maybe Seymor Hersh's tale is not the truth but the official version is certainly pure fantasy.

1. If Pakistan is paranoid about India then it will have concentrated its air defences facing India, not Afghanistan. The USA also has the resources to know the location of Pakistani radar sites and thus plan routes to avoid them. 1&2. Just because it is a garrison city, and if the Pakistani air defence noticed, this is not going to be a situation in the playbook. The local watch officer doesn't have a set of standing orders to deal with this, which means people need waking up. A full on invasion has plans and procedures, two helicopters don't constitute that and there will be rules of engagement etc. Especially in a country with a history of military coups you don't delegate to local forces the sort of decision making process to go and deal with a situation like this. Plus the state within a state aspect of ISI cuts both ways, the local army's reaction can also be explained as "I want nothing to do with whatever secret stuff is happening over there".

3. I can absolutely believe that. Guards attract attention and are a massive risk in terms of extra low level people having information that they may accidentally leak. He was the most wanted man in the world, how would guards have helped? He was facing nation states not gangs. He survived all those years because he kept a low profile with a tiny number of people knowing his location.

4. Why would it be released? It isn't like anyone is claiming he is still alive.

5. See 1. But also bear in mind that many of the options available to Pakistan would have had severe repercussions. If they knew (or heavily suspected) it was a US raid then they were hardly going to shoot it down. It could have taken a decent amount of time just to run down the "are you sure this isn't us?" line, proving a negative takes time. Once the information necessary to make a decision was received it is entirely possible someone senior made the deliberate call to be deescalatory and deal with the situation diplomatically - which is arguably the right call. As for the police why would they interfere in what is clearly (someone's) military operation, something which is likely to be a career or life ending move.

You need to account for human nature, military bureaucracy and never attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

There is also the real risk/reward involved. Pakistan is an ally, is dependent on the US for aid, and even if it wasn't, absolutely cannot afford a military confrontation with the US.

So, game it out: if the mission fails, and the SEALs are stranded in Abbotabad, then what happens? Probably nothing, other than some embarrassment for the administration. The SEALs could probably fly back commercial if they had to.

This isn't a midnight raid into North Korea we're talking about.

I see you conspicuously do not address point 2 (which, by the way, is also buttressed by eyewitness testimony that Pakistani plain-clothes security showed up before the raid and told people to keep clear, etc.)

Your suggestion that all the radar was merely pointed in the wrong direction is ridiculous.

"You need to account for human nature, military bureaucracy and never attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence"

But this is specifically addressed in the article. The Pakistanis frequently explain inconvenient facts as incompetence.

Nice to see you read my entire post which does very much reference point 2. The whole "they knew in advance" thing is getting into massive conspiracy theory territory where a shedload of relatively junior people know a massive secret and have all managed to keep it. Whilst also of course going and telling a load of civilians about said secret.

On the radar point I've love you to explain why it is ridiculous. Ground based radar is sited in a way to reduce the blindspots created by terrain features. Given Pakistan has viewed Afghanistan as a client state essentially since the Soviet pullout, yet is terrified of India it is surely credible that detecting low flying aircraft coming from Afghanistan is not top of the priority list when it comes to siting their radar?

I like that your conspiracy theory involves a government secretly being much more competent than it claims to be.

You don't keep conspiracies secret by keeping quiet, you keep them secret by burying them in confusing noise -- plausible deniability. This is why we have crazy stories about flying saucers and people still believe carrots improve your eyesight. The truth is out there mixed up with all kinds of half truth and bullshit.

Radar is arranged to create overlapping coverage and handle planes flying weird courses (and switching to secondary targets and flying home). It's possible the US knows Pakistans air defence grid so well that it could pull this off but it wouldn't be because their radar is pointed at India.

Governments claim incompetence to cover up stuff all the time. "We lost those records." Suggesting that the Pakistani government is incapable of doing this is silly.

> Why would it be released? It isn't like anyone is claiming he is still alive.

I'm claiming that Bin Laden may still be alive.

Or, quite the opposite, he might have been killed long time ago.

Without body, Obama's claims about Navy Seals killing Osama Bin Laden in 2011 are unsubstantiated.

Well Osama was making and releasing tapes, referencing current events, up until 2011 after which AQ acknowledged his death. Which lends credibility to a) his being alive up until 2011 and b) that he died then. You'd need to come up with a reason for the US to announce his death and AQ playing along...

Most of your bullet points as you've described didn't actually happen they way you've outlined. The only thing listed remotely accurate is that there is no official picture of OBL dead with a bullet in his head, and it has been purposefully kept that way to keep it from being used as further propaganda.

I'm not sure what propaganda value there is in noone knowing if the US actually killed Bin Laden.

Benazir Bhutto said, a month before she was assassinated, that Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2001 by Omar Sheikh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MBTd5QNGB0

There was an actual person there live-tweeting the thing.

Of course pakistan knew perfectly well.

Not really sure why so many accept that explanation at face value. The biggest single victory in the so-called WoT and it is handled with a quick, quiet, burial at sea with absolutely no evidence because, what, a photo would make terrorists even angrier?

No third-party corroboration. No photos. Nothing but a story.

That is supremely ridiculous.

Unfortunately evil conspiracy at every turn is going to be the norm from here on out in the post 9/11 world. Parading his dead picture around would for sure just anger more people, so there is no need.

If OBL is in fact alive he should show up holding today's newspaper any day now in a new video showing how incompetent the USA really is. Also what good does it do to fake his death? We certainly aren't winning over there and everyone knows it, as Obama just committed to extending our stay in Afghanistan. Faking OBL's death makes no sense if he can just show up on YouTube the next month alive and discredit everything the government told us.

The U.S. started an illegitimate war that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by some accounts. We are executing drone-strikes that are killing more civilians and "enemies". We tortured, engaged in rendition, suspended detainee rights, and more. We continue to hunt and kill Al Qaeda affiliates, as well as create "collateral damage".

How much angrier can we make people?

And, we have done this, presumably, because of OBL. After killing him, we can tell detailed stories about how the raid was performed, describe where he was shot, etc., but we just can't actually show evidence?

Sorry. Makes no sense.

As to why he doesn't show up, some believe he was already dead, which is plausible. Bhutto said as much years ago, before her passing.

If he had actually died much earlier, then the charade would have to end at some point, right? There would need to be closure.

It isn't the near universal belief in the government's version of the OBL saga that concerns me. What I find more worrying is that the moral framework is believed in. In former times we had things like 'innocent until proven guilty' - a moral code. Then some office blocks get brought down by some crazy civilians on some civilian airliners in a couple of the larger U.S. cities and then, as if by magic, quaint ideas like 'innocent until proven guilty' get to be completely forgotten. Recently some Labour politician was 'lynched' by the media for suggesting that OBL deserved a fair trial. A fair trial - e.g. court of law rather than government assassination - should be de-facto, yet it isn't, and anyone who steps out of line with that might as well write 'terrorist' on their forehead.

That was the real effect of 9/11 attacks, and this is the goal of actual terrorism. The Two Towers were only a tool, the death toll was so small it doesn't really matter. The US gets several WTC worth of deaths anually in traffic accidents alone.

What the 9/11 attack did is damage the core of Western principles and send the entire population of US into state of paranoia. The massive overreaction of US killed orders of magnitude more people than died in the attack and it is us, not terrorists, who are danger to our own freedoms.

Innocent until proven guilty is for accused citizens acting and bound by an existing legal framework. It does't extend to anyone who may pick up arms against you. You don't set up a trial for every enemy soldier on the battlefield just to make sure he's really the one that shot your comrade and tried to shoot you; you kill them first. Assassinations against military leaders engaged in active war is an extension in time and space of this concept.

The thing is, with an enemy actively shooting at you it's pretty clear they're guilty.

But when you go in later we need proof that it's the right person you've caught. Not just for their sake, but for ours.

Rule of law protects me, so I have in interest in offering it to others at any opportunity even if they're scum and don't "deserve" it.

Don't forget the cuckoo clock perpetually parroting the line:

  > ...bin Laden’s burial at sea 
    (carried out in accordance with "Islamic custom"!)

Yes! Yes! Of course! Naval traditions are the first thing that springs to mind, about a religion born of a region mostly known for its deserts, and not very much at all for naval conquest.

But go ahead, someone correct me, with some obscure technicality about the ways of Islam and The Sea. What do I know, land lubber that I am?

The most populous Islamic nation on earth is a massive archipelago, land lubber.

So, if you're referring to Indonesia, how many burials at sea are they known for? (discounting the scattering of cremated ashes)

We're talking only whole bodies, dunked in the drink.

I'm going to ball park it at less than 10%, probably dialing in at perhaps 1%, or at most 2%.

Cremation is forbidden according Islamic practice (http://www.islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/what-islams-viewpoint...).

Burial at sea is explicitly within Islamic practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_at_sea#Islam).

His point is that it's not an islamic custom to bury people at sea, and he's completely right. The custom is to bury people in the ground, facing mecca, the same day of the death. That doesn't mean burial at sea never happens or isn't allowed or preferred under relatively rare circumstances, but an islamic custom it certainly is not. The custom would be to have buried him in the ground, not take him onto a ship and them dump him in the ocean, lashing him between planks to obviate bloating so that one may find him washed ashore and bury him properly. In short, he wasn't buried according to islamic custom at all.

Supposedly, the US did consult with Imams on how to deal with this fringe case.

It's not common, but guidelines exist. The Arabs were not without their own traders and explorers.

Muslims have been sailing the Red Sea and the Mediterranean for a loooooooong time.

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